BTS: Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston

Exec producer, Alan Eyres, explains how Plimsoll Studios took A-list talent and an iconic location to deliver a cinematic, multi-timeline epic on a TV budget.

When National Geographic greenlit Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston, the mandate from Washington was clear, ambitious, and slightly terrifying: fundamentally reinvent the historical documentary format. For decades, the industry standard for programming around ancient history has hovered between two poles – traditional blue-chip presenter-led travelogues or standard talking-head “drama-docs” with repetitive, mid-budget reenactments. We wanted to do something different.

The creative breakthrough for the series did not begin in a development brainstorm, but rather with a personal anecdote from Tom Hiddleston. While Hiddleston is globally recognized as an A-list actor in film, television and on stage, his foundational intellectual passion is rooted in the ancient world, having studied Classics at Cambridge. During a conversation with Plimsoll about potential future collaborations following his narration on our Natural History series Big Beasts, Tom recounted visiting the ruins of Pompeii for the first time as a seventeen-year-old. Standing over the world-famous plaster casts, he locked eyes with the preserved remains of an ordinary family and their dog.

In that exact moment the distance of two millennia collapsed. He didn’t see archaeological remains. He saw his family and his dog.

That acute realization – that the boundary between past and present is fundamentally porous, bridged entirely by human empathy – became our creative North Star. The logistical and creative challenge was translating that visceral philosophy into a concrete televisual language.

And when we told National Geographic that our series would turn Tom Hiddleston into a time travelling detective with an almost clairvoyant sense of the past, they didn’t look at us like we were insane. They told us to double down.

To pull this off, Plimsoll assembled a specialized, cross-genre creative team. Showrunner Tom Barbor-Might (Limitless, Pole to Pole) came aboard to lead the creative vision and the team. Working alongside Hiddleston’s longtime producing partner, Kevin Wright (Loki, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), he began to map out the narrative structure. The team did something relatively unusual for a documentary series. They assembled a writer’s room. Veteran TV writer Jess Rushton (Catch Me a Killer, Young Wallander) and multi-award winning playwright Mark Ravenhill (Mother Clap’s Molly House, Vicious) were brought in to provide a brains trust to work through the narrative. Any writers room requires each creative to have a shared creative vision. This one required everyone to build a unique TV grammar.

Together, the writing team engineered a radical framework: a single, unbroken narrative arc told simultaneously through two distinct filmmaking languages. Rather than treating the drama as b-roll or visual wallpaper, Tom’s real-time present-day forensic investigation and the premium period drama operate in absolute symmetry, meticulously unravelling each Roman citizen’s timeline at any given moment. Achieving this narrative elasticity required the ultimate balancing act: infusing the scripted drama with the raw urgency of a documentary camera team, while treating the present-day documentary investigation with the high-concept visual grammar of a Hollywood feature.

First, the team had to solve the inescapable hurdle facing any unscripted budget tracking an ancient epic: scale. The series follows three historical individuals—the independent female entrepreneur Julia Felix, a teenage blacksmith apprentice named Avianius, and an anonymous veteran of the Praetorian Guard – minute-by-minute through the five terrifying physical phases of the Vesuvius eruption. To capture the cinematic expanse of an action-driven disaster movie without blowing out budget, we brought on veteran scripted producer Helen Flint (Wheel of Time, Generation Kill, Skins) who initiated a meticulous pan-European location scout.

She found the answer in Malta. Ridley Scott had recently wrapped shooting on Gladiator II, leaving behind colossal, forensically detailed Roman standing sets. By securing access to these existing studio assets, we gained a massive logistical head start. Production designer Natalie O’Connor (The Enfield Poltergeist, Lover Stalker Killer) was able to repurpose the existing physical infrastructure, building on Scott’s epic sets while creating specific locations sets tailored precisely to our scripts—such as the gritty, ash-choked heat of the blacksmith’s forge or the sprawling, luxurious estate of Julia Felix.

To ensure the sets bore up under intense on-screen scrutiny, O’Connor implemented a design philosophy of earthy realism – deliberately rebelling against the usual tropes of sanitized, white-marble cinematic convention. The team forensically matched colors, pigments, and architecture to existing ruins by taking multiple R&D trips to the Naples Museum and the active excavation sites. Key props, including a crescent moon amulet and Julia Felix’s loose-clasped emerald necklace, were foreman-scanned from authentic artifacts and handcrafted using period-accurate, 2,000-year-old metal-smithing techniques. Costume designer Cécile Van Dijk (The Phantom Thread, Tell me Everything) carried this realism into the wardrobe, sourcing hand-woven textiles and mineral dyes available in A.D. 79 to visually encode the complex Roman social hierarchies directly onto the screen.

When it came to capturing the action, DOP Jim Jolliffe (Limitless, A Road Trip to Remember) approached the story with the visual language of a war movie. Drawing on by the visceral, highly kinetic style of Paul Watkins and the Safdie brothers, the camera was treated as a literal character trapped within the disaster. Operating strictly at street level, handheld cameras were thrown directly into the throng of running bodies. The camera setup didn’t preempt the action; it scrambled to keep up with it. Lenses were violently shaken by real-time SFX rigs mimicking earthquakes, splattered with Mediterranean surf, smeared with soot, and eventually subsumed by the white shadow of the pyroclastic surges.

By embedding this chaotic, documentary-style camera language into the Maltese drama sets, we laid the groundwork for seamless editorial transitions back into Tom’s present-day investigation. In the edit suite, the boundary between the eras became transparent. The team used dynamic, millimeter-precise architectural match cuts and prop match cuts to slide between the ancient world and the modern ruins.

Tom Barbor-Might introduced a series of magical realist flourishes where the physical detritus of the past literally bleeds into the present. As Hiddleston steps through a ruined archway in modern Italy, the camera reveals ancient volcanic ash from the drama timeline floating past his face. When a geoscientist describes the buildup of magma, a low-frequency sound design cue echoes from A.D. 79, physically rattling the modern desk of Professor Steven Tuck.

The result – we believe – lives up to the collective goal we set with National Geographic. Throughout, the network was steadfast in their belief that intellectual curiosity and high-octane blockbusting entertainment do not have to be mutually exclusive in factual television.

Hiddleston’s genuine deep investment as a protagonist rather than a detached host raises the emotional temperature of the storytelling. The series challenges audiences to move past the anonymous plaster casts and engage with the ancient world through the shared experience of our collective humanity. For unscripted audiences hungry for something new, this project demonstrates that with the right combination of evidence, empathy, and collaborative craft, time travel is indeed possible.