One more interview with Tom Hardy & Guy Pearce from Cannes. It’s impossible to get tired of this, isn’t it? Tom always has something new and interesting or funny and weird to say. Particularly the last bit… ♥  

Stepping into a packed room of journalists all waiting to ask each of them a question or two about their new filmLawless, Tom Hardy and Guy Pearce came prepared. When one journalist tried to sneak in that ever-aching The Dark Knight Rises angle, Hardy dismissed it like an old pro: “You can’t have that question. Next question, because it’s Batman. Come on, it’s just wasting our time. Next question.”

And so it goes. Pearce went on to discuss what he took from gangster pictures past as inspiration. A short discussion, I’ll have you: “I just relied on the script, the personality that becomes evident in the script, so I find it a very difficult thing to explain, the crystallizing of a character, but it comes about through some version of what’s there on the page and some version of what’s in my head, and what is then created that I wouldn’t have necessarily been able to think of myself.”

Pearce admitted that he stayed away from the source material, Matt Bondurant‘s The Wettest County in the World, instead relying of stills from the Prohibition Era to aid his character’s look and feel, which is a performance on to its own.

As for the various accents that are thrown around in the period piece, Hardy explained that, for him, the authenticity of the vocal tones mean very little to him: “…I couldn’t tell you whether my accent [in the film] is genuine or authentic, nor do I really give a shit. What I care about is whether the character is [relatable]. Whether you identify with him, whether you like him, whether he can get away with doing some heinous stuff and still you feel for him.”

The duo went on to discuss their relationships with certain filmmakers (this is Pearce’s third film withLawless director John Hillcoat, while Hardy’s got a couple with Chris Nolan under his belt) and how that relationship comes about and is sustained. “I think there’s an innate respect, like with his chap and whoever else, so it’s rare, special people who come into your life, but you know straightaway,” Pearce said. Hardy had a more blunt take on the subject: “It’s family. When it’s not broken, don’t try and fix it, right?.” As for those you work with in which that relationship doesn’t develop: “We call it chaff. Riff-raff.”

The two then begin an aside, recalling their days in the make-up trailer, playing Angry Birds and the like, describing how the violence and heavy themes in the film made the downtime more fun, more relieving and enjoyable.

Commented Pearce: “I’ve worked on things that seemed relatively simple story-wise, and you have a horrible time. And, not because it’s a simple story, but if the dynamic and the connection between people isn’t natural and isn’t kind of honest and trusted, it’s a pain in the ass. And suddenly, you’re dragging your feet through the mud.”

And finally, Hardy opened about being wary of getting too proud of any performance or moment in any film:

“I think it was watching last night [at the premiere], to be honest, when we got to Cannes, and we were standing [before the film started] and the camera ran along all of our faces…and then, when I saw the camera get to John’s face, and I saw him well-up, I saw the relief and the release of something in my friend that I realized how big a moment this is for me. I suppose it’s taken twelve years [to get here], and to not be the guy who’s like ‘*GASP* I’m at Cannes?’ To be the guy at Cannes who’s like, ‘I’m at fucking Cannes.’ And this was a really amazing experience. My mom is here, my dad is here, I’m sober, I will remember it in the morning, I’m not going to hit anybody, you know. I’m alive! And, these people are considerably fucking talented people, and this is a very small world. I have allowed myself to pride, and quickly fucking put it away because I’ll go, ‘THAT’S MINE!’ Fucking dispatch me to the blackness, and go, ‘you have the wrong Tom Hardy!’”

(Source: thefilmstage.com)

From a little article about watching Lawless and interviewing Tom Hardy in Cannes (makes me REALLY want to see Lawless NOW!):

[…]The relationship between Tom Hardy and Jessica Chastain is as romantic as you’ll see, more romantic than most intended love stories. And that’s primarily what it is, how he is in the film. 

But don’t go into Lawless expecting him to look good. He does not. He’s stocky. Like Bane stocky. Because he was training for The Dark Knight Rises when he was shooting this one. So there’s that thick neck and bloated face, and he walks around in goofy pants and an overstretched cardigan the whole time, with his hands shoved in the pockets, and all he ever does it grunt, literally, a grunt for every emotion; aesthetically it’s really not there. 

But then he falls in love with her. In the most quiet, most restrained, most respectful, most selfless way, to the point where he doesn’t even want to be with her, he just wants to know she’s ok. There are no overtures, there’s no sweeping gesture, he doesn’t declare himself in a rainstorm, and she navigates their entire relationship. Somehow in a gangster story about 1920s Prohibition, a modern equal romance emerged: it’s incredibly sexy. Tom Hardy goes about this film smashing faces with brass knuckles and slicing the balls off his adversaries and I left thinking I’d just seen The Notebook. He and Jessica Chastain, they’re totally my Ryan and Rachel now. 

Then I had to interview him. Fresh off associating him with this character and all those really hot attributes only in person, now that he’s lean again, having lost the Bane bulk and in the process of slimming down for Mad Max (that’s what the beard is for), well now it’s just not fair. After all, the challenge is attracting your mind; the physical draw is easy. He was wearing a green t-shirt and jeans that hang off good narrow hips. At one point he walked past me down the hall and I smelled fresh laundry. When I walked into our interview space he was muttering to himself, five minutes, five minutes, five minutes. When he looked up I promised I wouldn’t torture him. He was like, oh no love, I just talk too much and they’re saying we’re running long. Gotta keep my answers shorter. Five minutes, five minutes…

We ended up going seven. 

You get him on something and he’ll just…talk. In my case it was about how he interpreted his character like an “old lesbian”, playing house on set where he and Jessica became like the parents of the bigger family, and the dog they adopted together. He’s called Woodstock. Tom got custody and he lives with him in London. And then he went on about how Woodstock is home probably tearing sh-t apart. And he couldn’t stop himself then, laughing about his goofy, messy dog. 

(Source: laineygossip.com)

(Source: vulture.com)

An interview with Tom Hardy from a Danish paper - again, my translation. (I’m not sure I agree with him about what it is to be a ‘real man’. I’d love to know what he thinks women are supposed to be like. Aren’t we all individuals, first and foremost?)

The real man is making a comeback, according to the 34-year-old actor Tom Hardy, who is the main character in John Hillcoat’s bloody gangster drama Lawless which just premiered in Cannes. 

Hardy means that the time is up for the metrosexual man, who adorns himself with fashion and spends a lot of money at the hairdresser. 

Berlingske met Hardy at the Cannes festival, where the actor held court for the media at Hotel Carlton. In the luxurious surroundings, Hardy stood out with a worn, army green t-shirt and a large, wild full beard which would have made an Afghan warrior proud. And to be a ‘warrior’ is exactly what defines the kind of man Hardy wants to be. 

In a fascinating monologue, which made both journalists and his co-actor Guy Pearce for several minutes, Hardy explained what it means being a real man today. 

“I want to be like a dangerous animal you’re locked in a room with. I want to be someone who can melt into the background, and just as you think you know where you have me, I’m at your throat. I am a warrior”, growled Tom Hardy who has made a name in Danish Nicolas Winding Refn’s brutal prison film Bronson. 

Soon, Tom Hardy’s striking presence will be seen in the upcoming Batman film The Dark Knight Rises, and a new version of the Mad Max movies. 

“The metrosexual is definitely on its way out. It’s about time men accept being men”, Tom Hardy says, making Guy Pearce tease Hardy by asking where he - Pearce that is - would fit in. 

The suspiciously well-dressed Guy Pearce, who gave interviews in a bright red shirt and Gucci jeans, has, among other things, been known for his full drag queen costume in the Australian comedy Priscilla Queen of the Desert.

“You’re a man too - you’re a wolf in sheep’s clothing, dammit”, Tom Hardy said, who won’t be stopped, but instead got rather Hemingway-esque in his man-philosophy. 

“Masculinity is about dealing with a situation - not about turning your brain off. Carefulness is a masculine way of minimizing risk. Courage can only be shown by someone who has experienced great fear. Patience is a masculine virtue. To keep on going, even though you really know you wont reach your goal. And if you’re a lucky man, maybe someone will stand by your grave and say you had some kind of greatness”, Tom Hardy said. 

One on of his manly wrists, Hardy has a number of bracelets, which a British journalist recognised. The bracelets show that the actor supports a number of organisations for veterans and support groups for soldiers traumatised by war and have served in Afghanistan. 

“I have many friends who have been and are now in a very dark place in their lives. They’ve lost limbs, but are still warriors, and I suffer myself from a kind of survivor’s guilt, since I’ve not been there with them. War is an art form, older than any other”, Tom Hardy said. 

(Source: b.dk)

Yet another interview with Tom Hardy from Cannes. He doesn’t like the furniture… *g*

Consider Heath Ledger’s Joker. If you conduct a Twitter hash tag search using the phrase #reallytoughacttofollow, by rights Ledger’s performance in The Dark Knight should come up first.

Now, even though no one’s seen it yet, consider Tom Hardy’s Bane. This is the actor, portraying the ragingly violent adversary featured in The Dark Knight Rises (opening July 20), who finds himself in the unenviable position of following Ledger’s posthumous Oscar-winning act.

The 34-year-old Hardy is everywhere at the moment, which takes the heat off following a really tough act. Like Michael Fassbender, who was two years ahead of Hardy at the same London drama school, Hardy’s an actor of considerable stage training and an already impressive range of screen credits, most recently Warrior and, less comfortably (the script was crud), the romantic comedy This Means War.

At this particular moment within his overall career moment, Hardy’s trying to get comfortable on a surreally low-slung couch in a banquet room in a hotel (the Martinez) located on the Croisette, the seaside boulevard that transforms each May into a study in elegant traffic congestion during the Cannes Film Festival. Hardy’s in Cannes with Lawless one of eight English-language main competition titles (out of 22) vying for the Palme d’Or.

“Sorry, I seem to be sitting here rather louchely,” Hardy says, doing his best to negotiate a position of repose without sliding onto the floor straight off the hotel’s stylish but uncomfortable settee. All the furniture in Cannes works this way, I say.

“Yes, but then, everybody in Cannes is stylish and uncomfortable,” Hardy counters, grinning.

The Prohibition-era drama opens Aug. 31 in America under the Weinstein Company banner, and stars Shia LeBeouf as the real-life Jack Bondurant, junior member of a tight-knit rural Virginia clan that held its own against rival bootleggers and various lawmen until alcohol was once again legalized. LeBeouf may top the billing and narrate the heavily romanticized story in director John Hillcoat’s movie, but Hardy anchors and dominates the cast as Jack’s older brother, Forrest, a fearsome wielder of brass knuckles and a man who often grunts, bear-like, in a witty actor’s flourish, when words fail him.

Hardy, whose last stage appearance came in early 2010 in “The Long Red Road” Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, says that his main concern in “Lawless” was not making his character a lout of pure violence, nor a “second-rate Clint Eastwood.” Animals were his building blocks, he says. Forrest is a bit of a bear, a dinosaur and, he says rather perversely, Tweety Bird from the Warner Bros. cartoons.

Like so many projects in Hollywood, “Lawless” languished a long while before coming to fruition and earning a prestigious Cannes competition slot. (Rumors abounded this week as to why; one had Harvey Weinstein, the man who took The King’s Speech and The Artist all the way to best-picture Oscars, strategically murmuring about the possibility of “Lawless” bowing at the Venice film festival, in order to get Cannes to bite. Which they did. On the other hand, maybe Cannes festival head Thierry Fremaux like its brand of pulp Americana.)

Hillcoat, the Australian filmmaker whose previous picture was The Road, rehearsed his “Lawless” actors on the set in Georgia, a process Hardy enjoys. Screenwriter and composer Nick Cave based his script on the memoir “The Wettest County in the World” by Matt Bondurant. At a “Lawless” press conference in Cannes, Cage noted, sardonically, that he was attracted to the story’s blend of “sentimentality and brute violence.” Hillcoat stressed they were going for something based in character as well as archetype. “In my world,” said Hillcoat, “which is the medium-budget world, I’m interested in films that have character and drama. And those are words that you cannot use in the United States at this time.”

But he got it made, and Hardy’s reputation will only benefit from being the strongest aspect of “Lawless.” Somewhat apologetically, as Hardy attempts, eventually with success, to get out of that infernal low-slung sofa, the actor notes he has no immediate plans to the return to the stage. He’s to be the new Mad Max in the “Mad Max” reboot. His work has been linked to the animalistic charisma and tenderness of Brando, and while he hastens to mention that he quite deliberately has never seen the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire or, from three years later, Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, he’s humbled by the comparisons.

“May as well make a bit of hay,” he says, again with a faint note of apology. Why not? It may be raining in Cannes, but career-wise, Hardy’s sun is shining.

(Source: chicagotribune.com)

Actor Tom Hardy likes to be ‘other people, not me’

CANNES, France (USA TODAY) — We’re not hearing a lot from Tom Hardy these days.

As Tommy Conlon in 2011’s Warrior, he was a man of more punches than words. In extended clips released from the much-anticipated The Dark Knight Rises, Hardy, as the villain Bane, speaks through a mouth-muzzling mask.

In the Prohibition-era drama Lawless, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Hardy takes on strong, silent bootlegger Forrest Bondurant.

“These characters are difficult to play because I have a very busy head,” Hardy says. “I have inside voices that I have learned to contain.”

Fortunately for Hardy, 34, there are many others eager to speak for him. At the Cannes news conference after the movie, Hardy earned comparisons to Marlon Brando because of his ability to lose himself in his characters.

“I hate to use the word ‘Brando,’ but he has more excitement on-screen than any new actors in the last 10 years,” says Guy Pearce, who faces off against Hardy as a corrupt special agent in Lawless. “There’s this body and weight of a boxer, and yet the sensitivity of a butterfly surgeon. It’s incredible to watch.”

In Lawless, Hardy plays one of three brothers (alongside Shia LaBeouf and Jason Clarke) in a Franklin County, Va., bootlegging gang. The movie is based on the historical novel The Wettest County in the World. Hardy — who was bulking up to play Bane when he shot the movie — was much larger than the book’s Bondurant, a survivor of the Spanish flu.

But he captured Bondurant’s measured silence (“he’ll speak when he must,” Hardy says), his explosive violence and the subtle emotional whirlwind that takes place when the beautiful Maggie (Jessica Chastain) enters his world.

“He’s genuinely the 45-year-old virgin who then has these affections,” Hardy says. “It throws his entire life in disarray.”

For Hardy, things couldn’t be more sorted out professionally. Besides Lawless (opening in September in the USA) and The Dark Knight Rises (July 20), he’s about to begin work as Max inMad Max: Fury Road.

That explains the extensive beard he strokes as he’s talking.

“There are not a lot of razors out there in that world,” he says. “I’m at least going to show up on set with a beard and say (to director George Miller), ‘Do you want me to shave this?’ I’ve been in the post-apocalyptic thinking for the past six months.”

He also has a slate of future projects, including an Al Capone biopic.

“It’s an incredible harvest of work,” he says. “I’m incredibly lucky.”

The upswing has its downsides. Hardy does not love the PR game. “I hate publicists and publicity,” he scoffs. “But I love the people.” And he would much rather be working than walking a glitzy red carpet.

“I like to be other people, not me,” he says. “And when you’re on the red carpet, it’s like, ‘Here’s Tom Hardy.’ I don’t want to be me. That’s why I play other people.”

But at the Lawless world premiere in Cannes, with his parents and fiancée Charlotte Riley at his side, Hardy had a revelation.

“It hit me. This is what movie stars do — what Shia and these guys do. I felt like a guilty perpetrator because I realized I am also here. So it made me think I must be an actor being celebrated for a hot minute. But it will be gone tomorrow.

“Anyway, moving on,” he adds. “I’ll get on with the work.”

(Source: Washington Post)

From a Swedish paper (!), some words from Tom Hardy on Tomas Alfredson and more (translation by me):

A greeting from hard man Hardy to the director Tomas Alfredson:

“Promise you’ll go back to Sweden and ask Tomas Alfredson to call me. I want to work with him again. I want to be a part of Tomas’ family”, Tom Hardy says and laughs.

If you think that movie stars always look like they do on the red carpet, with all the flashes going off, it’s a (nice) exception to meet Hollywood’s new favourite Brit. Tom Hardy, 34, wears tattered jeans, tattoos spilling out from his green t-shirt and then that enormous beard, but it is there for a reason.

“It’s for a part. And there’s a woman I’m playing against”, he says and points to a photo of Charlize Theron on the wall.

Tom Hardy is filming Mad Max in George Miller’s new version, but is in Cannes with the Palme d’Or nominate Lawless, a brutal story of three bootlegging brothers in the US during the depression. Hardy plays the apparently emotionless middle brother Forrest. 

“I had a cigar and a hat and muscles, but that was because I was preparing for Batman at the same time.

“The tough guy isn’t tough at all, it’s a man covering for the loss of his mother. Nobody ever cared about Forrest”, Tom Hardy says. 

His career started with Band of Brothers and Black Hawk Down, but lately he’s become a favourite for the bad guy, in for example Inception and Warrior. During this interview in Cannes, he’s far from a brute, laughing, jumping into the photo, being silly. When his Lawless colleague Guy Pearce says he chooses parts because of characters, scripts and director, Hardy shouts. “Money! There has to be a lot of zeroes.”

I ask what Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy meant to him and Tom Hardy answers immediately. 

“I love to talk about Tomas Alfredson! He’s amazing, does his own thing. He’s one of the loveliest men I’ve met, he’s an artist. He’s someone I’ll try to work with again”, Hardy says then corrects himself. “FOR, I want to work FOR him! I hope to work WITH him too, when I grow up.”

(Source: expressen.se)