Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárittu talks about the dark character of John Fitzgerald and the lightful soul of Tom Hardy.
“Tom has this incredible complexity as a human being, a very beautiful, lightful soul inside, that is soft and fragile and sweet, and in his carcass, he is strong and sometimes inaccessible on the surface..”
Not Your Standard Villain: How Tom Hardy Turned Real-Life Trapper John Fitzgerald into a Multi-Faceted Character for ‘The Revenant’
At first glance, there is a very real, very evil antagonist in The Revenant, a man who resents his fellow trapper and is quick to dispose of him at the first opportunity. John Fitzgerald, as played by Tom Hardy in a performance being touted by many as Oscar-worthy, was a real person who actually did murder fellow trapper Hugh Glass’s son, bury Glass alive and leave him for dead. All the things you expect from the standard, one-note villain.
But thanks to Hardy, director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárittu and his co-writer Mark L. Smith, the cinematic version of the man — now dead nearly 200 years — is far more complex. What could have been a simple, thinly-drawn, stock villain is, instead, a powerful force throughout the movie and, ultimately, right or wrong, a man just trying to survive.
“Fitzgerald is a very practical man. He is pragmatism with legs,” Iñárittu explains. “For me, I didn’t want to make him the uni-dimensional villain, because I don’t believe people are bad. He was just ignorant. I think with knowledge comes responsibility, and when you don’t have that knowledge, when you are ignorant, you are very irresponsible, like many xenophobic people are. Creating a lot of pain by ignorance.
“He is a man of his time,” he continues. “The worst thing you can do is judge a man or judge a time without knowing the context of the circumstances. This guy is a victim of his own culture, of his own nurturing that taught him that slavery was right, and that the Indians and Native Americans were dangerous and wrong. He is a victim of all these prejudices.” […]
Something else that was incredibly important to the overall story, of course, is Hardy’s performance. As strong as Leonardo DiCaprio is in his lead role as Glass, he barely speaks in the film. Hardy spends much more of his screen time talking than does the movie’s star., spitting out his words in a strange accent that sounds like a mix of Ozark and the deep south. For lesser actors, using that tone and inflection would be a flashy, attention-grabbing move that would detract from the overall quality of the project. For Hardy, though, it makes perfect sense, and rather than take away from the movie, it compliments it.
Of course, it didn’t hurt that Hardy also naturally has something of a mountain man quality to him. It’s that same quality that led George Miller to cast him as the main character in Mad Max: Fury Road, and Brian Helgeland to cast him as twins Ronnie and Reggie Cray in the crime drama Legend. It was also one of the key things that most attracted Iñárittu to cast him in The Revenant.
“Tom Hardy has this very strong, physical appearance, very attractive, very manly, which was needed for the character,” Iñárittu says. “But at the same time, I know Tom has this incredible complexity as a human being, a very beautiful, lightful soul inside, that is soft and fragile and sweet, and in his carcass, he is strong and sometimes inaccessible on the surface. These characteristics were what I wanted in Fitzgerald, who has built these things around him because of his insecurities.”
That comes out with every steamy breath Hardy exhales on screen, whether he’s scheming how to get rid of Glass, how to make it back to the fort in one piece, or just how to survive. Hardy’s performance brings the viewer inside a raw and untamed world just as much as DiCaprio’s does. The difference is, Fitzgerald is much more in control of his own fate.
“I was always attracted to this idea of people surviving in the wilderness, in this world, with no technology, just man against nature,” [co-writer Mark. L.] Smith says. “It’s not just one man out there who is trying to survive. They all are.”
It’s that struggle that makes DiCaprio’s performance so captivating, and Hardy’s no less so, especially since the audience is inclined to root for Glass and against Fitzgerald. That anyone in the theater might at least understand the motivations of the latter is certainly a tribute to what Iñárittu and Smith created, but also to what Hardy personified on screen. (ssninsider.com)
photo: courtesy 20th Century Fox (thv edit)
snowghoul
kianamaiart
ellievsbear
gummygunk
annaxmalina
germansingergirl
andulkaphoto