‘I’m old! Why didn’t they give me these roles before I turned 40?’: Tom Hardy, Hollywood’s late bloomer

“No one cared who I was until I put on the mask.” The phrase was uttered by Bane, the character Tom Hardy (Hammersmith, England, 46) plays in The Dark Knight, but it could just as easily describe the actor himself. In at least three movies, Hardy’s face has been partially hidden: Mad Max: Fury Road, Dunkirk and the aforementioned third installment of the Batman trilogy, his long-running Hollywood gig. Sometimes, Hardy’s masks have been of his own making, crafted via extreme transformations that have put his health in danger. He’s hardly risk-averse: he played two brothers in Legend and was the only character in the well-received Locke.

The man is not one to shy from a contradiction: he jealously guards his private life, but still speaks openly about the addictions with which he’s lived for 13 years and his exuberant love for his children: “When I found out I was going to be a father, it cut out so much shit from my head.” A symbol of normative virility, one who says he feels “as masculine as an eggplant,” an actor who shuns Hollywood stardom, yet whose box-office hits earn millions. While we wait for the final chapter of his unexpectedly successful Venom trilogy, Hardy has released The Bikeriders, described by Variety as “The Godfather of biker movies,” in which he shares billing with Austin Butler and Jodie Comer.

He is aware that his fans adore his excesses. “People didn’t sit up and take any notice of me until I started putting on weight and kicking people and being aggressive,” he told Esquire. Conflict has been a constant in his story. He’s the son of novelist and screenwriter Edward “Chips” Hardy — co-creator of Taboo, the brutal HBO series on which Tom has both co-writing and leading man credits — and of the painter Elizabeth Anne Barret. The actor had a comfortable childhood. “I always felt a certain sense of shame over being privileged,” he says. At 11 years old, his ears perked up during a presentation delivered by a police officer to his class that warned of the dangers of sniffing glue. He hadn’t realized that it was so easy to find drugs. Not that he wants to glamorize addiction. He wasn’t a bad man, he says, just a bad drunk.

He was a scrawny kid who they called a “weasel,” who “alleycatted” about. At 13 he was already on the police’s radar, having been expelled from school for robbery, plus driving without a license and with a gun. He fell into addictions to alcohol and crack that lasted until he entered his twenties. After waking up in a puddle of blood and vomit in Soho in 2003, he went to rehab and hasn’t had a drink since. “Now I know my beast and I know how to manage it. It’s like living with a 400-pound orangutan that wants to kill me. It’s much more powerful than me, doesn’t speak the same language and it runs around the darkness of my soul. I would sell my mother for a rock of crack,” he told The Guardian of his problematic relationship with substances.

His family provided the support he needed to recover. “I wanted my dad to be proud of me, and I fell into acting because there wasn’t anything else I could do,” he says. While studying at Drama Centre London, alongside such budding stars as Michael Fassbender, he was chosen for a role in Band of Brothers, the World War II drama produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, followed by Black Hawk Down. After that Ridley Scott film came Star Trek: Nemesis, a mega-production that flopped, and Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla, in which Hardy played a gay gangster. But it was another tough guy, this time inspired on a real-life figure, that brought him to prominence. Bronson, a disturbing and hyperviolent prison drama, demanded exhaustive preparation that included gaining 44 pounds. It was the first sign of how hard Hardy was willing to work to lend credibility to his characters.

He got his first big role in the United States in a somewhat atypical manner. When production began on Warrior, the story of two brothers who live in the shadow of an alcoholic father and wind up facing off in a brutal martial arts tournament, the studio asked director Gavin O’Connor to choose two promising, unknown actors to turn into movie stars. O’Connor’s intuition proved to be spot-on: his picks were Joel Edgerton and Hardy. The director gave Hardy a chance to read for the role and he showed up at O’Connor’s house one Sunday at midnight, saying that he was terrible at auditions, and wound up sticking around for five days.

Hardy got the part, but then, nearly bolted. “Gavin, I didn’t come from a working-class background, I’m not a fighter, I’m not American, I don’t know anything about wrestling,” O’Connor remembers him confessing. The director had to don his therapist hat to hang onto his star for what became an excellent movie that deserved more success than it achieved.

The Mad Max sequel came around in a slightly more conventional manner: George Miller had fallen in love with Hardy’s acting in Bronson. “I had the same feeling about Tom that I had when Mel Gibson first walked into the room: there was a kind of edgy charm, the charisma of animals. You don’t know what’s going on in their inner depths, and yet they’re enormously attractive,” Miller told Vulture. The head of casting at Warner Bros. at the time, Lora Kennedy, had the same perception: “Tom has this amazing duality as a man: He’s got this incredible physical presence that is so scary and mean and masculine, but then he’s supersoft and feminine and delicate at times, which is a unique combination for a guy who looks like that.”

In the end, the final decision was between Hardy and the controversial Armie Hammer. They read together, and at one point, Hardy spit on Hammer, according to Kyle Buchanan in Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road. That was the moment when Hammer told Miller that Hardy needed the role more than he did. Buchanan’s book also reveals an incident that was long an open industry secret: Hardy’s feud with Charlize Theron, the film’s female lead. The South African’s professionalism, her commitment to arriving on set every day with her lines perfectly memorized, clashed with Hardy’s erratic behavior. One day after being forced to wait for him for three hours, she exploded, calling him disrespectful. She shouted, “Fine the fucking cunt a hundred thousand dollars for every minute that he’s held up his crew!”

After that, Theron asked for on-set protection and was assigned a producer to accompany her and make sure there were no more conflicts. Time has smoothed out the pair’s rough edges and both have since blamed grueling shooting conditions for their spat. Hardy has also cited his inexperience at the time: “I was lost. In hindsight, I was in over my head in many ways. The pressure on both of us was overwhelming at times. ‘What she needed was a better, perhaps more experienced partner in me. That’s something that can’t be faked. I’d like to think that now that I’m older and uglier, I could rise to that occasion,” he says in the book.

It was not his only on-set conflict. According to director John Hillcoat, Hardy came to blows with Shia LaBeouf during the filming of Lawless. “There was definitely a fight between them. It escalated to the point where they had to both be restrained. But I was very pleased to hear it didn’t go that way because I would hate to see the outcome,” said Hillcoat. Hardy had another high-profile showdown with his director from The Revenant, Alejandro González Iñárritu, which was immortalized on a t-shirt that the actor had made. It was an extremely hard and complex shooting schedule, but had a happy ending: the actor got his first Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.

Awards don’t seem to be his primary motivation, however. When Hardy was nominated for a BAFTA award, he stayed home to spend time with his newborn baby. But he’s not ungrateful. “Don’t get me wrong, there is part of me that wants to win an Oscar and wants to be on the front cover of a magazine and all that kind of stuff, but there’s also a part of me that really doesn’t. I’m not the guy you need — I’m not a role model. Don’t look too deep, because after you scratch the surface, you are going to find out that I’m normal and I’ve got skeletons in my closet,” he confessed to Esquire.

His ability to disappear within characters was what captured the attention of Christopher Nolan, with whom Hardy has worked with on Inception, Dunkirk and The Dark Knight. For the latter, the actor played Bane, one of the most charismatic villains in the Batman saga, which presented a sizable challenge. Hardy had to gain 29 pounds in three months and undergo a brutal training program to get the wrecking-ball musculature that the character sports in the comic, and also learn to modulate his voice. His performance is so over-the-top that it could come across as parodic, but is still riveting, terrifying.

Physical work like that which Hardy often assumes can take its toll. He joked to this effect after the release of Venom: “Why do they keep giving me these parts now that I’m over 40? I’m old! They should have given them to me 10 years ago, damn!” Despite his complaints, he still has the conditioning of a professional athlete. He has a blue belt in jiu jitsu, a martial art that he fell in love with while filming Warrior, and in 2022, made the news by winning a gold medal at a championship in north London.

But don’t let Hardy’s affable behavior fool you. He’s extremely jealous of his privacy, especially when it comes to his children. He has three, one from a relationship with actress Rachel Speed and two with his wife, Charlotte Riley, who he met during the filming of Wuthering Heights and with whom he has also starred in Peaky Blinders. He volunteers with disadvantaged young people at the Prince’s Trust organization and has worked with canine adoption campaigns. Hardy is a big fan of pitbulls and his love story with his dog Woody, to whom he wrote a heartbreaking letter when the pup passed away, enamored his social media following.

In contrast with his peers like Cillian Murphy, he doesn’t ignore social networks, quite the contrary. When Buzzfeed published some of Hardy’s MySpace photos, in which he appears in — let’s say — singular poses, the actor said he was proud of the shots. “I’ve got no shame about my MySpace photos, especially the one of me in my underpants, which is a glorious photo of a man in his natural habitat. I might not be an Adonis, but I like to think of myself as an Adonis in that photo,” he told Sky News. “This is me, thank you.” No problem.

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