From boyband Shakespeare to Betrayal: Tom Hiddleston on stage – in pictures

As Coriolanus is streamed for National Theatre at Home, look back at Tom Hiddleston’s theatre career, including his early roles with Cheek by Jowl and his hot-ticket Hamlet

Tom Hiddleston as Alsemero in Declan Donnellan’s 2006 staging of The Changeling at the Barbican, London.

Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

In a review of the Cheek By Jowl production, Michael Billington described it as a dark Jacobean masterpiece, in which ‘madness, as much as passion, spins the plot’

Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Hiddleston appeared in another Cheek By Jowl production, Cymbeline, at the Barbican in 2007

Photograph: Alastair Muir/Rex/Shutterstock

As designer Nick Ormerod recalled, Hiddleston as Posthumus delivered ‘ a brilliantly cringeworthy’ boyband number. Here he is with Jodie McNee as Imogen

Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

With his 2013 performance in a ‘fast, witty, intelligent’ Coriolanus at the Donmar Warehouse, ‘Hiddleston gives us a man ultimately destroyed by his own headlong nature’, wrote Billington

Photograph: Johan Persson

Coriolanus was directed by Josie Rourke and designed by Lucy Osborne

Photograph: Johan Persson

Hiddleston took on Shakespeare again, reuniting with his Ivanov co-star Kenneth Branagh, in an intimate 2017 production of Hamlet to raise funds for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art

Photograph: Johan Persson

‘The occasion,’ wrote Billington in a four-star review, ‘was remarkable for the traditionalism of Branagh’s production, the romanticism of Hiddleston’s Hamlet and the rapt concentration of the audience’

Photograph: Johan Persson

He added: ‘If I had to pick out Hiddleston’s key quality, it would be his ability to combine a sweet sadness with an incandescent fury. He suggests a fierce intellect gnawed by intense melancholy and yet subject to bouts of intemperate rage’

Photograph: Johan Persson

Hiddleston in rehearsals for Betrayal, considered one of Harold Pinter’s finest plays and the final instalment in Jamie Lloyd’s Pinter at the Pinter season in 2019

Photograph: Marc Brenner

Hiddleston played Robert, opposite Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox, in a story of two couples entangled in a seven-year affair

Photograph: Marc Brenner