Masked motives
He’s got those bee-stung lips and impossible cheekbones. So why has Brit actor Tom Hardy been so reluctant to show us his face in his movies?
At least his newest, “Venom,” shows us more of the actual Hardy than the Marvel monster he eventually becomes. But there’s still a curious theme to his roles in which the handsome actor chooses to hide his face from view.
He rose to fame in Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film “Inception,” but it was Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises,” two years later, in which Hardy found his comfort zone: wearing a grotesque face mask to play the villain Bane.
He followed that up with dual roles in 2015 that again obscured his beauty: “The Revenant,” in which his heavily bearded John Fitzgerald goes up against Leo DiCaprio’s bearravaged Hugh Glass. Then there was “Mad Max: Fury Road,” whose first hour features Hardy’s Max with, once again, a cage over the lower half of his face.
(And, yes, if this was written about a woman, it would be considered grossly sexist. But give me a break: Actresses have uglied up since the beginning of film, often to be rewarded with Oscars. It’s not a one-gender game.)
Last year, Nolan cast him as a pilot in the WWII saga “Dunkirk,” in which Hardy wore a period-appropriate pilot’s mask and did nearly all of his acting with his eyes. Nolan told press: “I was pretty thrilled with what he did in ‘ The Dark Knight Rises’ with two eyes and couple of eyebrows and a bit of forehead, so I thought, let’s see what he can do with no forehead, no real eyebrows, maybe one eye.”
Still, we see more of Hardy as journo Eddie Brock in “Venom” than we have of late, so maybe he’s come to terms with his own reflection. Or, maybe the goopy villain who subsumes him represents Hardy’s longing to escape the terrible burden of his own beauty.