From time to time THAAC loves to repost the vintage Tom Hardy interviews, this interesting and moving expose is one of them.
LHC.
HARD MAN MELTING….Interview dated 30th June 2007….. he’s come a long way.
By Chloe Fox 12:04AM BST 30 Jun 2007
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In Tom Hardy’s eventful life he has been an addict, a petty criminal and a supermodel contest winner. Now, as one of Britain’s most promising young actors, he faces his most difficult challenge - drop the tough man act. By Chloe Fox.
Tom Hardy is not your average interviewee. For a start, he conducts the entire interview, which takes place in his small, light-filled flat in East Sheen, London, in his boxer shorts. It’s a blisteringly hot morning and he has only just got out of bed. In a few hours, he and his girlfriend, Rachael Speed, an assistant director he met on the set of the BBC’s The Virgin Queen in 2005, will leave for a 10-day holiday in Cyprus; a much-needed break before he starts filming the BBC’s big-budget production of Oliver Twist, in which he is to play Bill Sikes.
As he stands in his kitchen making coffee and burning several pieces of toast, the up-and-coming 29-year-old actor makes no apologies for his state of undress. He is far too busy talking incessantly, articulately about his love-hate relationship with his work. ‘I love what I do,’ he says from his position over the kitchen sink, as he splashes cold water on his face. ‘But sometimes I wonder what on earth the point of it is.’
In Hardy’s case, the point is that he is really, really good. In the five years since he first came to the public’s attention in 2001’s acclaimed HBO Second World War mini-series Band of Brothers - during which time he has amassed some 22 film and television appearances, not to mention five high-profile forays into theatre - Hardy has proved himself to be something unique: a handsome young British actor with much more to him than meets the eye. In all his most notable screen performances - as Robert Dudley in The Virgin Queen, Jack Rose in Granada’s Second World War prison-break thriller Colditz and the villainous Shinzon in Star Trek: Nemesis - he has managed to excavate the sensitive soul that lurks beneath a swaggering arrogance.
But it is on stage that Hardy has electrified audiences. In 2003 he was awarded the Evening Standard Theatre award for Best Newcomer for his performances in In Arabia We’d All Be Kings at the Hampstead Theatre and Blood at the Royal Court. ‘Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call Promising,’ the then 26-year-old cautiously joked in an interview. He needn’t have worried. ‘Tom Hardy exudes sex appeal and a dangerous unpredictability,’ said one newspaper theatre critic of his performance in Rufus Norris’s production of Festen at the Almeida the following year. Even in this year’s damply received National Theatre production of George Etheridge’s The Man of Mode, directed by Nicholas Hytner, he was singled out by another critic as ‘utterly persuasive throughout’.
When asked about his work, Hardy becomes strangely bashful. He looks anywhere but directly at me, rubbing his hand nervously over his recently shaved head. When he does approach the subject, it is always accompanied by a self-deprecating tilt. ‘I got two venomous, horrible letters when I was in Man of Mode,’ he says, totally out of the blue. The first was from one of the founders of the Drama Centre, the Method-based school where he studied for two years. ‘It said, “You are not a star”,’ he recalls, visibly flinching at the memory. ‘The second one was from a total stranger. It said that I was a “small, undignified man who clearly has no understanding of women”. They hurt me deeply,’ he admits. ‘Going on stage is a very difficult thing for me because I want so much to be liked.’
There is a default mechanism that exists deep inside Hardy; almost as soon as he has exposed his sensitivity (‘I’m just a frightened little boy, really’), his defences go up. ‘I decided against contacting my teacher because it was enough to know that I had worked at the National and he never f***ing would,’ he half snarls. ‘But I couldn’t get that second letter out of my head. I found out where he lived, and would have gone over and broken both his legs if I hadn’t also discovered that he was 76.’
On the surface - and, one suspects, only on the surface - there is more than a hint of the hard man about Hardy. His torso, toned to within an inch of its life - is covered in tattoos. He swears constantly, talks unguardedly about his criminal past (for example, when, aged 15, he was arrested in possession of a stolen Mercedes and a gun), his worrying ability to go to ‘very dark places’ in his mind, and his one-time drink and drugs addiction. ‘The minute he walked into the audition, I knew he was what we needed,’ says the American director Duane Clark (best known for the hit thriller series CSI) of his decision to cast him as psychotic odd-job man Jack Donnelly in Cape Wrath, an engrossing eight-part Channel 4 thriller.
Cape Wrath - which also stars David Morrissey - centres around the Brogan family (a young couple and their teenage twins) who are on the run from their past. As part of a witness protection programme they arrive, blindfolded, in a town called Meadowlands. On its pastel surface, it is a suburban paradise, but darkness lurks beneath the utopian facade. From the beginning, Hardy’s baseball-cap-wearing character is an ominous presence, who soon turns out to have a disturbing past. ‘When his name came up, the producers said he was too posh,’ Clark laughs. ‘But anyone who meets Tom knows that he is a nice middle-class boy from East Sheen with a very dark underbelly.’
‘Everything I’ve ever known is nice and lovely,’ Hardy says at one point, waving a heavily tattooed arm in the direction of the leafy streets outside his sitting-room window. ‘Sheen is nice and lovely, my parents are nice and lovely, but I’m not nice and lovely. For as long as I can remember, people have been telling me not to put my hand in the fire and, over and over again, I’ve done it.’
An only child, Edward Thomas Hardy was born in September 1979. On paper, he had an idyllic childhood. He went to good private schools where he excelled on the playing fields. But fairly early on in his school career he discovered that he ‘didn’t like the rules’. What started with a few tattoos and a bit of smoking behind the bike sheds gradually became more ominous. Petty crime gave way to more serious violent behaviour and he repeatedly found himself in a police cell. ‘I’m not proud of myself,’ he admits. ‘But what happened, happened and I can’t change it now.’
After an early career as a model (at the age of 19, he won The Big Breakfast’s Find Me a Supermodel competition), he signed up for a foundation course at Richmond College for the Performing Arts. ‘But I was thrown out for never turning up to classes,’ grins Hardy, who ironically now teaches a six-week course in film acting to its students and ‘loves every minute of it’. By the time he went to the Drama Centre, he had eased up on breaking the law, but was - he realises in retrospect - a full-blown drink and drug addict. What was his particular vice? ‘Anything I could lay my hands on. You name it, I took it.’
At first, his addictions didn’t affect his career. Two years into his three-year drama degree, Hardy landed a part in Band of Brothers, swiftly followed by Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (in which he performed all his own stunts, including being set on fire). His big break came when he was offered the role of the villain in Star Trek:Nemesis (2002). By then, he was regularly bingeing. Hardy’s low point came one morning in 2002 when he collapsed in Soho, and came round ‘on Old Compton Street with a crack pipe, covered in blood and vomit’.
With the support of his parents - to whom he has always been very close - Hardy checked himself into rehab. When he left several weeks later, he moved back home. But it was his work, he says, that was his salvation. ‘The first job I did out of rehab was In Arabia We’d All Be Kings, in which I played a messed-up smack addict,’ he laughs. ‘The opportunity to exorcise my demons, night after night, was a real gift.’
The major casualty of Hardy’s war on himself was his five-year marriage to Sarah, a producer whom he had met on a street in Covent Garden during his second year at drama school. ‘It was pretty intoxicating,’ he has said of their three-week courtship. ‘We married for all the right reasons but, in hindsight, we didn’t have the best reasons to stay married, for the health of everyone involved.’
Like so many reformed addicts, Hardy’s speech is couched in terms of recovery. His conversation - at best, touchingly honest; at worst, nonsensical - is saturated with confessional self-analysis. ‘I’m grateful, arrogant, self-centred, tenacious, versatile, honest, honourable, loyal, loving, gentle, consistent, reliable, focused, prideful, passionate and nuts,’ reads his MySpace entry. ‘I have a head like a disco ball.’
When it is not focused on his work, Hardy’s over-active mind can easily turn on itself. The day we meet, for example, he is still reeling from the events of the past week. A few weeks previously, he had auditioned for a part in a new American mini-series called Generation Kill. Written by the actor/writer Ed Burns, it chronicles the experiences of a Marine during the first wave of the 2003 American-led assault on Baghdad. Hardy is no stranger to playing a soldier. Not only does he look the part, but he also lives the part, running at least seven miles a day in nearby Richmond Park, often with a weighted backpack. His grandfather was in the SAS. He loves watching war movies. He wanted the part badly.
'And I couldn’t get f***ing near it!’ he yells. While most actors would feel jilted and move on, Hardy became so obsessed with proving that he could play 'a f***ing soldier standing on [his] head’, that he decided to do it for real. 'I went to an induction day for the Reserve Forces, to see what being a Para in the Territorial Army would involve. But, before I knew it, they had brought out all these forms which, as far as I could see, would have committed me, there and then, to serving at least three years.’
This is the sort of disconcerting thing that often happens to him. To say that the experience freaked him out is putting it mildly. ‘I was so wound up by it that I redecorated my flat in less than a week,’ he says, charging out of the sitting-room to show me the sanded floorboards, the repainted bathroom and the shelves built from scratch.
In every aspect of his life - most notably his work - Hardy seems to be hell-bent on bettering himself. ‘I’m definitely a better actor since I got clean,’ he says. ‘I’m really good at it, I know I am, but I also know that I’ve got a very, very long way to go. Being intense is easy. I can throw chairs and shout, but being intimate and sensitive is really hard for me.’ As he talks, Hardy stands up, turns his back on me and looks out of the window. ‘I used to drink and take drugs and do whatever I thought was hardcore in order not to feel,’ he continues. ‘It’s like I’m a painter, who finds it easy slapping great blasts of oil on a canvas. What I have to learn to do now is be delicate and watercolour my emotions.’
In many ways, Hardy’s work is a contained outlet for his inner demon. He is never happier, he says, than when he is doing ‘a tour of duty of a character’s head’. Thus, for Cape Wrath’s Jack Donnelly - who committed a childhood crime - he read up about the lives of the boys who killed James Bulger, and tapped into his own, partly psychotic, recesses. ‘I’m not psychologically imbalanced, but there are a lot of different people in me,’ he explains. ‘Tom is a shape shifter,’ says the director and close friend Robert Delamere, with whom he has worked several times. ‘His best work is done when he is entering into a character that isn’t himself.’
Hardy says he has never enjoyed a role more than that of Stuart Shorter, the drink- and drug-addicted, knife-wielding lead he plays in BBC2/HBO’s forthcoming film version of Alexander Masters’s bestselling memoir Stuart: A Life Backwards. In it, Masters (played in the film by Benedict Cumberbatch) charts the life of a social outcast - who also suffers from muscular dystrophy - back from its tragic end through to its tainted beginnings.
Making the film was, Hardy says, his Taxi Driver moment. ‘I had waited so long for my big break,’ he enthuses. ‘And then along came Stuart and I couldn’t stop pouring more and more of myself into him.’
'In many ways Tom is very similar to Stuart,’ says the film’s director David Atwood. 'He is an addict. He is slightly crazy. He is damaged and wounded. But, unlike Stuart, he has come out the other side.’
The hardest part for Hardy was physically preparing himself for the role. Having bulked his slight 5ft 11in frame up to a muscle-bound 13 stone to play Charles Manson in a project that never got off the ground, he then had to waste himself down to 10 and a half stone in five weeks. He also had to research the physical effects of Stuart’s illness. ‘When I was filming, I attached 5kg weights to both of my ankles and an elastic band around my upper body so I couldn’t lift my arms,’ he remembers.
'Watching rushes of Tom, I had to leave the room,’ Masters wrote in a recent newspaper column. 'He was too good, too close to memory.’ He adds that the film’s executive producer, Sam Mendes, thinks this will be the role that will make Hardy a star.
To his credit, Hardy is not interested in the easy route to stardom; the smouldering leads that he could so easily play. ‘He’s essentially a character actor in a leading man’s body,’ Robert Delamere says. ‘See these,’ Hardy says, curling back his full lips to reveal a mouthful of wonky teeth. ‘These are the reason that I’ll never have a career in Hollywood.’ Like his heroes Gary Oldman, Sean Penn and Philip Seymour Hoffman, Hardy refuses to have them fixed.
Whether he is rebelling, acting, exercising, falling in love, decorating his flat or doing an interview, Tom Hardy does it with intensity. ‘I guess that I’m always looking for the next hit,’ he admits. It is half an hour until his taxi arrives to take him to the airport. Rachael is understandably twitchy.
'I’ve run you a bath, Tom,’ she says firmly. 'Yeah, I’m coming babe,’ he says, never once taking his eyes off the computer screen on which he is showing me a catalogue of photographs that he posts, almost daily, on tomhardy.org, his officially 'unofficial’ website; bulked-up Tom, shrunk-down Tom, Tom on stage, Tom pretending to rob an off-licence, Tom in gangster mode, Tom with a full beard, Tom with Stuart’s real-life mum, Tom on the empty stage at the National Theatre. 'Just getting to know who I am’ he says quietly, almost to himself.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3666234/Hard-man-melting.html
