Tom Hiddleston is swapping Loki‘s sceptre for ice picks, as he’s set to play real life Antarctic adventurer Henry Worsley in an adaptation of non-fiction book The White Darkness for Apple TV. Soo Hugh, the showrunner of critically-acclaimed Apple show Pachinko, will be the showrunner with Mark Heyman.
The show will be based on David Grann’s book The White Darkness. Grann also wrote Killers of the Flower Moon, which will soon be a Martin Scorsese film, also for Apple. And Grann wrote The Lost City of Z, which was made into a James Gray film starring Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, and Tom Holland. Tom Hiddleston also has The Essex Serpent, which is also based on a critically-acclaimed book, coming up on Apple TV in May of this year.
Henry Worsley was a British explorer who retraced the steps of his heroes such as Ernest Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott, and Roald Amundsen. He was close to completing a thousand mile journey across the Antarctic on foot in 2016, when he was forced to call for help.
While Hiddleston has been busy with the MCU for the last decade, he has still managed to squeeze in a range of interesting projects including Midnight in Paris, The Deep Blue Sea, Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, Only Lovers Left Alive, Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak and Kong: Skull Island. There was also his James Bond audition, in the television mini-series The Night Manager.
Arctic and Antarctic exploration has long held fascination in literature, television and film. The Terror starring Jared Harris was a brilliant recent television adaptation of a spell-binding book, and The North Water starring Colin Farrell was another good TV show on the subject. While they both featured ships, and fairly large casts, it looks as though Hiddleston will be almost a lone central figure in The White Darkness.
While we wait for more news on The White Darkness, check out our guide the best adventure movies.