28 Reasons Why We Love Tom Hollander

Tom Hollander is the beloved, multi-award-winning, painfully versatile actor best known for Rev, The Night Manager and BBC Radio 4’s School Drama. Oh, and we also adore him. Why? Let us count the ways…

1. While at Cambridge, he blew Nick Clegg off the stage when they both starred in a production of Cyrano de Bergerac together. (There are no actual reports that he blew him off the stage - but come on, he’s Tom Hollander.

2. He worked as a toy demonstrator at Hamleys - which we assume he absolutely hated but is still adorable.

3. He once found himself unexpectedly sharing a hot tub with Lou Reed. His opening line to the rock legend? “This hot tub, um, haha, it’s not really hot is it?”

4. He played Saffy’s terrible, awful, frequently shirtless fiancé Paolo in Ab Fab. “Sex with him would be a rather localised experience,” Patsy decided.

5. He’s had fictional romantic flings with Hugo Weaving (Bedrooms & Hallways), Liam Neeson (The Judas Kiss) and Tom Hiddleston (sort of, in The Night Manager).

6. His full name is Thomas Anthony Hollander so his initials are ‘Tah’. You see, even his initials are polite.

7. When Rev won a Bafta, he was so surprised that he forgot to thank anyone and just sort of made an 'eeeuggoo' noise instead favour of a speech.

8. To play the part of Dylan Thomas in the BBC’s A Poet in New York he gorged on ‘chips, pizza, deep fried pork balls and egg fried rice’. He sounds like our kind of dinner date.

9. To avoid people screaming ‘Oi Rev!’ at him in public, he doesn’t dress in a Rev style hi-vis cycling jacket but instead wears a dark one. Not really sure how a dark hi-vis jacket works, but we’re sure Tom can pull it off.

10. He’s passionate about his work. After being cast in the title role of Trollope’s Doctor Thorne, he said: “For me, Thorne was as exciting as other actors would feel about being cast as Mad Max.”

11. Though he’s not overly passionate about acting in general: “Show business is not conducive to mental stability”.

12. He had the best reason for turning down a role in Game of Thrones: “I wasn’t particularly drawn to the wolf pelt thing. I was thinking ‘six years of wolf pelt in Belfast?’.”

13. In an attempt to ‘look prettier’ at age 16, he dyed his hair blonde with Sun-In and applied copious amounts of eyeliner. Can you just imagine?

14. He is a hopeless romantic. He’s been linked to a number of glamorous heiresses and had an extended unrequited love affair with a friend during his school years. He remained close to the lady in question, eventually becoming godfather to her son.

15. This romanticism also affected his meeting with Prince. While at Prince’s house in LA, the purple pop star performed a private concert for his guests - but Tom was too smitten with his female companion to fully appreciate the experience.

16. He does a massive amount for charity: running, cycling and generally helping out. “People farting are expressing themselves,” he has said. “People who set up hospices for children are actually doing something.”

17. He has a very special relationship with inanimate objects “I regularly think about betraying my car, getting a replacement. But I actually can’t because it’s like a friend.”

18. He has fans in high places. The Archbishop of Canterbury loved Rev and appreciated the depiction of a man of the cloth who "prays honestly”.

19. And the great director Robert Altman picked him personally to play the role of Commander Anthony Meredith in Gosford Park.

20. He loves to party. He’s been spotted in Ibiza, Portofino, the Cote D’Azur and practically every glitzy hotspot in London.

21. But his partying days may be over. For his 40th birthday, he cancelled a surprise party that a friend had been planning for nine months and took to his bed while I awaiting the results of a herpes test. (It was revealed to be caused by some chafing Nazi jodhpurs he wore in the film Valkyrie.)

22. He somehow managed to have a fairly public feud with Joan Collins, who forgot to hang up when leaving him a voicemail and said some fairly unpleasant thing about him. Poor Tom!

23. He’s a man of many talents. As well as co-creating and co-writing Rev, he also regularly writes a confessional column in The Spectator magazine.

24. He’s also taken the mantle of ‘sex thimble’ once bestowed upon Dudley Moore.

25. He claims he was too handsome to play Frodo or Bilbo Baggins. (Or at least that’s what his agent told him when he didn’t get either part.)

26. He’s not all Trollope and Shakespeare. He’s appeared in the cartoons Family Guy, American Dad, Aqua Teen Hunger Force and alongside Kermit and friends in Muppets Most Wanted.

27. Twitter went into meltdown when it was thought he was going to be cast as the next Spiderman. Instead the role went to almost name-a-like Tom Holland. We were highly disappointed that Rev wasn’t going to be donning the Spandex.

28. He made such an impression in In The Loop, that he was brought back by producers to play a completely different role for the next series of the TV version The Thick Of It. His character dropped the F-bomb continually and earned the sobriquet ‘The F**cker’.