Tom Hardy’s beautiful face
All quotes from Tom Hardy in the article about The Dark Knight Rises in Entertainment Weekly (STILL no start date for Mad Max? Really? I thought he’d gone to Namibia already!)
And then there’s Bane (Inception alum No. 3 Tom Hardy), a cunning, hulking terrorist of mysterious origin. Bane has a small army, a mean muzzlelike mask (visual inspiration: baboon mouth as painted by Francis Bacon), and a theatrical mumble that perhaps you’ve heard about… or heard and didn’t understand. (More on that in a minute.)“The Joker didn’t care - he just wanted to see the world burn, and he was a master of chaos and destruction, unscrupulous and crazy. Bane is not that guy.” says Hardy, a British actor who’s earned acclaim for highly physical performances in indies like Bronson and Warrior. “There is a very meticulous and calculated way about Bane. There is a huge orchestration of organization to his ambition. He is also a physical threat to Batman. There is nothing vague about Bane. No jokes. He’s a very clean, clear villain.”
The Bane of the Batman comics was born in a fictional Caribbean country, a brilliant lad forced to serve out his revolutionary father’s prison sentence. He’s physically dependent on a drug that makes him monstrously strong but yields painful, debilitating side effects. No one involved in Rises will say how closely the film’s Bane hews to the source material but says the much-talked-about voice he developed for the role was inspired by his desire to honor the comic character’s brains and heritage, albeit in an elliptical way. He wanted a sound that conveyed both malevolence and old-soul wisdom.“There were two doors we could walk through,” says Hardy. “We could play a very straight forward villain or we could go through this very quirky door, which was totally justified by the text but may seem very, very stupid.” Not surprisingly, Hardy decided to go for the second option. “It’s a risk because we could get laughed at - or it could be very fresh and exciting,” he says.
While some found his dialogue incomprehensible to the IMAX-exclusive sneak peek attached to Mission:Impossible - Ghost Protocol last December, the actor asks for patience. “The audience mustn’t be too concerned about the mumbly voice,” says Hardy. “As the film progresses, I think you’ll be able to tune to its setting.”
For Hardy, the potentially breakthrough role of Bane came at exactly the right time. In June 2010 the actor confirmed his role as Mad Max in Fury Road, director George Miller’s long-in-the-works reboot of the Australian franchise that made Mel Gibson a star. But just a few months later, while shooting This Means War with Chris Pine and Reese Witherspoon in Vancouver, Hardy learned that production on Fury Road has been delayed by a year. (The movie still doesn’t have a start date.) Hours after that call, Hardy’s phone rang again. Christopher Nolan was on the line. “It was a complete downhill plummet when I heard about Mad Max - and then I was hauled into the heavens,” says Hardy.
Of course, Nolan being Nolan, the director avoided specifics about the character he wanted Hardy to play, and seemed especially concerned about the actor’s willingness to wear a face-obscuring mask for the whole movie. “I think he worried it would be something I might not consider because wearing a mask might damage my career or something. He thought I’d be worried that the audience couldn’t see my beautiful face,” says Hardy. “Like I care. It’s Chris Nolan! I would wear a paper bag over my heard for that man.”
“[The Dark Knight Rises] stands alone, yet completes a cyclical work,” says Hardy. “Think triplets instead of one child after another-the Dark Knight triplets.”
