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Part of the stress was dancing on the hot asphalt in Alabama; part of it was making sure that dance was a key part of the film, “The Life of Chuck.”

Based on a Stephen King novella, the movie touches on those seminal moments that matter in life — not the job promotions, the awards or the traditional benchmarks.

They’re the “moments in our lives which will become the brightest stars in our memories in the last hours of our lives,” Hiddleston says. For his character, Chuck Krantz, one of those moments is an impromptu dance on a street. A drummer starts working out a beat, Chuck drops his briefcase and soon, the accountant is sharing moves with a woman who feels a similar vibe.

The dance is the centerpiece of Mike Flanagan’s film — a segment that took four days to capture. Choreographer Mandy Moore and her assistants worked with Hiddleston five or six weeks before filming. “We all kind of collected together in London, initially, then in Alabama for a week,” he says. “We were in a dance studio in Fairhope.”

Among the segments: moonwalking. Flanagan tried to do it but couldn’t. “There’s a horrifying video of it out there somewhere,” he says.

For Hiddleston, it was an opportunity to check off all the dance experience a young Chuck might have had.

In another segment of the film, Benjamin Pajak (who plays a younger version of Chuck), is shown learning steps and discovering the joy of dance.

To make sure young Chuck and old Chuck matched, Moore united the two and offered signature moves that would be evident in both segments.

“I don’t think I would have gotten through it if I didn’t have Mandy,” Pajak says.

In those non-dancing moments, the young actor (who starred on Broadway as Winthrop in “The Music Man”) brought a level of professionalism that “raised the bar for everybody,” co-star Kate Flanagan says. He brought a sense of wonder “that shows in everybody’s eyes when they look at you in the movie.”

Other standout moments leaned heavily on King’s thesis statement.

Example: Mark Hamill, who plays Chuck’s father, has a monologue that extols the joys of math.

“At one point, I was having a hard time making a jump from one line to the other,” he says. “One line was, ‘Just think, you could go to dinner and figure out how much it cost for everybody to eat … and it’s good for your brain.’ And I’d say, ‘How do I make that jump?’ And then it hit me: Eat brain. So in the side I wrote, ‘Zombie.’ Anything to help me remember lines.”

When he saw the film, the line had been cut. “That’s a different kind of apocalypse,” Mike Flanagan says.

In one of the three parts of the film (it’s told in chapters), two characters consider the end of life.

“As things start to break down, as traffic grinds to a halt, as the Internet goes down, as the phone lines go down, as you see images of whole land masses sliding into the sea (you realize) I don’t need this … I have two legs,” Hiddleston says. And the character who has that moment of enlightenment decides to walk to his friend’s place and have a real conversation.

“Stephen is asking questions — we have the resources we need but we lean our technologies, which are simulating real connection, but they’re not the substance of human connection,” Hiddleston explains.

Chuck’s non-dance scenes take place in a bed where his life is coming to a close. As elements become stripped away, he revisits those important memories.

“I had this awareness of the preciousness and the fragility of living, but also the magic and majesty of connection in the every day,” Hiddleston says. “As it’s so beautifully described in the story, this moment on the sidewalk on a Thursday afternoon is maybe an expression of the most intense freedom of his entire life.”