14 DAY TRIAL // British actor Tom Hardy, who can now be seen in Christopher Nolan’s best-selling “Inception” as The Forger, must be among the very few men who think very little, if anything at all, about Madonna’s charisma. To him, the singer is only somebody’s mother, who also happens to look like a ghost – and he should know because he met her face to face.
In a new interview cited by NDTV Movies, Hardy recalls the first time he got to meet and talk to the Queen of Pop. It was when he was playing gangster Handsome Bob in “RocknRolla,” which Guy Ritchie directed. At the time, Ritchie was still married to the singer and, at one point, she came down to the set to see him. When Hardy saw her and realized who she was, he got so starstruck that he literally hid from her to avoid having to speak to her and make a fool of himself.
“She left me starstruck. I did what anyone who can’t deal with the situation does: I went and hid in the Range Rover,” Hardy recalls. When he came back to the set later, he found out he hadn’t been successful in his attempt to avoid her. “I was sort of prepping for the scene in there and someone said hello to me and it was her – she’d somehow managed to get into the back of it! Then we had a conversation, which I’ve completely blacked out because there she was like the Mother Mary in the boot [back] of the Range Rover and I was completely starstruck,” the actor adds.
However, being in such awe of Madonna doesn’t mean Tom makes too much of her looks. As far as he’s concerned, she could very well be a very close friend of his own mother. “She’s just someone’s mum to me and she looks like a ghost. I didn’t see her as a [sensual] creature. There was a time when I really would’ve gone there but since [she appeared in] the Justin Timberlake video, leaping over cars and things, I just think, ‘Enough now',” Hardy explains.
In recent days, the critically acclaimed actor has been getting a lot of media attention – and it’s not necessarily for his work that he’s doing so. The other week, for instance, he was quoted as saying part of being an actor means experimenting “with everyone and everything” (men included), which would have marked the first time a male star came out as bi. Shortly afterwards, a source close to him said the comments had been taken out of context, though exactly how that could have happened is yet to be determined.
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