The world was left wondering: Did Taylor make him wear it? Was Tom so madly in love that he screen printed the tank top for himself? How much convincing would it take to get our boyfriends into a similar one for us? Also, what?!
But finally, seven months later, Hiddleston finally opened up in his March 2017 cover story with GQ the real reason he wore the infamous tank top emblazoned with T.Swift’s initials.
“The truth is, it was the Fourth of July and a public holiday and we were playing a game and I slipped and hurt my back,” he says. “And I wanted to protect the graze from the sun and said, ‘Does anyone have a T-shirt?’ And one of her friends said, ‘I’ve got this’ … And we all laughed about it. It was a joke.”
While we’re still stuck on the words “graze of the sun” and the fact that anyone in the squad came prepared with that tank top, Hiddleston isn’t here for our questions: “It was a joke. Among friends.”
The star goes on to say he isn’t a huge fan of the limelight that comes along with being in such a high-profile relationship, and still can’t believe the frenzy the romance caused.
“I have to be so psychologically strong about not letting other people’s interpretations about my life affect my life,” he told GQ. “A relationship exists between two people. We will always know what it was.” (And what it was, he says, was “real.”)
And Hiddleston goes on to say he’s not a fan of paparazzi snapping photos of him without actually knowing the context of situations.
“The narratives that are out there altogether have been extrapolated from pictures that were taken without consent or permission, with no context. Nobody had the context for that story,” he said. “So the hardest thing is that that was a joke among friends on the Fourth of July. I was just surprised that it got so much attention. The tank top became an emblem of this thing.”
This article originally appeared on PEOPLE.com.
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