“I guarantee you within a couple of years’ time this will all blow over and I’ll be back to being about as interesting as I am, which is not very interesting at all. “I’m just Tommy who does his thing,” he said. 25 - says fame for its own sake has never been on his agenda. Iñárritu’s western thriller “The Revenant,” in theaters Dec. Even as “Fury Road” catapulted him to greater levels of fame and he finds himself being mentioned as a potential successor to Daniel Craig as James Bond, Hardy - who will next be seen in Alejandro G.
LEGEND TOM HARDY INTERVIEW MOVIE
If that has meant a slower, more circuitous path to movie stardom, so be it. I like to play people who’ve got a bit of range on them: a little bit of dark and a little bit of light.” Darcy is, and I’m afraid you’re just not it.’ I was like, ‘Fair enough.’ I’m obviously not a romantic lead, so I’m not going to focus a lot of my attention on being something that I’m not. “One of the execs at the studio told me quite categorically, ‘Every woman has an idea of who Mr. “I remember when I was younger, I went up to play Mr. The fact is, for all his versatility as an actor, he has never felt entirely at home as a romantic lead. But I never really talked to him about it.” (Earlier in his life, Hardy struggled with substance-abuse issues but he has been sober since 2003.)įor Hardy, the biggest challenge was actually portraying Reggie’s romantic side, as he enters an ultimately doomed love affair with a local East End girl named Frances (Emily Browning). “I know from things I’ve read that he had some problems in the past with addiction and things, and he certainly draws on all of that. “Tom is a teddy bear - when he arrived on set, you had to schedule at least five minutes for him to hug almost every member of the crew,” Helgeland said.
Where exactly Hardy pulled that darkness from, however, remained a mystery to Helgeland. “With Tom, you have this paradoxical tremendous accessibility as an actor and then this danger, where you just don’t know what he’s going to do,” George Miller, who directed Hardy in this summer’s “Mad Max,” told The Times last year. Tapping into the menace and hair-trigger violence of the Krays was the easy part for the actor. “There wasn’t a lot of money so we sort of worked it out like we would in a stage play but with sleight-of-hand.” “On a daily basis it was like doing a Sudoku that got progressively more complicated,” Hardy said. The technical challenges involved in pulling off dual roles were formidable to say the least, particularly given the film’s relatively lean budget of around $25 million. “If you couldn’t get past that, then the movie sunk,” he said. On one end of the spectrum, you have well-received turns like Jeremy Irons in “Dead Ringers” and Nicolas Cage in “Adaptation” on the other, you have Jean-Claude Van Damme in “Double Impact” and Adam Sandler in “Jack and Jill.” Helgeland was wary of it coming across as a distracting gimmick. Confidential” and “Mystic River.” “There was a little bit of a friendly showdown, and at the end of the dinner he basically said, ‘I’ll give you Reggie if you give me Ron.’ I don’t think either of us realized what we had agreed to at that point but we quickly learned.”Īs both Hardy and Helgeland were well aware, the track record of actors playing twins has been a rather spotty one. “Tom doesn’t want to be a leading man in a way because it’s a little dull for him,” said Helgeland, best known as the writer of such films as “L.A. But from the start, Hardy was single-mindedly focused on the dangerous, unhinged Ronnie. When Hardy first met with the film’s writer-director, Brian Helgeland, over dinner to discuss the film, Helgeland was initially interested in having him just play Reggie, which is more of a traditional leading-man role. Take a guess which role Hardy was more excited to play.
In what many critics have deemed a tour de force performance, Hardy creates a study in contrasts, with Reggie boasting polish and charm while Ronnie is a paranoid schizophrenic prone to unpredictable flashes of violence. 20, the movie stars Hardy in the dual roles of Ronnie and Reggie Kray, the notorious real-life twin gangsters who ruled over a brutal organized crime empire in London in the 1950s and 1960s. “Though you can’t really talk to an angry orangutan in the same way you can talk to a lot of people.”Īs it happens, there are also two very different Tom Hardys in the actor’s new film, “Legend.” Opening in limited release Nov. Or animals - I’ll learn from animals as well.” He laughed. “Wherever I go around the world, there’s always somebody out there who’s a bit scary and I’ll collect that. “I think things that frighten me are compelling and I want to understand them,” Hardy, 38, explained.