14 DAY TRIAL // Tom Hardy is not a movie star, he’s an actor: this is how the May 2014 cover story in Esquire, focusing on the London-born Tom, begins. Until “Mad Max: Fury Road,” the reboot of the beloved Mel Gibson-centered franchise, doesn’t open in theaters in 2015, we won’t know if he really has what it takes to be a movie star.
Fans, of course, have already made up their mind: Hardy isn’t just pure eye-candy, be it in film or in magazine spreads like this one (do check the gallery below for more of that, by the way), he is also incredibly talented and a very versatile actor. He’s also charismatic, charitable and well-spoken.
Tom Hardy also gives great interviews, in which he doesn’t beat about the bush or run away from words because he’s scared of them. Most recently, he admitted to being just a “bloke” with loads of insecurities, whose main motivator was fear – not fear of failure, but fear that he might not be able to do the things he started doing.
In this Esquire piece, which is actually meant to promote his new film “Locke,” dubbed a cinematographic experience similar to a one-actor theater play, Tom goes a bit deeper into the topic of his insecurities, to make a very surprising revelation.
“I have always been frightened with men. To the point where I couldn’t go into a gym because of the testosterone and I felt weak. I don’t feel very manly. I don’t feel rugged and strong and capable in real life, not how I imagine a man ought to be,” he says.
For fans, this comment sounds like a paradox, to say the least: Hardy is the man who brought to life on the big screen Charles Bronson, aka the most dangerous prison inmate in Britain; he played an MMA fighter in “Warrior” and broke Batman’s back in “The Dark Knight Rises” as Bane, the biggest villain the Caped Crusader ever faced.
Hardy is trying to draw the line between fiction and reality, as if to distance himself from all his onscreen personas and to make himself as a man even more of a mystery. Because, you see, Tom is no celebrity either, so that means fans don’t know every little detail of his life from the tabloids.
“So I seek it, to mimic it and maybe understand it, or maybe to draw it into my own reality. People who are scary, they terrify me, but I can imitate them. I’m not a fighter. I’m a petite little bourgeois boy from London. I don’t fight, I mimic,” he says.
Hardy refuses to even think of himself as on the same level as other actors who have graced the cover of Esquire throughout the years: DiCaprio, Clooney, Matt Damon or Brad Pitt. He says he’s no “ambassador” like them, that he doesn’t have the same clean track record as them.
He’s referring, of course, to his addictions and the troubled years from the beginning of his career. “I was a shameful suburban statistic,” he says. He’s “[expletive]-ing lucky to be here” and he’s taking each day as it comes, resisting temptation, remembering why it’s important to stay clean and sober, doing whatever he can for those who didn’t get the wake-up call he got.
The full Esquire interview will be available with the magazine at newsstands. This Tumblr page, TomHardyVariations, set up by Tom Hardy fans have it already – you should definitely read it if you want to know more about this actor who’s not yet a movie star, but has already won the hearts of millions. Ours included.
