Tom Hiddleston saw autopsies as part of research for ‘High Rise’

TORONTO – Tom Hiddleston did some post-mortem prep for his role in “High-Rise.”

In the film based on J.G. Ballard’s 1975 dystopian novel, the British actor plays a doctor who moves into a luxury apartment building that’s inhabited by eccentric tenants who close themselves off from the outside world.

Hiddleston told a press conference at the Toronto International Film Festival that he spent a day with a forensic pathologist and witnessed autopsies as part of his research.

“It was pretty intense,” he said. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever done, to see a human body cut open.”

Hiddleston said Ballard was also fascinated with anatomy, noting he studied it at the University of Cambridge for three years before he became a writer.

In reading “High Rise,” the actor felt Ballard was “incredibly prescient about our obsession with technology and how we outsource our needs to machines and to man-made technologies.”

“I think the building for him, the high rise, was a manifestation of that,” said Hiddleston.

“And then when you read around it, you realize in interviews and things, he’d predicted all the things that are now part of our world — he predicted social media, he predicted YouTube and the industrialization of the moving image.”

“High-Rise” is directed by Ben Wheatley and also stars Jeremy Irons as the building’s architect and owner.