If you’ve seen The Avengers — and surely, that’s most of you now considering the film recently crossed the 1 billion dollar mark worldwide — you are familiar with Tom Hiddleston as Loki, the bad guy who managed to steal a whole lot of scenes from a bunch of A-list superheroes.

But Hiddleston has had quite a year in addition to Avengers. Since introducing his villainous supervillain character last May in Thor, the Brit has appeared in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, played opposite Rachel Weisz in the critically acclaimed Deep Blue Sea, and been the spitting image of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. He found out he had won that latter role when he received a letter from Allen himself. “It was three sentences long,” Hiddleston told EW. “Dear Tom, I’m making a movie in Paris this summer. I attached some pages. I’d love for you to play the role of Scott.”

The actor, now 31, had no idea who “Scott” was, or what the film was about, as Allen had only sent him 15 pages of the script. “The character was only referred to as ‘Scott.’ So I thought, okay this guy Scott is in a scene with a character called Ernest and a character named Zelda. Is Woody Allen writing a movie about F. Scott Fitzgerald? But there was this other character called Gil” — Owen Wilson’s character — “and I couldn’t figure out who Gil was! I showed up on the set the first day, doing rehearsals and camera tests and I asked Owen, and I swear this is the God’s honest truth, I had to ask him who exactly Gil was,” Hiddleston said with a laugh, before doing a (spookily accurate) Owen Wilson impression. “He said, ‘Oh no no, I’m from now. See, there’s this time machine.‘” Hiddelston laughed. “And then he told me the entire story. I was so very glad I asked.”

Unsurprisingly, the entire Woody Allen experience was a pleasure. “It was one of those things where it’s like, Paris! Woody Allen! It was a dream, such a great, surreal time.”

As for that letter, Hiddleston has it framed and hanging up in his home office.

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