Tom Hiddleston's utterly adorable promotional antics for the Marvel blockbuster Thor: The Dark World rumble on. With his good humour, a voice like volcanic sand slaked in honey, and an innate understanding of what makes internet memes tick, he's managed to become the most beloved posh person in the UK. That fluttering noise you can hear is the net's heart beating excitedly against its ribcage.

Playing Loki, the god of mischief, in Thor's first instalment and Avengers Assemble made him a favourite with Marvel fans looking for something edgier than Robert Downey Jr's wisecracks. He cemented his position with a gloriously camp appearance in character at this year's Comic-Con where the crowd became masochistically drunk on his verbal abuse. And after that first delicious whiff of adoration, he's now taking deep inhalations of opiated fame, capering about in the name of Thor, self-promotion and just plain old fun.



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There's Loki bullying cute children; the explanation of delayed gratification to a baffled Cookie Monster; the unleashing of a robot dance in pyjamas on MTV – the latter prompting a rare moment of fawning from hard-to-impress women's site Jezebel as sassy, snarky users dissolved in a puddle of gifs and digital yearning in the comments.



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He's deployed his considerable dramatic range in some lowest common denominator crowdpleasing, doing impressions of the likes of Alan Carr, Chris Evans, Owen Wilson, and Samuel L Jackson. He impersonated the poster pose of his Thor: The Dark World co-star Natalie Portman, prompting an instant meme, and has shown a willingness to perform karaoke at the slightest prompting, be it a rather freeform rendition of Man in the Mirror to screaming Korean fans or a version of Stand By Me in a car on German TV. Cue fan fiction and more Tumblr heat than a Kate Upton photoshoot.

How much of Thor's massive box-office success is down to his mugging is debatable, but it's certainly making a rather po-faced sequel seem frothier and more relevant than it might otherwise have been. It all also continues to prove there's nothing that makes the knees of the non-English weaker than a rumpled Brit doing ungainly things, as Colin Firth and Hugh Grant also found to their benefit – perhaps the slightly grumpy Jude Law would have crossed over with more success had he gritted his teeth and skewered his aloof, GQ-endorsed pulchritude.

Hiddleston though doesn't seem to be going through the motions, which is why it works. Like Jennifer Lawrence, his is an unfiltered realness that is fast becoming the ultimate asset in post-Twitter, post-PR Hollywood; he makes it a lot harder for actors to go on to platitude autopilot, droning keywords like "inspirational" and "humble" during a hotel-room press junket. Expect a lot of earnestly constructed virality in his wake from stars desperate for the common touch, and hopefully a lot more ballad crooning, crotch thrusting and general Loki-grade mischief from Hiddleston as he shows them how it should be done.

More on Tom Hiddleston

• Tom Hiddleston: 'The dream is to keep surprising yourself'

• Thor: The Dark World - review