14 DAY TRIAL // As much as he protests that he’s not good at doing press for his own movies, Tom Hardy’s interviews are always a pleasure to read or watch. The Independent caught up with him at TIFF, where he was promoting “The Drop,” with the piece going online the other day – and Hardy doesn’t disappoint here either.
The first thing you have to understand about Hardy is that he’s not your typical Hollywood star. An actor who has been working for years before he went “mainstream,” he’s almost always attracted to roles that draw on his inner darkness.
At the same time, though his fame has increased considerably in recent years, he remains down to earth, humble, and nice – and would never make the mistake of believing his own hype. Again, he’s not like most Hollywood stars.
Darker roles have a special appeal to Hardy
Above all, Tom Hardy is very candid on whatever topic that comes up, be it his personal life, his personal demons, or his career and movie choices. He’ll talk freely about his addiction to crack cocaine and alcohol, about how he came very close to throwing his entire life away (not just his career), and how happy he is that he finally gets to do what he likes.
He’s happy he’s also making money from it, but mostly because he gets to travel and do something he enjoys – and how many people are there to be able to honestly say they love their job this much?
Whichever way his life must have changed since he caught the eye of fans and critics with his performance in “Bronson,” one thing remained constant: this attraction he feels for a certain type of characters.
Make no mistake, Hardy is by no means typecast: he’s done action movies, and he’s done dramas and even period dramas, and he’s even done rom-coms, but his characters do have something in common. That would be their feeling of loneliness or not belonging.
“I like dogs, I like New York,” he says of taking the offer for “The Drop.” “And I like characters that are desperate and lonely and aren’t normally looked at under the microscope. Hustlers and pimps and villains and drunks and homeless people and loneliness; disparity and the losers,” he continues.
“The Drop,” James Gandolfini’s final movie
“The Drop” is already running in theaters in some territories, and Hardy describes it as a project he’s most proud of. The Bob character he plays in it was a challenge, he says, because to play it, he had to explore “the layers of denial and the masks that you have to create in order to participate in life, on life’s terms, whilst trying to deal with having done something so heinous that you can’t forgive yourself, but at the same time you can justify.”
Hardy is also proud of this film because it gave him the chance to star opposite James Gandolfini, who died a short while after wrapping production.
It was also a project that his good friend and co-star Noomi Rapace came to him with, when he was away in the desert shooting for “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Tom admits that he never does any research on the directors he’s about to work with because he doesn’t have the patience to read books or watch movies, so he took Rapace’s word on director Michaël Roskam’s work before signing on the dotted line.
The Independent interviewer notes that Hardy can hardly sit still for a few minutes in a row during the chat, so no wonder he has no patience for research work. But he’s a perfectionist to the core so, once he’s on set, he’s giving the role 150 percent of what he’s got. His already impressive resume is enough to validate his hard work and commitment.
