ONTD

Tom bares all in his new interview for dazed and confused's collection special which hits stores this week!



Tough Nut

September 2011
Hannah Lack
Dazed & Confused
Tom Hardy has gone from being a butter-wouldn’t-melt teenage heartthrob to waking up stoned next to a loaded gun. Now on the brink of megastardom for the second time, the “go-to guy for nutters” talks to Hannah Lack about pumping up and settling down.

“People sit up and take notice when you kick somebody in the head,” Tom Hardy joked to Dazed back in 2007. He had just spent months inhabiting the persona of Britain’s most violent prisoner, Charlie Bronson, putting on two-and-a-half stone to play the former bare-knuckle fighter who has seen the inside of 122 jails. The tenacious actor braved the grim corridors of Wakefield prison (aka “Monster Mansion”) to meet Bronson, where he languishes in a cage alongside a cannibal and a handful of other lifers.

When Nicolas Winding Refn’s visceral, Kenneth Anger-inspired Bronson was released, it caused a mini-thunderstorm in the tabloid press. Hardy’s maniacal but undeniably charismatic portrayal was accused of glorifying violence, and the actor was called in to answer earnest questions on Richard & Judy. Meanwhile in Park City, Utah, the film triumphed at Sundance and Bronson became Tom Hardy’s Clockwork Orange moment.

Since then, often unrecognisable from one role to the next, Hardy has been the “go-to guy for nutters”, as he puts it. He’s climbed into the minds of a kaleidoscopic criminal underworld of misfits, gangsters (there are rumours he is soon to play a young Al Capone) and psychopaths with chameleonic ease. In real life, happily, he’s not half as psychotic as his onscreen personas. ”Since Bronson I’ve had a lot of lumps to play,” the 33-year-old says today. “I’ve ended up doing a lot of fighting, which is not really my thing at all! But I know what frightens me, and I use that.”

Days away from shooting Christopher Nolan’s third and final Batman instalment, The Dark Knight Rises, Hardy is currently inflated up to superhero size. This being Nolan, the script is locked up as securely as Charlie Bronson, and the ending currently only exists in the director’s mind. “Sorry, it wouldn’t be worth my life,” the ordinarily candid actor shrugs in response to questions about the film. Just one picture has been released of Hardy, rippled back to the camera, as Gotham City’s venom-addicted ‘Bane’ – born and raised in prison, and famous in the DC comics for breaking Batman’s back. Hardy has pumped-up with the help of his trainer “P-nut”, the Bronx-born former Marine who has assisted the actor’s extraordinary physical metamorphoses since Bronson. “We decide what I want to look like,” Hardy explains, “and then he helps me get there. He’s my nanny, my best friend, my ‘manpanion’. And he also does a great rock ballad.”

The Dark Knight Rises will be the second time Hardy has worked with Nolan, who cast him in the mind-bending riddle Inception last year – Hardy remembers being on set as “like walking into a Dali painting”. As part of an elite squad of industrial spies able to hack into people’s dreams, Hardy found himself gaffer-taped to the back of a skidoo and flying down Fortress Mountain in Canada. Since then, his career has similarly snowballed; this year he shares screen-time with an illustrious collection of A-listers. He’ll play a bootlegger in the deep south opposite Gary Oldman and Shia LeBeouf for John Hillcoat’s The Wettest County In The World; a rogue MI6 scalphunter – opposite Oldman again – in the cold-war thrillerTinker Tailor Soldier Spy; and a cage-fighter with Nick Nolte in a Deerhunter-meets-Rockytale of sibling rivalry, Warrior. The latter involved a typically gruelling schedule: 16-hour days of weightlifting, kickboxing and jiu-jitsu at a Pittsburgh “Fight Club” against genuine UFC fighters. Damage included cracked ribs, a broken toe and a torn ligament in his wrist. It’s not exactly a surprise, when asked what he looks for in a script, that Hardy says “a challenge”. “Well, it always seems like a good idea until you’re twelve weeks in, on a diet of chicken and broccoli, and you think, ‘Fucking hell, what am I doing?!’” he says. Doesn’t he ever long for a nice rom-com? “Doing a rom-com would be a lot scarier,” he laughs.

You don’t meet many cage-fighters or industrial spies in leafy East Sheen, London, where Hardy grew up. But the only child of a comedy-writer father and artist mother had energy to burn and a “head like a disco ball”. and he managed to discover the wilder edges of net-curtained suburbia. “It was very privileged, and there was a certain amount of free reign,” he says. “You know, ‘he’s just expressing himself’. A reasonable degree of intelligence and curiosity, combined with hormones and testosterone, and you’re going to have trouble. I just ran riot really. And that carried on into my adult life, when the toys were no longer Buzz Lightyear, you’re dealing with everything from drugs to theft…” he pauses, “It becomes a different playground, and that darkness creeps in. Idle thumbs, isn’t it? Typical suburban story for many.”

The not-so-typical story that everyone likes to quote about Hardy, is that he was arrested aged 15 joyriding in a stolen Mercedes and in possession of a gun, he might have faced 14 years behind bars. Expelled from his public school, alcoholism and crack addiction followed in his late teens and early 20s. Hardy has always been wryly honest about the depths of the abyss he toppled into, whether it was lying in a pool of vomit on Old Compton Street with a crack pipe in his hand, or missing a Hollywood meeting with John Woo because he woke up somewhere in downtown LA, naked, next to a guy, a cat and a gun with its safety off. It’s tempting to explain Hardy’s talent for characters who inhabit the dark side as a result of the struggles he’s had with his own demons. But Hardy suppresses a laugh, “East Sheen wasn’t exactly the Bronx. I was only pottering around suburbia being a twat. That doesn’t make me some crusader or badass. I think what labels it as dark is that one is capable of going to a place that is wilful,” he pauses. “Finding some kind of elation from doing something that’s naughty. As you get older those options become more abundant. You could just as soon choose to knit or get really good at Sudoku… or you could get into the ins and outs of how to wash up crack, or how to strip a Browning 9mm, or how to find and purchase one in the city of London. Because you’re interested, because it’s a bit dodgy and nobody else is doing it. Probably it was attention-seeking, really, at the end of the day. It’s taken me a while to get all of those tools into the right arena.”

Hardy’s looks got him attention fast enough – aged 19 he won a contract with Models 1 (he was Mr July in Just Seventeen, incongruously). But it was London’s provocative Drama Centre, known for its emphasis on method acting, that threw him a lifeline – until he was chucked out of that, too. “Because I was a pillock!” he shrugs. “I’ve always been a bit reactionary around authority. Normally that petulance would come out when I had failed to achieve something. And my reaction would be, ‘Well, why am I listening to you anyway?’ Very teenager.” Even so, he won roles in Stephen Spielberg’s Band of Brothers and Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (he persuaded Scott to let him do his own stunts, including setting himself on fire). Then a “star-vehicle” arrived, in the shape of the schizoid alien villain in Star Trek: Nemesis. Through no fault of Hardy’s, it flopped. “I ended up in hospital just after it came out,” he explained later. “I broke down physically, spiritually, mentally.”

A clean and sober Hardy came blinking into the sunlight in 2003, minus a marriage. The first acting role he took sober was on the stage, as a crackhead rent boy in a Stephen Adly Guirgis play, which proved to be cathartic. If drugs and alcohol were an escape, Hardy has found a healthier outlet in the complex characters he morphs into, changing his accent as frequently as his body-size. These days, the “400lb gorilla in his underpants” that he says lopes around his head seems to be causing less trouble. A decade on from Star Trek, Hardy is poised on the brink of super-stardom for the second time: he’s stepping into the scuffed leathers of “Mad Max” Rockatansky in George Miller’s $100million reboot of the dystopian cult film that put Mel Gibson on the map. There’s only one hitch before he can start riding the abandoned highways of the future: 800 miles west of Sydney, the dusty mining town of Broken Hill, where the films have historically been shot, isn’t looking very post-apocalyptic: “The thing about Mad Max is that it’s supposed to be barren wasteland,” Hardy says. “It’s great news for Australia, but it’s had the highest rainfall in something like 120 years, and it’s now a green meadow. We don’t want to wish away the flowers, but I can’t trip through a meadow of wild flowers in this lush state of grace…”

While Australia’s outback reverts to desert, Hardy is keeping his hyperactive mind busy, writing and producing his own projects, while fielding offers from across the Atlantic. “It’s like having this hotel room, and I’ve got to keep remaking the bed for the next character that’s coming in,” he says of the multiple roles he’s played this year. It must feel reassuring, to have so many scripts dropping through his letterbox? “Yeah, people keep saying that to me: ‘The ship is afloat now, Tom, you don’t have to worry.’ But I still think it will stop tomorrow, because that’s how I’ve always thought – I’m working out of fear. One day, I’ll enjoy leaning back into my pipe and slippers. At the moment, I still think I’m going to get kicked out of school – they’re going to realise I haven’t done my homework.” The pipe and slippers will have to wait: there’s Gotham City to terrorise, and marauding Australian bandits to bring to justice



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