Shadowing Practice: Tom Hiddleston on Bringing Pompeii’s Past to Life | This Morning - Learn English Speaking with Video
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now from the avengers to the night manager hollywood star tom
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hiddleston has starred in some of the biggest blockbuster films
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and hit tv shows
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but what you might not know about tom is it is
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also an ancient history lover with a degree in classics
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and the passion for the roman empire this brand new documentary
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is delving into one of history's most famous disasters the story
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of pompey take a look wow i mean we're in great
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tom joins us now oh mate this looks wonderful thank you so much i I love it.
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It's a subject that's really close to my heart.
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I've loved it all my life.
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When I was a child, I grew up just into the Greek myths, you know, thesis and the minor tour.
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So who introduced you to this then?
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Was it your family?
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It was interesting.
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So I did Latin at school around the same time as I did French.
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I started learning French and Latin at the same time, and I twigged, as most people will know, that all the vocabulary from French comes from the Latin
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and then i started doing spanish gcse
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and i was like oh this is just like latin i just loved languages
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and then i did it at gcsc and a level and
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when i was 17 it's
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so memorable summer of 1998 another world cup summer uh france 98 me
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and two friends got the train through europe it's just before my a levels uh to rome
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and naples and we got an interrail ticket back in the glory days
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no adult supervision no teachers no parents no phones
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and we were all doing something related to the ancient world for a level
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and we landed in naples and read in the in the guidebook you go to pompeii
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and we went to pompeii at the age of 17
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and until that point latin had existed for me in books in the classroom
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and you arrive in pompeii and i promise you this
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if you ever go and and you must because it's such a beautiful part of the world anyway.
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You walk into Pompeii and it is like traveling back in time.
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Wow.
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You are walking into the past.
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It's an ancient town the size of Oxford, and it's been perfectly preserved by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
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And you feel 2,000 years between now and then compress
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and collapse it's like time travel and you always
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if these walls could talk they do the paintings the frescoes they found bread still baking in the oven
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and it's in the museum they found babies cradles and you realize
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that it connects you to a thread of human history you you think these people lived 2,000 years ago.
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They are at the cornerstone of Western European civilization.
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And so much of how they lived and how they thought and how they spoke and their culture, politics, how they made laws, how they ate, how they,
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you know, baked bread and sold food in the market is the basis for who we are now.
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And it's that I've loved it then, I love it now, the feeling of the proximity of the distance.
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It's so far away, but it's so close.
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Yeah.
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It's such a human story as well, isn't it?
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Like you said, they were cooking bread, they loved their families, they were just going about their daily business.
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That's the most remarkable thing about Pompeii, is that it's also unfathomable to think of a volcanic eruption.
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Vesuvius is right there.
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And I don't think they knew it was a volcano.
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I think they knew about the earthquakes.
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But most people we learn about in history are people whose lives they expect to be remembered.
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Politicians, generals, soldiers.
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These are ordinary people.
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That's what I love about this whole situation.
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Because you think there's a timeline, there's a timeline, there's a moment where you either choose to stay in Pompeii or you choose to leave.
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And you look at three characters, don't you?
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Tell us a little bit about those characters.
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It's a young boy, isn't it?
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So, yeah, basically you could pick...
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There are thousands of characters you could pick in Pompeii.
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We picked three who we loved.
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And research is so detailed now that...
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Pompeii is full of graffiti and inscriptions.
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They didn't have paper.
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So they used to leave messages for each other on the walls.
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So if you take an inscription and you find the name outside the city that dates after the eruption, you know that person made it out.
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So we found the name of a teenage boy who's about the same age as I was when I first went there, a businesswoman called Julia Felix, whose house you can visit.
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It's this massive estate who ran a bathhouse, a kind of spa, to be honest, and an elite soldier.
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I mean, three really different people who all happened to be in Pompeii on the day of the eruption in 79 AD.
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And what I discovered making the show is I thought the volcano erupted and the city was buried in ash and pumice.
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What I learned was there was a whole day.
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Volcano erupted at about lunchtime in mid-August in 79 AD.
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And the following day around lunchtime, the pyroclastic flow, which is what they call a kind of avalanche of ash and pumice,
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buries the city for 1,800 years and preserves it.
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So you've got a day.
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You think, I've got a day to make choices, and I wanted to, in real time, almost set the stopwatch and track each of them, see if they turn left, turn right.
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Does the teenage boy go back to find his mum?
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Does Julia help get her guests out of the house?
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Does the elite soldier suddenly have the skill set to get people into the boats and out into the Bay of Naples?
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It's a disaster movie, basically, right?
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Yeah, yeah, it is a disaster.
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These terrible, tragic human consequences.
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But then the extraordinary thing is it is a tragedy and many people lost their lives.
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What I found is, and it felt so resonant and so contemporary,
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is you can tell from the historical record that these communities collected together to help each other in a crisis.
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Exactly what people do today.
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And it's really moving.
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You can track their movements to see that people went back for their families, their children.
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And Ali mentioned the minority report.
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I mean, the effects look incredible.
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And when someone pitches this to you, there's a point of view that goes, yeah it's not really gonna look like that right
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but it really does not no dry documentary this is like
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a Hollywood movie documentary I thought we wanted to go for
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it you know we wanted to earn our place in in there's
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so many stories that was a little nod to the fact
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that some of the films I've been in have involved some pretty interesting tech yeah
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and I thought we could we could play with that
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but it really was just about I wanted to make it as immersive
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and propulsive and emotional as I could I wanted to earn my place in there there's
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so many documentaries about Pompeii and I wanted to people to feel how I felt
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when I went there but actually these are human stories
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that we are as connected to their experience as our own
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and hopefully that might help generate the empathy I feel for them
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and bring it you know bring the past to life
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and these two timelines the present tense of me being in pompeii
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and trying to accumulate evidence
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and fragments of data pieces of a jigsaw to build a picture
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but the past running in parallel and then actually at a certain point the past
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and the present come together my favorite bit I should tell
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you is the we've got permission from the archaeological park of
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Pompeii to film at night after dark long after the park had closed
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and we were doing a sequence where I'm sort of searching
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for the teenage boy I'm trying to to mirror his journey home in the darkness
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and it was just me a camera operator the director
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and we got lost in the streets of Pompeii I've had my phone
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and and the shadow of Vesuvius you know sort of lit by the moon
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and it felt like this is what it must have been like for them.
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And in the film, what happens is, you can see
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when the teenage boy in 79 AD is trying to see his way through all the ash
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and the clouds and the pumice, you see this electric light behind him, and it's my phone.
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And it's me trying to sort of illustrate that the whole show is about trying to illuminate the past.
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To bring it.
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Listen, we had so much more Avengers.
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We did.
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We're done.
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That was amazing bless you thank you we're all in we're really
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so much pompey out of time available to watch on disney plus
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and nat geo national geographic channel from next thursday 23rd of
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july thank you guys yeah thanks for joining us uh well listen
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and thank you for dancing it was lovely yeah you know i love the dance anytime come back
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and dance with us
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 133 sentences and 1574 words to shadow. The speech runs for 8:43. The speaker talks fast, about 181 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 83% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| documentary noun | /ˌdɒk.jʊˈmɛn.tɹi/ | A film, TV program, publication etc. which presents a social, political, scientific or historical subject in a factual or informative manner. |
| teenage adjective | /ˈtiːneɪd͡ʒ/ | Of or relating to an age between thirteen and nineteen years old. |
| eruption noun | /ɪˈɹʌpʃən/ | A violent ejection, such as the spurting out of lava from a volcano. |
| disaster noun | /dɪˈzɑːs.təː/ | An unexpected natural or man-made catastrophe of substantial extent causing significant physical damage or destruction, loss of life or sometimes permanent… |
| timeline noun | /ˈtaɪmˌlaɪn/ | A graphical representation of a chronological sequence of events (past or future). |
| volcano noun | /vɑlˈkeɪ.noʊ/ | A vent or fissure on the surface of a planet (usually in a mountainous form) with a magma chamber attached to the mantle of a planet or moon, periodically… |
| earn verb | /ɝn/ | To gain (success, reward, recognition) through applied effort or work. |
| soldier noun | /ˈsoʊld͡ʒɚ/ | A member of a ground-based army, of any rank, but especially an enlisted member. |
| elite noun | /ɪˈlit/ | A special group or social class of people who have a superior social or economic status and attendant power, advantages, or privileges in society; a member of… |
| connect verb | /kəˈnɛkt/ | To join (to another object): to attach, or to be intended to attach or capable of attaching, to another object. |
| preserve verb | /pɹəˈzɝv/ | To protect; to keep from harm or injury. |
| bake verb | /beɪk/ | To cook (something) in an oven (for someone). |
| bury verb | /ˈbɛɹi/ | To outlive. |
| volcanic adjective | /vɔlˈkænɪk/ | Of or pertaining to a volcano or volcanoes. |
| inscription noun | /ɪnˈskɹɪpʃən/ | The act of inscribing. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| come back verb | To return to a place. | |
| come together verb | /ˈkʌm tʊˈɡɛðɚ/ | To assemble; to congregate; to combine. |
| go back to verb | To stem from; to originate in. | |
| grow up verb | To mature and become an adult. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has starred · I've loved · it's been |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be remembered · was buried |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who all · flow, which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 19 contractions and reduced forms, such as I've, we're, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: thread /ˈθɹɛd/, earthquake /ˈɝθkweɪk/, myth /mɪθ/, thesis /ˈθisɪs/, empathy /ˈɛmpəθi/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: eruption /ɪˈɹʌpʃən/, inscription /ɪnˈskɹɪpʃən/, passion /ˈpæʃən/, shadow /ˈʃædəʊ̯/, politician /ˌpɑ.ləˈtɪʃ.ən/
- Long words — get the stress right: documentary /ˌdɒk.jʊˈmɛn.tɹi/, ordinary /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/, minority /maɪˈnɒɹ.ɪ.ti/, extraordinary /ɪksˈtɹɔːrdɪn(ə)ɹi/, operator /ˈɑpəˌɹeɪtɚ/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like documentary, teenage, eruption.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.