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[Cover: GREG WILLIAMS/AUGUST IMAGES]
Tom Hardy interview and exclusive David Bailey shot
Tom Hardy interview and exclusive David Bailey shot
By DANIELLE DE WOLFE
02 September 2015
ShortList meets the British actor who took on the Kray twins and won. Plus an exclusive image of the actor taken by the inimitable David Bailey.
Interviewing Tom Hardy is not like interviewing other film stars. From the moment he arrives â alone, dressed down in hiking trousers and black T-shirt, puffing away on a complex-looking digital e-cigarette â it is immediately clear this is not someone who will be exhibiting any kind of on-promotional-duties polish. He is very, very nice (I get a hug at the end of the interview), but there is unmistakably a wired edginess about him. When we sit down, it starts like this:
Me: Iâm going to start with an obvious question, which is⊠Hardy: Have you seen the film? Me: Yes. I⊠Hardy: Right, well thatâs the first question, then. The second one is, âWhat did you think?â I tell him I loved it, and why, and he is pleased (âThatâs a f*cking result!â). When we move on to me asking him questions, his answers â again, in contrast to other film stars, with whom the game is to get them to veer slightly away from prepared, succinct monologues â are smart and eloquent, but long, drawn-out and enjoyably all over the place, veering off into tangents prompted by thoughts that have clearly just formulated. At the end of our allotted time, we are told to wind it up not once but twice, and even then he is still going, launching into theories about American versus British gangster films and life and humanity and such things (âSorry man, I can talk for f*cking ever!â he laughs). He will be talking with a seriousness and sincerity (âAll the risk was taken by [writer and director] Brian [Helgeland], to be fairâŠâ), then will switch without warning into a piercing, mock-hysterical falsetto (ââŠletting me PLAY BOTH F*CKING ROLES, MAN!â).
In fact, briefly, while weâre on the subject of the way he speaksâŠ
Tom Hardyâs normal speaking voice is not something we have been privy to onscreen. Since he delivered â whatever your opinion of it â the most imitated cinematic voice of the decade in The Dark Knight Rises, we havenât come close. That thick Welsh accent in Locke, The Dropâs quiet Brooklyn drawl, the Russian twang in Child 44: we just never hear it. And this might be because it doesnât exist. Itâs five years ago, but if you watch his Jonathan Ross appearance in 2010, where he is very well spoken, he confesses he âsometimes picks up accents, and sometimes I donât know how Iâm going to sound until I start speakingâ. If you then watch another video of a feature on GMTV, dated just a month previous, while addressing some young people from troubled backgrounds as part of his charity work with the Princeâs Trust, he is speaking to them in a south London street kid drawl. Today, in the flesh, he is about halfway between these two.
A natural-born chameleon.
Tom Hardy shot by David Bailey for ShortList
BEING DOUBLE
The role we are here to discuss today does not, by Tom Hardyâs own standards at least, involve a huge stretch accent-wise. But it is âthe hardest thing that Iâve ever done, technicallyâ. This is because, as mentioned, he plays not one role, but two. In the same film. You will likely have seen the posters for Legend by now, depicting Hardy as both of the Kray twins. Which seems an ambitious, almost foolhardy undertaking.
Hardy agrees. âIt is one of them situations,â he says. âYou get an actor to play two characters, and immediately, itâs pony. Itâs gonna be rubbish. Just: no. Itâs a bad idea.â
This particular âbad ideaâ came to him when he first met writer and director Brian Helgeland (who had previously written screenplays for â no biggie â LA Confidential and Mystic River) for dinner. Brian wanted Hardy to play Reggie (the hetero, alpha male, more-straight-down-the-line Kray). Hardy, though, had read the script, and of course, being Tom Hardy, was drawn to the more complex character. âI was like, âWell, I feel Ronnie,ââ he says. âSo which actor am I gonna give up Ronnie to, if I play Reggie? ErrrrrgghâŠ. I canât have that. âCos thatâs all the fun there! And Reggieâs so straight! But there was a moment when I could have come away just playing Reggie. We could have gone and found a superlative character actor to play Ronnie, and that would have been the best of everything."
But Helgeland sensed the dissatisfaction in his potential leading man. âIâm sitting there thinking, âOh, he wants to play Ron,ââ he tells me. âAnd the paraphrased version is that by the end of the dinner, I said, âIâll give you Ron if you give me Reg.ââ
And so began their quest to turn a risky, potentially disastrous idea into something special (as Brian puts it to me, âthe movieâs either gone right or gone wrong before anyone even starts working on itâ). Hardy found some comfort in Sam Rockwellâs two-interacting-characters performance in Moon. âIâm a big fan of Sam,â he says.
âAnd Moon gave me reason to go, âI know itâs possible to hustle with self, to create a genuine dialogue with self.â So then itâs the technical minefield: can you authentically create two characters within a piece at all? So that the audience can look past that and engage in the film? It is what it is: itâs two characters played by the same actor. But I think we got to a point where people forget that and are genuinely watching the story."
This was the âwhy I liked the filmâ reasoning I gave to him at the beginning of the interview. And it is a remarkable performance, or pair of performances, or triumph of technical direction. The opening shot features both Tom Hardy Krays sitting in the back of a car, and feels strange, but very quickly, within about 10 or 15 minutes, you settle into it, and forget that it is actually the same guy. This was made possible, in part, by Hardyâs stunt double from Mad Max: a New Zealander named Jacob Tomuri.
âHe inherited the hardest job of my career,â Hardy grins. âI put on a pair of glasses, played every scene with Ron, then took âem off and played Reg. And we went through every scene in the film, recording it on the iPhone. So heâs got every scene of me doing both characters, on his iPhone. He actually played both brothers, had to learn all of the lines. He was paying attention twice as hard to keep up. But he superseded that, and was eventually ad-libbing. Thereâs a line that ended up in the film, where Ronnie goes, âI bent him up like a pretzel, I hurt him really f*cking badly.ââ âWhere did that come from?!â Hardy shrieks, in that falsetto again. âIt came from New Zealand."
The wifeâs tale
The other big potential pitfall, as Hardy sees it, was contributing to the ongoing glamorisation and eulogising of two brothers who were, to say the least, not very nice. Somehow they have become almost as iconic a piece of the Sixties puzzle as the Beatles or the Stones. But this was not something that Legend would be setting out to reinforce. âOne has to approach these things thinking about the families of the victims who were involved in the other end of it,â he says. âBefore you find the heart to like somebody, youâve gotta look at their track record as best as possible: the people whoâve been hurt, the bodies, the suffering, people who were bullied, who lived in terror, who lost significant parts of their lives in the wake of these two men. Thereâs a lot of sh*t to wade through. And a lot of people who do not, quite rightly, want to see anything to do with these two men. And if I were them, I wouldnât want to be involved myself, but thereâs also part of me that wants to know. That wants to get under the skin.â
So how do you go about doing that? About humanising, to any extent, such people?
âI think the first port of call is, âWouldnât it be nice to be able to do and say whatever you wanted to do and say in the world, regardless of the ramifications and the consequences?â Ultimately, when I â we â go to the cinema or read a book or we go to escape, we respond to certain types of characters that go, âF*ck it: Iâm gonna do whatever I want.'
And thatâs because we canât. Because most people would feel a responsibility.â
The answer to how Legend would do this came in the shape of a person who did feel some responsibility, namely Frances Shea: the troubled wife of Reggie, who died in 1967. Played by Emily Browning, she became the centre of the film when Helgeland met Krays associate Chris Lambrianou, who told him that âFrances was the reason we all went to prisonâ.
âWe could have put more of the carnage and the crimes in that film,â says Hardy. âNot to say that it is not there, but what you do see, really, is Reggie, Ronnie and Frances. Thatâs the dynamic we focused on, that space, which hasnât been seen before. What was that dynamic like? I donât know if we came anywhere near the truth, because we werenât there. But that was the playing field, if you like: Frances Shea, future ahead of her, caught up in something, and no one with her, the suicide. That sits with me in a way as the lead. Sheâs who we forgot. Ronnie, Reggie, theyâve done their bit. Frances was forgotten. And that kind of all ties it together for me."
FUTURE LEGENDS
The initial praise for Legend has been plentiful, but the mindset of Tom Hardy right now is such that he does not have the time to bask in it. There are other quite ludicrously challenging projects to be pressing ahead with. Coming in autumn is The Revenant, starring his good friend Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Alejandro GonzĂĄlez Iñårritu of Birdman fame. Its trailer, as well as doing the not-going-anywhere trend for big beards no harm whatsoever, suggests that it will also match Mad Max in terms of an unrelenting barrage of intensity. Further into the future thereâs the Elton John biopic Rocketman (initial challenge? Hardy âcanât singâ) and another foray into comic-book adaptation with 100 Bullets (news of which broke just after our interview).
And right now, as in this week, heâs working on a BBC series called Taboo, which is set in 1813 and stars Hardy as an adventurer who comes back from Africa and builds a shipping empire. The story has been developed by his production company Hardy Son & Baker (formed with his father, Chips) and has been written and directed by Locke/Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, with Ridley Scott also exec producing.
âWeâre sat on something really awesome,â says Hardy. âAnd itâs trying to piece it together. Iâve never produced anything before, so I basically donât know what Iâm doing. But Iâve got some options and solutions: if you say something is not working, you better come up with at least four other options. But itâs good. Itâs just different.â
Another day, another big challenge. Another chance to do something different. It isnât an easy life being Tom Hardy. But neither will it ever a boring one, and thatâs good news for us.
Legend is at cinemas from 9 September
Words: Hamish MacBain. Images: David Bailey, Studio Canal
You can also read the Hardy interview in this week's ShortList Magazine. It'd be a crime to miss it.
Source:Â https://www.shortlist.com/news/tom-hardy-interview-and-exclusive-david-bailey-shot
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