HARDY FILLS GIBSON’S SHOES — AND JACKET — HIS OWN WAY
But this star wears mantle of fame a little less easily
Mad? Not today. Tom Hardy rolls into the Peninsula Hotel incognito in a full beard, cargo shorts and a T-shirt, wraparound sunglasses dangling off the back of his neck. Once in his room, he peers suspiciously at a tray of chocolate truffles. There sits a delicate, disgusting hair.
Hardy, 37, erupts with laughter before ordering poached eggs and greens.
Hardy has spent the last decade slaying critics in Bronson, playing the masked villain in The
Dark Knight Rises and a brooding bartender in The Drop, and giving a tense one-man performance in
Locke. But there’s something new: He’s vegetarian now.
“I’m just a bit foggy in the cockpit,” says Hardy, who roars to life today in Mad Max: Fury
Road, a new chapter in George Miller’s apocalyptic franchise (which last saw the light of day in 1985’s Beyond Thunderdome). “My mind is a bit slow and sluggish sometimes, I notice.”
So it’s veggies only before Hardy goes back into the wild with Leonardo DiCaprio to finish shooting The Revenant, a 19th-century revenge thriller about a fur trapper mauled by a grizzly bear, then left for dead by cohorts who rob him.
“I’m not perfect,” he shrugs. “Every so often I do snatch a burger out of its cage.”
Chaos escalated cage-free in the desert of Namibia for Mad
Max, or as Hardy calls it, “this S&M fetish party with Cirque du Soleil and Hells Angels in the middle of nowhere.” Miller’s Fury
Road is akin to a vicious rock opera on wheels, with Hardy taking over for Mel Gibson as Max Rockatansky, the antihero battling for survival in a postapocalyptic wasteland where water and gasoline have become a bloody currency.
“He definitely reminded me of Mel when Mel walked through the door 30 years before,” Miller says. “They have that immediate lovability, but at the same time, there’s a danger to them.”
By day, the aggressive stunts were frenetic and risky, with little left to CGI. “Nobody’s in a wheelchair. No one’s dead,” Hardy says. “But that was definitely on the smorgasbord of opportunity.”
Before shooting, Hardy paid his respects to Gibson over lunch. (“We talked about everything but Mad Max.”) And when he arrived on set, Gibson’s iconic jacket was waiting. “I put it on and it fit like a glove,” says Hardy, who is married to actress Charlotte Riley and has a 7-year-old son, Louis.
Hardy was a tot when the original Mad Max came out. He grew up on a diet of Indiana Jones, The
Goonies and E.T. To him, Max is “a real superhero, a guy who actually things really hurt. He can’t fly, he can’t jump. He’s asked to do exceptional things and he feels like Harrison Ford with the sword-fighting scene in Indiana
Jones (where) he pulls out the gun and shoots him. This man has the ability to choose unscrupulous methods to get through, which I quite like.”
In Fury Road, Hardy is strung upside down as a human blood bag, his head chained inside an iron mask. He’s strapped to the front of a runaway battle car and beaten relentlessly. The down payment on pain was an intensive background check (“and references,” Hardy chuckles), thanks to his reputation as brilliant but difficult. With Hardy, “there is also an element of something Hollywood hasn’t seen in a long time — danger,” wrote Esquire in 2014.
Charlize Theron signed on to play Imperator Furiosa, every inch Hardy’s equal as they wrestle for control of a massive war rig holding Immortan Joe’s beautiful enslaved wives. Dialogue in Fury
Road is scarce, and they worked from a 300-page comic book- inspired storyboard.
Hardy “basically plays a wild animal, trapped,” Miller says. “When the two of them meet, they’re trying to kill each other in order to survive.”
The variables were overwhelming. Surrounded by miles of sand and a crew of 500 and with only a bare-bones script, “it was so loud and so unclear,” Hardy says. “We didn’t know what was going on when and where. It was just chaos for six and a half months.” Though there were reports that he and Theron struggled, Hardy describes Furiosa as one of the best action leads he has ever seen, calling his co-star “the perfect blend of exquisite beauty and rare fearlessness.”
“We both were filled with so much fear,” Theron says. “It was nothing either one of us had done before, for him more than me because he was filling these big shoes. He brought his own Max.” Hardy will next disappear as Elton John in the biopic Rock
etman and plays twin gangsters in the upcoming drama
Legend. Yet fame is knocking, and unlike Gibson’s jacket, it doesn’t quite fit. Hardy says he routinely forgets why his day job makes him familiar on the street.
When people approach, those shoulders rise. “Leo had to say to me the other day, ‘I think he probably recognizes you from a film. And that’s OK,’ ” Hardy says. “And it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah. Of course.’ I forget.”