I don’t want to oversell this, but GQ’s cover story on Tom Hiddleston is possibly the best piece of celebrity journalism I’ve ever read. “Best” as in “most enjoyable to read.” Best as in “she got him to talk endlessly about TIDDLES and whether or not TIDDLES WAS REAL.” The journalist is the “mystery brunette,” Taffy Brodesser-Akner. The article isn’t written as a Q&A session with pre-rehearsed answers. After talking about Taylor Swift the night before, Tom comes to Taffy’s hotel room before dawn the next morning to talk about love and broken hearts off the record. He heats up leftover bolognese for Taffy, which he made himself for when he was watching a screener of Moonlight alone the night before. She notes, “His zeal is bottomless.” She also notes, “By most definitions, Tom Hiddleston is… uncool. His vulnerability, his enthusiasm, his Bolognese, these are not trademarks of a dashing movie star.” You can read the full piece here and I would suggest doing so. Some highlights:

His enthusiasm: Tom Hiddleston is enthusiastic about everything: Barack Obama (“An enormously temperate man!”); his Thor director, Kenneth Branagh (“Such a humanist!”); Jonathan Franzen’s Purity (“It holds the Internet to account—it shows you how it can distort identity in an unhealthy way!”); Moana (“Incredible!”); Dwayne Johnson in particular (“That man radiates joy!”); Matt Damon (“I think he’s got real integrity!”); Michael Fassbender (“Extraordinary!”); Chiwetel Ejiofor (Amazing!”); this porridge he makes, which is just oatmeal and almond milk and chia seeds (“I’m obsessed!”).

He loves Tom Hanks: “His decency is poured into everything he does. I’m nowhere near Tom Hanks’s contribution or even close. All of it’s not high art, you know? But there is a value in it, you know, somehow, somewhere.”

What he wants to fix: He’s concerned about our “strange public distrust of experts… If you’re under attack, “if your values are under attack, if you’re being shamed, if you’re being humiliated, the animal response is to hide in the bush. It’s to be less, to make yourself smaller, to diminish in size and volume. And the lesson of 2016 is we have to love more, we have to risk more, we have to be braver, we have to be more outspoken.”

His first comment on Taylor Swift: “Taylor is an amazing woman. She’s generous and kind and lovely, and we had the best time.” But I didn’t ask that, I say. I asked something else. So I wait, and he says, “Of course it was real.”

The “I Heart T.S.” t-shirt: “The truth is, it was the Fourth of July and a public holiday and we were playing a game and I slipped and hurt my back. And I wanted to protect the graze from the sun and said, ‘Does anyone have a T-shirt?’ And one of her friends said, ‘I’ve got this.’ ” The friend pulled out the “I ? T.S.” tank top that Taylor’s friends are contractually obligated to own. “And we all laughed about it. It was a joke.” So that’s his statement on the entire relationship: an explanation of the tank top. “It was a joke,” he repeats. “Among friends.”

There’s more about Swifty: “I have to be so psychologically strong about not letting other people’s interpretations about my life affect my life. A relationship exists between two people. We will always know what it was. The narratives that are out there altogether have been extrapolated from pictures that were taken without consent or permission, with no context. Nobody had the context for that story. And I’m still trying to work out a way of having a personal life and protecting it, but also without hiding. So the hardest thing is that that was a joke among friends on the Fourth of July….I don’t know. I just, I was surprised. I was just surprised that it got so much attention. The tank top became an emblem of this thing.”

A relationship in the limelight: “I only know the woman I met. She’s incredible.” But, man, all those cameras. “A relationship in the limelight… A relationship always takes work. A relationship in the limelight takes work. And it’s not just the limelight. It’s everything else.” He wanted a regular relationship. So did she, he says she said. “So we decided to go out for dinner, we decided to travel.”

His endnote: “…Because you have to fight for love. You can’t live in fear of what people might say. You know, you have to be true to yourself.”

[From GQ]

That endnote comes before Taffy turns off her recorder and just sits down with him and talks to him off-the-record. At 6 a.m. in her hotel room. Taffy writes: “We talk about how relationships go sideways, how the ripples of a breakup can still pin you to a wall even months later. We talk about heartache. We talk about sadness and healing. We talk about what it’s like to love and what happens when the object of that love withdraws but all your love is still there.” And on and on. Basically, this is how Hiddleston is playing it in the wake of TIDDLES and the Tiddlesplit Heard ‘Round the World. He’s playing it as brokenhearted. He’s playing it as he was all-in and he really fell for Taylor and the world and the relationship chipped away at his natural enthusiasm. Is this the best strategy? Honestly, it’s not the worst. I’d rather hear from a guy who talks about his ex with respect and love – even if he’s talking way too much – as opposed to a guy who uses a national platform to slam an ex. So, well played, Hiddles. Maybe.

Photos courtesy of Nathaniel Goldberg/GQ.