By James Mottram
You could never accuse Tom Hardy of shirking a challenge. Whether it’s training to be an MMA fighter in Warrior, building himself into a brutish prisoner for Bronson, bringing it to Batman big-time in The Dark Knight Rises, disappearing into evil for The Revenant, or finding his inner anti-hero for Mad Max: Fury Road, Tom Hardy is as resilient as his surname suggests. When FilmInk met the actor at The Venice Film Festival in 2013 (where his extraordinary one-hander, Locke, was screening), Hardy looked like a bodybuilder on his day off, with his muscles bulging from his T-shirt and his skin covered in tattoos. “Hours in makeup, that is,” he said, dryly noting how long it takes to cover them up for every role.
Then again, the British-born Hardy is all about transformation in his work. “If you’ve ever been locked in a room with a very dangerous animal, how quickly does it take you to fucking realise how dangerous that animal is?” he said, somewhat cryptically. “That’s all I need! I have no skin, so I take stimulus very quickly. I calibrate it and get it. Nuance and performance…I want to shape-shift, and people-please. I’m a terrible, terrible people-pleaser.”
It would seem, however, that Hardy has not always been that way. The only child of advertising copywriter and occasional playwright, Edward Hardy, and his artist wife Anne, living in the wealthy London suburb of Richmond, he was a teenage tear away. Educated privately, Hardy rejected his privileged background, wrestling with issues of authority. Expelled from Reeds Boarding School for theft, by the time he was fifteen, Hardy was arrested, famously, in a stolen Mercedes with a gun. “I was very lucky to be with a diplomat’s son,” he told one journalist. “And if he wasn’t there, I couldn’t be there either, and if I couldn’t be there, then the gun wasn’t there. I just had to sign a form and walk away.”
Not unlike his character in the bruising drama, Warrior – an MMA fighter who boasts self-destructive tendencies – Hardy almost threw away his life just as it was getting underway. A promising stage career segued into an even more promising screen one. Winning small roles in the war-themed Band Of Brothers and Black Hawk Down, Hardy followed them by playing the villain in 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis. He referred to the film as his “brief stint with the Americans, with Hollywood, and the movie industry.” Understandably, he was like a kid in a candy store. “I was like, ‘This is it! Straight out of drama school, here we go!’ But I had no idea of how to handle the industry, to interact with producers, executive producers, studios, even my fellow men! I was 24 – and punching way above my weight.”
But this doesn’t tell the whole story. According to Hardy, he suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder and low self-esteem. Moreover, he has a fiercely addictive personality, which drew him into a spiral of alcohol and drug dependency. In 2002, the year he was meant to go stellar with Star Trek, he was famously found slumped in a Soho alleyway, covered in his own vomit, with a crack pipe in his hand. At the time, he was married to Sarah Ward, a producer he’d wed just three weeks after meeting her. While their marriage lasted five years, it became one of the many casualties of Hardy’s addictions.
It’s why he’s delighted that his success is happening now. “I’m glad that it’s happening now, because I was white-knuckling when I was younger,” he explained to FilmInk back in 2011, while doing press for Warrior. “There are people who are more susceptible and less susceptible to stimulus. I was very reactionary. I’ve learnt as I grow older – I’m 34 now – to be less ‘jumping’ at everything.” Warming to the theme, he continued, seemingly unconcerned about getting personal in front of publicists. “It’s taken ten years, being someone’s dad [he has a son, Louis, with former girlfriend, assistant director Rachael Speed], being divorced, going to rehab, having mortgages, playing different characters, doing theatre, waiting, and then it not happening. Then doing rather well at something, enjoying my character work, but it not being a huge amount of money.”
Ego, it seemed, had been checked in at the door. At the mention of Inception, Hardy smiled. “It was like, ‘How can I help and be a part of this?’ Rather than, ‘I must impress everyone!’ That’s what it was like when I was 24…actually up until a couple of years ago.”
This rugged brand of selflessness still appeared to be driving Hardy when FilmInk met with him to discuss his lead role in Mad Max: Fury Road, which would, of course, turn out to be an enormous financial and critical hit. “There are lots of Australian actors who probably think that I shouldn’t be playing Max,” he said. “Obviously, I’m grateful that it’s me, but I’m very aware of the fact that he’s an Australian icon. I want to pay respect to that, and pay attention to that. A lot of people from all different countries were drafted in to audition for it, and it wasn’t a straightforward audition either.”
Hardy was duly celebrated for his low-key performance, and the film once again showed that the actor has a facility for on-screen violence and malevolence, as also show cased in the likes of Lawless, The Drop, Legend (where he effectively played both Kray Twins, the notorious London gangland overlords), and TV’s Taboo. “You’ve got to get your foot through the door, whatever that may be, and my way happened to be by playing slightly nutty characters, or people who get aggressive, or who experience some kind of mental instability,” Hardy said of how he maneuvered his way into Mad Max’s leathers. “That’s a real playground for an actor, and there’s a lot of great material there. Being typecast as a lunatic isn’t great, but the other side to that is the opportunity of trying to understand the complex psychology of a character. That’s a lot of fun, but you shouldn’t misinterpret that with the actor,” Hardy laughs. “I play characters that are violent. I understand what violence is, so I can recreate it, but it’s not something that’s come from a crazy place. It’s something that I’ve observed. So I just reflect it, and if that gives me gainful employment, then I’m not going to knock back a paycheck, and I’m certainly not going to knock back good work. So I’ll do that, but I’m not a loony…well, maybe I am a loony,” he laughs.
Being a loony might help Hardy with his new role in Venom, the movie showcase for one of Marvel’s most bizarre and complex characters. Hardy plays investigative journalist, Eddie Brock, who has been obsessively trying to take down the notorious founder of The Life Foundation, genius Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed). Brock’s obsession has not only ruined his career, but also his relationship with his girlfriend, Anne Weying (Michelle Williams). Upon investigating one of Drake’s experiments, the alien symbiote creature, Venom, merges with Eddie’s body, and the emotionally fractured reporter suddenly has incredible new superpowers, and a new sense of abandon. Eddie wrestles to control his dangerous new abilities, but also gets a massive high from them. Soon, these two separate entities become more and more intertwined, and the line between Eddie and Venom becomes increasingly blurred.
“To me it’s exciting, because it’s a double act,” Hardy told Esquire. “The character has an ethical framework, the alien by virtue of coming from another planet doesn’t have the same ethical framework, and they have to work out how to be together so they click. Eddie Brock now has a beast who lives rent-free in him. It could be like somebody who’s contracted a tropical disease and gone mad. It’s like acting out mental illness in some aspects, of which I have a fair understanding, having had a certain amount of mental health problems of my own, which are relevant, being an addict. So I might as well fucking use it.”
Venom is in cinemas on October 4.
