So it’s around two o’clock on a grey June Friday afternoon and Tom Hardy is trying to talk me into walking out of the Richmond branch of Pets at Home with the lid of a spherical fish tank stuffed up my shirt.
“You’d look three months pregnant!” he says. “No one’s ever going to think that I would shoplift, and look at you…”
Winona Ryder, I say. Winona Ryder.
“But I’m not actually taking it out of the shop,” he points out. “I’m taking you to hospital, sharpish. Let’s move!”
Navy wool waistcoat, white cotton shirt and red silk thai, all by Gucci
Greg Williams
I’m 90 per cent sure he’s joking, and I’m 75 per cent sure I wouldn’t do it anyway, but then again he is professionally adept at the art of persuasion — “hustle” he calls it — and the lady pushing the toddler in the trolley down the aquaria aisle doesn’t look like she’d grass, and my shirt is quite roomy and I could probably fit the fish tank lid up there without much difficulty, and as the seconds tick by I’m wavering closer to 60.
But let’s back up a bit. We’re in Pets at Home, “the United Kingdom’s leading pet supplies retailer”, because Tom Hardy wants to make a Captain America shield for his two-and-a-half-year-old kid — he asks me not to reveal the name or gender — and he’s looking for circular objects that he could jerry-rig for the job. So far he has considered a bin lid, a dog Frisbee, and a cardboard scratching mat meant for kittens. He’s also suggested I might want to steal him a hubcap (“you could rip one off a car on the way out”) but now he’s all over the idea of the fish tank lid and his brain’s whirring: “We can just run hardcore gaffer tape with a bit of towel, a flannel, in there…” Until he spots the price.
“A hundred and thirty-five quid? Forget it!” You could get some fish for it, I suggest. “Yeah, and more responsibility,” he says. The £5 kitten scratch mat it is.
But let’s back up a bit more. We’re in southwest London, where Hardy lives with his wife, the actress Charlotte Riley, and their toddler, because he has just returned from near back-to-back shooting of two very typically Hardian projects: Fonzo, an independent movie written and directed by Josh Trank about the last few months of the life of Al Capone (Hardy twist: he’s suffering from dementia brought on by syphilis) and Venom, the film with which Sony plans to launch its major foray into the world of Marvel, and in which he plays a street-wise journalist who gets possessed by an alien parasite (Hardy twist: the alien eats people; his journalist host doesn’t necessarily mind).
The films serve as exemplars of the kinds of projects Hardy likes to do, and the kinds of projects others want him for: gnarly, eccentric character studies of so-called tough guys, which he’s very good at — Charles Bronson in Bronson; the Kray Twins in Legend, treacherous fur trapper John Fitzgerald in The Revenant — and roles in absolutely enormous studio movies with the potential to make absolutely enormous amounts of money, at which he’s also proving pretty proficient — Bane in The Dark Knight Rises; Max Rockatansky in Mad Max: Fury Road; the doomed Spitfire pilot in Dunkirk.
Now that Hardy is home, he’s spending as much time as possible with his children — he has a 10-year-old son, Louis, from an earlier relationship, who also lives nearby — and, as he says, not unhappily, as we drive to Pets at Home in a red estate he’s been loaned by Audi, “I’m covered in gravy and chocolate and snot.”
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