I’d have sold my mother for a rock of crack cocaine
Tom Hardy on his astonishing journey from public schoolboy to drug addict — and now Hollywood’s No 1 baddie
Any director looking for someone to portray a psychopath convincingly knows that the go-to man these days is Tom Hardy. Last year, he was to be seen playing not one but both the Kray twins in Legend, the story of the gangsters who terrorised London’s East End in the Sixties.
now he’s giving a chilling turn as a wild-haired woodsman who leaves Leonardo Di Caprio for dead in Alejandro Inarritu’s epic The Revenant. It’s earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor — just one of 12 the film has garnered in total.
Among other menacing characters on his CV are the supervillain Bane in 2012’s Batman: The Dark Knight Rises, Charles Bronson in 2008’s biopic of the notorious jailbird, and the ultimate road warrior, Max Rockatansky, in last year’s Mad Max: Fury Road — all of which give you a portrait of an actor who is drawn to men on the outskirts of morality.
‘Playing the bad guy is a safe way of entering a fantasy world,’ Hardy says. ‘I’m fascinated by someone who announces, “I am going to change the world to suit my needs,” instead of “I am going to change myself to fit better into society.” It’s quite compelling to watch because we know that, whatever happens up there on the screen, in real life there is no fall- out or harm done.
‘now, I am an actor, not a criminal! But if I am able to put myself into the shoes of those people, and revel in this as a safe place to learn a little bit about it, then that is extremely interesting to me.’
‘Interesting’ is certainly one word to describe an on-screen career which seems to consist to a great extent of either beating up, or being beaten up by, other people.
But Tom — in real life a friendly man with a ready laugh, dressed in jeans and a slouchy grey T- shirt that shows toned arms muchdecorated with tattoos — says that, for him, onscreen violence is all part of the day’s work.
‘you might be surprised to hear that I feel very healthily indifferent to anything like that, because I do know that it’s pretend!
‘now, out here in the real world, there are real-life people who do heinous and horrible things. And they’re not just in the gangster world, either. you can go right through society, from commerce, to politics, to shopkeepers, and find them in all walks of life. The bad people out there are terrifying.’
not for nothing was Tom escorted by a bodyguard — well, more of a man-mountain — at the London premiere of The Revenant last week. He was ushered through the crowds by a burly man (thought to be an ex-Marine named John), whose jacket flapped open to reveal what seemed to be a formidable knife and a high-powered torch clipped inside.
At big public events such as this, security is the responsibility of the organisers — so in this case, the film company. A source close to Hardy explains: ‘Tom isn’t paranoid, and he doesn’t ask for protection, but it’s something that an event’s insurers insist on.
‘This particular bodyguard is a familiar figure at premieres, and he’s there not just to deter anyone with really evil intentions, but to keep over- enthusiastic fans from swamping stars and causing injury to their idols and to themselves.’
TOM
continues: ‘ I’m actually fairly contained in my real life. And it’s not like people are frightened of me when they meet me socially. Well, maybe some people can be, but once they’ve broken bread with me and talked to me, they will find out that I’m not really Bane from Batman, if you know what I mean.
‘In fact, I am as frightened of these characters as anyone is, because I have seen them in real life and they really do scare me.’
For a man from a background he describes as ‘ painfully middleclass’, Tom has quite a colourful history. He was born in East Sheen, Surrey, the only child of Cambridge-educated comedy and novel writer Edward Hardy and his artist wife Anne.
‘I grew up used to having lots of attention from my mother,’ he admits. The house was full of books and music; gifts and holidays abroad were plentiful; and an expensive private education was a given.
‘There was only one problem. I was a bit of a naughty boy when I was young. no, let me correct that: I was a lot of a naughty boy!’
When he was 11, he was warned by a policeman who visited his school about the dangers of sniffing glue. His reaction, he says now, was to think: ‘Bang — I know where to find that now!’ By the age of 13, he was on hallucinogens.
A couple of years later, he was expelled from his boarding school, Reed’s, in Surrey, for stealing. By age 16, he was a mess of alcohol and crack cocaine, continually in trouble with the law, including being arrested for joyriding.
So badly affected was he that he once reportedly said: ‘I would have sold my mother for a rock of crack.’
His drug and alcohol demons continued to plague him, until he collapsed after a crack cocaine binge in London in 2003 and was found lying in a pool of blood and vomit in Soho.
‘That was a lesson to me,’ he said later. ‘In death, I was reborn.’ He went to rehab and is proud to have been sober for over a decade. He has since focused his restless energy on physical fitness — training with the Royal Marines as well as boxing and doing martial arts.
He now tries to help others as an ambassador for The Prince’s Trust, but knows that the dangers of addiction never really go away.
‘The only thing that saved me through that dark time was acting.
‘I originally got into it because I wanted to make my father proud of me. Because I was an only child, this was very important to me — and there wasn’t very much of anything else that I could do.
‘But acting was something I could do — and because I found that I was good at it, I wanted to make the effort to invest time and effort into doing it.
‘These days, I’m lucky enough to do it for a living; and I love it and I learn from it every day.’
In 2003, he was awarded the Evening Standard newcomer Of The year Award for his two stage performances in Blood and In Arabia We’d All Be Kings. At around the same time, Hollywood came calling, and these days, between American films like Mad Max: Fury Road and The Revenant, and British TV series like Peaky Blinders, he is now in the enviable position of being in demand in Britain and the U.S.
‘I’m a very lucky boy!’ he beams. ‘I have had a lot of opportunities to do some very interesting movies lately, so I’ve been working very hard. The downside is that I am quite tired right now.’
He admits that he’s not getting much sleep at home either. In October, his actress wife Charlotte Riley gave birth to their first baby — a sibling for Tom’s seven-year-old son Louis, from his relationship with his ex girlfriend, Rachael Speed.
WHILE
Tom is reluctant to give too many details about the family’s newest addition, he does confess that for him — as for many men — the experience of becoming a father was a profound one.
‘I wouldn’t say it saved my life, but it definitely changed my life,’ he says. ‘That was when the penny dropped that there was no longer very much time for me to think about myself any more — about what I might like to do or who I want to be — because there is somebody now on the planet who really needs me to get my act together and focus on something that is more important than me.
‘And when I go home, I am not Tommy the actor, I am Tommy the dad, largely because my children aren’t allowed to watch any of my films yet. My older son really wants to watch Mad Max, but I’ve told him that he can’t — he’s got to watch the Harry Potter films first!’
THE Revenant is in cinemas nationwide now.