A special case
Is it odd, or lazy, or even negligent, to ask a journalist to interview the same subject on numerous occasions, for multiple cover stories, for different issues of the same publication, each article appearing at a distance of a few years? And, meanwhile, to commission a photographer to take that same subject’s picture, repeatedly, to illustrate those separate stories?
It’s not something we make a habit of. It’s typically felt, in the case of the celebrity interview — oh, little esteemed journalistic endeavour! (I write as a veteran practitioner) — that once is enough. Maybe next time, get a fresh perspective from a writer new to the subject, a different angle from another photographer?
As in so many respects, Tom Hardy’s is a special case. This issue marks the fourth occasion on which our features director, Miranda Collinge, has interviewed Hardy for Esquire — 2015, Calgary, Canada; 2016, Soho, London; 2018, Richmond-upon-Thames, London; 2021, Cardiff, Wales — and the fourth time that Greg Williams has taken the accompanying photos. And this ongoing project, in which Miranda and Greg check in with Hollywood’s most electrifying leading man on the irregular… well, I hope it offers something different from the eye-gouging ennui of the boilerplate, he-said-he-said, publicist-approved, beige hotel-suite encounter with a famous person that will be familiar to readers of so many of our must-try-harder newspapers and magazines. There’s some history there, and as a result, at least to me, the stories grow richer and deeper as their subject relaxes and reveals more of himself.
I’ve never met Tom Hardy, but I feel I do know him, just a bit, through Miranda and Greg’s portraits. (You can find the earlier interviews at esquire.com.) A questing soul, not unscathed, catholic in his tastes (sourdough and Brazilian jiu-jitsu), a family man, committed to his work, confident in his ability but with a healthy sense of proportion concerning his relative importance in the big picture, as well as The Big Picture. Asked by Miranda about the requirements for his role in Havoc, a forthcoming Netflix action movie in which he is, of course, the star, he summarises thus: “Put on a funny accent, film a few hours, have a sarnie, go home.”
In this latest dispatch from Hardyland, we meet and spend time not only with the hero himself, but the people he works with every day: his assistant, his bodyguard, his stuntman, his dog, all of whom follow him from set to set, time zone to time zone, and with all of whom he maintains a sporting badinage — while remaining, no doubt, primus inter pares. You can tell a lot about a person by the company he keeps, the flavour of his interactions with colleagues, especially those junior to him. The person Esquire works with is, from all reports, thoughtful, generous, solicitous and excellent company.
But why make such a fuss over a film actor? Aren’t there more important things going on in the world, people more deserving of such forensic attention?
To those questions, I say: have you even been to the cinema yet? There has been so much to miss over the past 18 months it was sometimes
possible to forget that it wasn’t just our most basic freedoms that were suspended (hugging, FFS). Also denied us was the supposedly inessential, life-affirming stuff that transforms merely existing into really living.
The first opportunity I could find, once our local cineplex reopened, I took the kids to the movies. We saw Cruella. That same week, their mother and I went to a preview of In the Heights, the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical. Both films were perfectly fine. Pre-pandemic, I would have found holes to pick, and disobliging things to say. (Sorry not sorry.) But now, starved for so long of one of my most enduring enthusiasms — like half the rest of the world, I’ve been a movie nut since childhood — that feeling of sinking into a seat in the dark, surrounded by whispering strangers, for the specific, multisensory, out-of-body experience that only cinema can supply? These were moments of blissful escape.
If you want to know why our super-sized reverence for stellar popcorn-slingers like Hardy is nothing to be ashamed of, turn to Andrew O’Hagan’s essay in this issue’s Journal section, where our editor-at-large hymns the cinema as “an invitation to communal dreaming”. Exactly right, and just what we need now.
More stuff about celestial beings: elsewhere in this issue, Mick Brown, who is a bit of a ledge himself, remembers his early days as a 1960s soul boy and tyro music hack, and his many meetings, over the years, with the magnetic stars of postwar black American music. Few people, if any, are as good as Mick on the crucial pleasures, and attendant perils, of emotional investment in figures who can seem extra-terrestrial in their majesty to the youthful fan, and yet who are also, it turns out, flesh and blood human beings, as flawed as they are fabulous.
It’s not all showbiz. We have essays from a galaxy of contributors — Simon Garfield on design, Will Self on buildings, Tim Lewis on psychology, Johnny Davis on music, Katie Mack on the cosmos — and a new short story from Joshua Ferris, the American novelist whose blazing 2007 debut, Then We Came to the End, you may remember as the smartest, funniest skewering of office life since Bartleby, the Scrivener.
I read both of those for the first time early this summer, as we prepared to return, tentatively, to the long anticipated — and, in many cases, somewhat dreaded — working-not-from-home. Those books now go on the shelf alongside Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, my favourite example of that undervalued genre of novel, the comedy of corporate anomie, with its deathless first line: “I get the willies when I see closed doors.”
On that subject, as happens too often I reach the conclusion of the editor’s letter having paid tribute to the fancier type of Esquire contributor, the Charlie Big Time Bananas as my friend Miles calls them, those writers and photographers who get their names on the cover and their CVs on the contributors page, without having mentioned the members of the team who toil fulltime, mostly off-stage, but whose talent and hard work is, if we’re truthful, far more integral to the success of this magazine than anyone else’s. I mean the copy editors, photo editors, designers, stylists, assistants, writers and editors, print and digital. To each of them, past and present, I am forever indebted.