Image: Actor Tom Hiddleston holds the award for Best Actor – Limited Series or Motion Picture for TV for “The Night Manager” during the 74th Annual Golden Globe Awards show in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., January 8, 2017. Paul Drinkwater/Courtesy of NBC/Handout via REUTERS
By Luke Mintz
LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – British actor Tom Hiddleston apologised on Tuesday to aid workers for comments he made at the Golden Globe Awards about how viewing his TV series “The Night Manager” had helped them in a conflict zone.
Hiddleston, a UNICEF ambassador, was accused of being a “white saviour” after telling the audience how he met some Medecins Sans Frontieres medics in South Sudan last year who told him they “binge-watched” the series while holed up.
He said the idea that he could provide some relief for people “fixing the world in the places where it is broken made me immensely proud”.
But after coming under criticism for his remarks, the 35-year-old actor said his “nerves got the better of me” while he accepted the award for Best Actor in a TV Drama for his role in the series that was adapted from a John le Carre novel.
“My speech at the Golden Globes last night was inelegantly expressed … I was very nervous and the words just came out wrong,” he wrote on Facebook on Tuesday.
“Sincerely, my only intention was to salute the incredible bravery and courage of the men and women who work so tirelessly for UNICEF UK, Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), and World Food Programme.”
Hiddleston has been a UNICEF UK Ambassador since 2015 and recently travelled to South Sudan for a second time to see the impact of the civil conflict on vulnerable children, the United Nations children’s agency said on its website.
(Editing by Belinda Goldsmith; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)
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