Pompeii: Out Of Time With Tom Hiddleston

The Marvel star follows the lives of the Romans who may have survived the eruption

Year: 2026

Certificate: 12

Watch now on Disney+

It took a whole day for Pompeii to be buried under ash from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD – not nearly as fast as it’s often portrayed in popular culture. So, did some citizens manage to escape? For this three-parter, ‘amateur classicist’ Tom Hiddleston follows the stories of three real-life Romans through the disaster to see what happened.

For Tom, Pompeii holds a special place in his life. The Marvel star took the train there in the summer of 1998 for his ‘first trip away with no grown-ups’ and the city instantly captured his imagination. ‘In Pompeii you could time travel,’ he recalls of the experience of seeing the casts of people frozen where they died on the streets. At the age of 45, he returns to tell some of their tales. 

This isn’t your average historical delve. Aside from the general razzmatazz afforded by the presence of the Loki actor it also has other little quirks, such as Hiddleston appearing to actually ‘freeze time’ when speaking to experts, delivering the odd sentence in Latin and, occasionally, reminding us that he studied classics at university. It all adds up to a good-humoured, genuinely intriguing documentary that finds a thread and just keeps pulling, even delivering fully-fledged dramatic re-creations of these potential survivors’ lives along the way. One could also argue that it’s the tiniest bit cheesy, but that’s part of the fun. (Three episodes)