charlidos

The character who dominates this production is Tom Hardy’s Bill Sikes, another character Phelps has foregrounded. Hardy is quite a slight man in the flesh, but the pent-up energy of his presence on screen has already led to his being cast as a string of violent characters, such as Stuart Shorter in BBC2’s Stuart: a Life Backwards this autumn. Master-thief and murderer Sikes is the most terrifying yet.

“Violence goes straight through him,” says Hardy, who describes himself as “not a tough guy” – yet in the same breath talks about his boxing training, and how he bit a piece of camera equipment on set as a joke.

Hardy is expressive on what his Bill Sikes isn’t going to be like – “that pantomime, chocolate-box, Christmas Carol side of Dickens”. But he best sums up his portrayal through rumbling growls and wild eye movements.

- Tom Hardy on Oliver Twist. He bit a piece of camera equipment? Uhm. *g*

(Source: telegraph.co.uk)

Tom Hardy talks about getting into character for Oliver Twist (he just grew a beard!). From The Independent, Dec 16 2007:

For any discerning TV enthusiast, 2007 will be remembered as the year when Tom Hardy revealed himself to be a stratospheric talent. Think I’m exaggerating? Then you must have missed the 30-year-old actor’s extraordinary, virtuosic and, above all, charming turn as the homeless protagonist of the BBC drama Stuart: a Life Backwards, which was based on Alexander Masters’s book. For Hardy, Stuart was an “opportunity to show what I could do. It was complete disguise work, basically, which I love doing”.

For his next role, he’s disguised himself as a totally different kind of sociopath, one with a bit more vintage, playing Bill Sikes, the villain of Oliver Twist, in a bold new five-part adaptation of Charles Dickens’s classic novel. The familiar tale of the orphan who joins a band of thieves is given a new lease of life by the EastEnders writer Sarah Phelps, aided by a stellar cast: Timothy Spall as Fagin, Sophie Okonedo as Nancy and the pleasingly bolshy William Miller as Oliver.

Even so, the ghost of Oliver Reed - the quintessential Bill Sikes in 1968’s Oliver! - was hovering over Hardy’s every move. “I could never go up against a performance as classic as that. Oliver Reed played Bill as this horrible, booming, alcoholic brawler… I play him softer, a bit sensual and maybe a bit more pathetic.” What Hardy lacks in physical bulk, he more than makes up for in his psychotic stare.

What did he do to get into the role? “Nothing!” he laughs. “I put a hat on and grew a beard.” That’s not strictly true. Hardy has spent two years researching the life of Michael Peterson, the armed robber who changed his name in prison to Charles Bronson, whom he’s playing in a forthcoming biopic. “Because the Bronson film didn’t happen last year, I put a lot of the work I did on him into Bill. Now it’s going to happen in February, so I’m going to have to carve out a new character.” It’s a challenge, but one that he evidently relishes. “I’m staying with Bronson’s mum next week,” he reveals. “It’s cool. I like investigating things and meeting real people. It’s exciting.”

More comments on Oliver Twist from Tom:

The casting of Oliver himself was crucial to the production’s success, as actor Tom Hardy, who plays a suitably brooding yet menacingly sexy Bill Sikes, testifies. “William is a particularly special young man,” said 30-year-old Hardy, last seen to devastating effect in the title role of BBC2’s adaptation of cult novel Stuart: A Life Backwards.

“He took such a heavy weight on his shoulders, at such a young age. The good thing about William is that he’s very good-looking, but in a real way - he’s not pretty. There’s always the danger that Oliver can go the way of that Where is love? song - and we didn’t want that, no way! For me, that’s toe-curlingly saccharine

“I like my boys to have a little bit of Cool Hand Luke in them. There’s a little Cool Hand Luke in Will. He can sit and listen, and I think that’s really important to learn like that, early in life. He personifies that as a young man.

“It wasn’t easy for William. If I come running at you as Bill Sikes with a pair of gloves and a long frock-coat, all scarred and menacing, I’d put the wind up you. For a little lad to put up with that, I know it must have been frightening.

“I remember having to do scenes where I’d be grabbing him, carrying him and threatening him, and that’s a lot to put onto a young mind. I know it’s before the watershed, but it can affect kids - the Fagins, the Nancys, the prostitutes, peddlers, murderers, big dogs.”

Tom Hardy gets into character on Oliver Twist.

[Bill] Sikes is the black heart of the show and Tom Hardy who plays him is fast making a reputation for himself thanks to shows such as Cape Wrath. For Oliver, Tom admits he got a little bit too into character at times. 

He said: “I was having a laugh with one of the crew, wrestling him, then I bit him on the head as a bit of a joke.
“It was just me keeping the character ticking over but the team did say, ‘Tom, can you calm down?’.”

(Source: thefreelibrary.com)

Tom looked like a pretty spectacularly tough guy in Oliver Twist, bet no one wanted to have a ‘throwdown’ with HIM…

Doesn’t it look like he’s trying to mime-box while lighting a cigarette? Or has the mime-boxing infected my brain? Mimeception! (Bad, BAD joke. Sorry.)

Tom about Bill Sikes, in Oliver Twist:

“In previous versions, there has been a kind of hamminess to Sikes. He has been played as a towering rock of emotionless violence.

Oliver Reed’s portrayal, magnificent as it was, showed him as a Neanderthal beast, and you did wonder what Nancy was doing with him.

In Sarah’s script she sees much more tenderness in the relationship. In the end, he kills Nancy, but he is haunted to his own grave by her death. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not playing him crying over kittens. Sikes is still a turd that’s managed to float to the top of a shit pile that the Dickensian underworld represents.”

Always making his characters three-dimensional, complex and interesting is one of Tom’s trademarks, isn’t it?

From Sunday Times, dec 2008.