I do not usually go on a vent express here on my blog but I am going to on this issue. I like Hank Williams and Hank Williams Jr. however. I am not impressed with Hank Williams III right now. He has made himself look like a backwards hick. In a recent interview and documented in this article on the New York Daily news he said of the casting of Tom Hiddleston:
The 41-year-old singer/guitarist/drummer, who bears a striking resemblance to his famous granddaddy,told TMZthat producers made a huge mistake signing Tom Hiddleston instead of a home-grown actor to portray an American icon.
Williams had his own suggestion for the role, tellng the gossip sitethat Academy Award-winner Matthew McConaughey would have been perfect given his Southern roots.
Hiddleston, who is best known to audiences on this side of the Pond as Loki from Marvels “Thor” and “Avengers” movies, has been tapped to play the country legend in “I Saw the Light” and will do his own singing in the film,Deadline first reported.
Hank Williams Sr.’s short life — he died at the age of 29 of heart failure — was tailor made for both country song lyrics and big screen drama.
The movie, directed by Marc Abraham, will focus on “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Honky Tonk Blues” singer’s rapid rise to fame and the alcohol issues that plagued him off stage. Abraham’s script is based on a 1994 biography of Williams by Colin Escott.
Now.. I can understand being concerned it is his Grand Father. However his reasoning has nothing to do with talent. It is all because the actor is not an American. Excuse me?! Get over it. I am sorry but seriously just get over it. Not only that while I respect Matthew Mcconaughey as an Actor and find him EXCELLENT Hank Williams died at age 29, a fact I would expect his Grandson to know, Matthew Mcconaughey is 44. Now he looks good don’t get me wrong but he is 44 and I just don’t think he could pull off younger then 29 successfully. He also does not look that much like him IMO.
Bless Tom though for a classy response in his own recent interview, focusing on what else? The work. The role and showing why he is the wonderful actor that he is the Daily Mail UK reported:
Tom Hiddleston has been working on the nasal twang that was the distinctive trademark of country music legend Hank Williams, whom the star will portray in what he called ‘the opportunity of a lifetime’.
I wrote, fleetingly, last week that Hiddleston — famous for playing the scheming and vengeful Loki in three Marvel Comic movies as well as his brilliant portrait of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in Josie Rourke’s scorching production at the Donmar — will tackle the part of Williams in a new film.
Yesterday, he spoke exclusively to me about the hillbilly with the ‘crooked smile and a wary eye’ he’ll play in I Saw The Light.
Starring role: Tom Hiddleston, who tweeted this picture of himself on set of I Saw The Light, is to play music legend Hank Williams in the new film
The movie will begin shooting in October in Louisiana, although Hiddleston has already started learning how to sing Williams’s doleful ballads with the help of Country & Western star Rodney Crowell. Tom will have to replicate those bluesy vocals and play the guitar.
Hiddleston told me I Saw The Light will chart the singer’s life from his turbulent first marriage to Audrey Mae Sheppard in 1944, through his early radio career to his auspicious debut, in 1949, at the home of country music, the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.
The film will get under the skin of Hank’s relationships with the aforementioned Audrey Mae, his mother Lillie, Nashville music executive Fred Rose, his band the Drifting Cowboys and second wife Billie Jean Jones Eshliman.
‘It will go all the way to his tragic death in 1953,’ Hiddleston told me. ‘He was only 29. In the intervening period, he wrote some of the greatest songs in the history of American music.’
Numbers such as Hey, Good Lookin’, Jambalaya (On The Bayou), Your Cheatin’ Heart and Take These Chains From My Heart.
‘The film is about the man behind the myth, the power of his music, the sheer voltage of his talent and charisma, and his formidable demons,’ Hiddleston continued.
‘He worked hard, played hard, lived hard — there were women, there was whiskey — but when he sang about being in the doghouse in Move It On Over, or about his heartbreak in I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, it came from an honest place.’
Marc Abraham’s screenplay ‘pulls no punches’, the actor added, and explores Williams’s ‘shattering, self-abusive relationship with alcohol and later prescription drugs’.
The singer, who suffered debilitating back pain from a congenital disorder of the spine, died of a heart attack on New Year’s Day in 1953.
Abraham, who will also direct, saw Hiddleston in Coriolanus and knew he had his man, even though the RADA-trained British thespian may seem an unlikely fit for the farm boy from Mount Olive, Alabama.
But Abraham said Tom has the rare ability to ‘transform himself’.
Hiddleston adds: ‘Hank’s life has a tragic arc, but in simple truth, he was a genius: a star that burned twice as bright and lived half as long. It’s a huge role for me and a huge responsibility. I’m going to give it everything I’ve got.’
He means it too.
Tom told me: ‘I’ve already started singing and playing every day’.
Rodney Crowell, the Grammy-award winning country music legend, is helping.
‘He came down to visit me over the a weekend when I was filming Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak” and we jammed for a day or so. It was so exciting. We had some coffee and did some talking and then we just started playing.
‘It was spine-tingling just to spend a day playing some of Hank’s greatest hits like Hey Good Lookin’ and Long Gone Lonesome Blues with such a gifted musician. He’s already expanded my vocal range and given me a few pointers about adapting my own tone to sound like Hank. Rodney has furnished me with his beautiful J45 Gibson to practice with. And he’ll be on hand throughout the shoot,’ Tom added.
He explained that Williams played rhythm guitar in 1-4-5 chord progressions that are heavily influenced by the blues greats: Mississippi John Hurt and R. L. Burnside and by country legends like Roy Acuff.
‘But his poetry, his lyrics, ache with raw vulnerability and emotion. And he sang them with all his heart.
They didn’t call him ‘The Hillbilly Shakespeare’ for nothing. How Hank sang and how Hank played – that’s the work I have to do’
