Tom Hughes Finds the Truth in Every Era

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When asked to name the most notable takeaway from his acting career, Tom Hughes has an easy answer. “I don’t look very good in tights?” he laughs. “That was probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned. Never wear tights again, in my life, ever.” But in all seriousness, it’s clear the English actor is constantly striving to learn new things with each character he plays, so that he can “feel more equipped” to “take on roles with added depth.” His dedication to pushing the limits of his craft is impressive and is showcased particularly well in historical projects as diverse as the hit ITV historical drama Victoria and his new film Red Joan, both of which vividly highlight different facets of his skills.

Victoria, in which Hughes embodies Prince Albert, the husband of Jenna Coleman‘s Queen Victoria, chronicles the young couple’s reign and their difficulties in finding balance between their familial and political duties. Red Joan, on the other hand, is a fictional story that is heavily inspired by KGB agents who helped steal confidential information about the atomic bomb from the British in World War II. Brimming with political idealism and charisma, Hughes’s character Leo deeply influences the protagonist Joan Stanley, played at different ages by Judi Dench and Sophie Cookson, as he tries to recruit her to spy for the Russians. The roles take place in vastly different time periods, but Hughes says he looks beyond the historical context to examine what key elements of his characters reflect a universal human experience. He admits that his fascination with people and what makes them tick is his main draw to acting. By playing in historical dramas, Hughes is allowed to explore the timeless nature of the human condition regardless of the ever-changing circumstances that shape the characters’ actions.

Ever since Hughes was eleven years old, he has pursued acting with an astounding amount of vigor and focus. His obsession was first sparked when a teacher convinced him to play the titular role in a student production of Roald Dahl’s play Fantastic Mr. Fox. It was the first time Hughes felt as though he had stepped into another reality and he was immediately hooked on the feeling. However, unlike his other passion for playing guitar, acting wasn’t a something he could just pick up whenever he wanted. “With acting, someone’s got to give you the chance to do it, so it just became this pursuit to find out who these magical people were that could give me this drug,” he recalls. “I needed to find some kind of structure in my life that meant that I could keep getting that feeling of stepping out of finite time and into another realm.”

In many ways, the dream of being a professional actor felt a million miles away from the world Hughes knew. Growing up, music was especially important in his household but while creative outlets were allowed to flourish, they were never pursued as careers until Hughes’s generation. With one cousin a guitarist and another a photographer, Hughes was alone in his love for acting and never met anyone who did it for a living. “It was a bit of a pipe dream I guess in that respect,” he reflects, “but I never really looked at it like that. For me, it was just something that I felt like I needed in my life, so I was going to keep trying every avenue to make sure it was there.”

Hughes’s determination has served him well in his acting journey ever since as he has taken on notable roles, including Victoria’s Prince Albert. Following the reign of Queen Victoria, the show begins with her ascension to the throne at the age of eighteen and highlights the influential relationships she makes along the way, including with Prime Minister Lord Melbourne and, of course, her husband. With her team in hand, she strives to find her political footing, facing crises such as the Anglo-Afghan War, the Great Famine of Ireland, and tense international relations with France. As Victoria begins to flourish, she struggles to balance her duties as a queen, wife, and mother of six. Much of this conflict springs from Prince Albert’s own journey as he tries to find his place in the monarchy alongside her. His frustration comes from knowing that his position of power is largely still constricted and his restlessness only puts more pressure on their marriage as they near their thirties together.

Now thirty-three, Hughes says that the primary focus in his twenties was to experiment with as many roles as possible, careful to never take “the obvious next building block.” As an actor with “itchy feet,” he admits to having shied away from doing television series, which makes his current turn as Prince Albert stand out, especially now that it has lasted three seasons and counting. “When I was younger, I was always fearful of getting to the end of a show’s first year and someone telling me that I had to move on, but also changing the character like, ‘By the way, this guy is a superhero now,’ and I’d go, ‘Jesus, if only I’d known! I would have played it completely differently,’” he elaborates. “Whereas with Albert, he was a real human and he lived. I know the arc of his story. I know where it begins and where it ends. That structure is in place regardless of what we do with our story. It’s not exact history, but we are slightly constrained by it and have a duty to portray that arc.” In that sense, Hughes adds, he approached Albert much like he would a character in a film: “In a movie, you can be subtle and drop things in that will pay off on page seventy of the script. With Albert, I can drop things in when he’s twenty-one that will hopefully pay off when he’s thirty-nine.”

Historical roles continue to be an interest for Hughes, as his character Leo from Red Joan highlights. Based on a novel by Jennie Rooney, the story takes inspiration from the real-life British KGB spy Melita Norwood, who shared atomic bomb research with Russia during World War II. She remained undetected by the British government until she was finally exposed in her eighties. In the film, Joan Stanley stands in for Norwood, with some key differences in her motivations. She is first seen, played by Cookson, during her time at Cambridge University, where she meets Leo, a Russian-born Jewish man whose family had immigrated to Germany when Hitler first began to rise to power. Having been subjugated to Nazi violence, Leo is driven to create a new world based on the ideals of Communism. With his youthful naïveté and natural verve, Leo seduces Joan with his charisma and passion. “The fascinating thing in playing him is that when you first meet him, there is no contradiction in his character,” says Hughes. “He’s actually quite singular in his focus, but there is a something quite attractive about that.” As their relationship progresses along with the war, Joan finds herself a job as a secretary for the Tube Alloys project at Cambridge, where she is granted access to information about the atomic bomb, which she later helps to develop. She eventually concludes that it is far too dangerous for only the West to harbor such a weapon and shares her knowledge in the hopes that by creating an equal playing field, both sides will be too scared to engage in another war.

Hughes found Joan’s motives the most fascinating aspect of Rooney’s reinterpretation of Norwood’s actions. “Politically, Melita was quite clear in terms of her persuasion,” he explains. “She pretty much identified as a Communist or at least a Communist sympathizer, so what she implemented was based on a political ideal, whereas Joan’s decision is more of an ethical choice.” The consequences of Joan’s actions have not only a resounding effect on history but on her life as well, visible in Dench’s reflective performance of Joan’s later years. Confronting this aspect of the human condition raises essential questions that Hughes says we can all ask ourselves, such as, “How has this decision affected my life? How have I survived it? What are the implications of it and how did I get to be in the position in the first place?”

For Hughes, the beauty of doing projects like Red Joan or Victoria, whose stories are greatly shaped by the period they’re set in, is not only gaining a greater understanding of history but also examining what makes the human experience. “I think it’s the reason why Shakespeare is still so prevalent today, because what he’s talking about—betrayal, commitment, love, family, identity, abuse of power—is commonplace within the human condition and they will be beyond the current state that we find ourselves in.” History is often understood as a list of facts that make up the past, but Hughes’s approach shows just how malleable it actually is. His eagerness to explore and learn about the human psyche goes beyond what’s written in a textbook. He opens up historical events and figures to interpretation while simultaneously grounding them in universal themes felt across all of humanity. Watching Hughes’s transformative nature on screen is worth every moment, regardless of where his character may be situated in time and space. Whether it’s 1852, 1952, or 2052, he will surely rise up to the challenge and make the audience rethink how they see the past, the present, and the future.

Red Joan is out today.