Tom Hiddleston's Pompeii: Out of Time AMA: Star Reveals 'Magic' Moment That Transformed His Life at 17

Tom Hiddleston has told fans that a 1998 visit to Pompeii at the age of 17 'felt like travelling back in time' and was 'like magic', describing it as the moment his schoolboy fascination with Latin became a life‑changing encounter with the ancient world.

Speaking during a live red carpet AMA on Reddit's r/AskHistorians on 16 July 2026, held with the crew of his new National Geographic series 'Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston', he traced that connection back to language lessons at around age ten and to the trip that he says reshaped how he understood history.

The series premieres on National Geographic on 22 July 2026 at 21:00 (9pm ET), and will stream globally on Disney+ and Hulu from 23 July.

A Fan's Question Sparks A Personal Reflection

The exchange began when Helen, identifying herself as the same age Hiddleston was during his first trip to Pompeii, asked what feelings or experiences had changed his mindset after seeing the ancient city for the first time.

'I'm now 17, the same age you were when you went to Pompeii, and I really wonder what impact that trip had on you,' she wrote, thanking him in advance for his answer.

Hiddleston's reply traced his interest in antiquity back further than the trip itself. 'I had studied Latin at school from about the age of 10,' he wrote, adding that he had also been learning French at the time. 'I loved learning languages, systems of thinking, systems of communication. I just loved it.'

Before 1998, he explained, that interest had been confined to the classroom. 'Up until that time, the study of the ancient world had existed solely in books, in the classroom,' Hiddleston wrote, describing his knowledge as limited to 'translating and stories that only existed in my mind'.

'It's Like Magic': The Trip That Changed Everything

Hiddleston said that changed the moment he arrived in Pompeii in 1998. 'Suddenly, immediately, I could walk into the past, and it felt like travelling back in time,' he wrote, describing an ancient city of roughly 20,000 people preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

He set out the mechanics of that preservation in the AMA, noting that the city had been sealed by a pyroclastic surge of volcanic ash, pumice and superheated rock, which held Pompeii 'in immaculate condition under the ground for nearly two millennia'.

It was this sudden, physical closeness to antiquity that produced the sensation he has spent years trying to put into words.

'You feel the 2,000 years between now and then compress and collapse,' Hiddleston wrote. 'It's like magic.'

He went on to describe the details that made the experience feel less like a museum visit and more like time travel: bread still sitting in ancient ovens, and children's cradles nearly identical to those parents buy today.

'I couldn't fathom how you could... there's bread baking in the oven, there are children's cradles exactly like the cradles that we buy for our children today,' he wrote.

From Teenage Obsession To National Geographic Series

That 1998 encounter, Hiddleston said, gave him 'a new relationship with the past, with ancient Rome and with ancient Greece', one built on both the closeness and the distance between his own life and theirs.

The interest eventually led him to read Classics at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and later to suggest a Pompeii sequence for Marvel's 'Loki', in which his character travels back to the city moments before the eruption.

'Pompeii: Out of Time' represents a more direct culmination of that long‑running interest.

In the series, Hiddleston works alongside archaeologists, historians, geologists and disaster experts to reconstruct the final hours of three real residents of the city: a teenage blacksmith's apprentice, a businesswoman who ran a bathhouse, and an unidentified Praetorian guard.

Nearly three decades after a teenager first stood among Pompeii's ruins, Hiddleston says that same feeling of the past compressing into the present is what he hopes viewers of his new series will experience for themselves.