By Cindy Davis | Celebrity | April 2, 2015 |
By Cindy Davis | Celebrity | April 2, 2015 |
Impossibly gorgeous, funny and witty, and he borrows dogs just to hang out with? Like we needed another reason to fall in love with Tom Hardy…hang on; he also likes to paint pottery, and he donned a mini dress and lipstick to watch this year’s Oscars with his friends. Okay, I’m DONE.
Speaking with Esquire about shooting Mad Max: Fury Road, Tom revealed more than a few interesting tidbits, including how the long weather-related delay starting George Miller’s fourth in the series affected the Batman. As you might have expected, Hardy seems like he has more than a little in common with Max Rockatansky.
Instead of a devil on his shoulder, Hardy has Harvey, an…orangutan in underpants?
“If you tell him you don’t want him on the treadmill because he’s breaking it, he’ll get upset. There goes the treadmill. You know what I mean? And he’ll get angry and give you a little slap - not a big one, but he’ll knock you out, because he’s massive. You’ll wake up cradled in his arms, and he’s howling that he’s hurt you, because if you die, so does he. He’ll bring you back round and apologise, bring you twigs and all kinds of shit. He’ll make up for it. But he’s still an orangutan. One has to have respect. Hee hee!”
Hardy acknowledges his reputation for being difficult; but, he’s not unreasonable:
“…I am actually. But I’m not unreasonable. It used to be that if somebody hurt me I’d lash out a bit, in order to get them to stop. It ultimately comes from fear. If I cause enough of a mess, then people will never ask me again to do something I don’t want to do. But that sort of backfires after a while so you don’t want to do that. You grow up.”
But, Hardy maintains he did nothing to provoke the Shia LaBeouf attack that happened while they were filming Lawless.
“He just attacked me… He was drinking moonshine. I was wearing a cardigan, and er, I went down… I was like, ‘What was that?’ It was lightning fast. And [my friend] said, ‘That was Shia.’”
Bad weather led to HardyBane.
Because of heavy rains that turned New South Wales’ Broken Hill into a “meadow,” Fury Road production was held up more than a year, freeing up Hardy to play Bale in The Dark Knight Rises.
When filming of Miller’s dream of a CGI-less two-hour car chase across the desert actually began, Hardy said the isolated shoot was a logistical nightmare.
“We’d lose half a vehicle in sand and have to dig it out. It was just this unit in the middle of x-million square-kilometres of desert, and then this group of lunatics in leathers, like a really weird S&M party, or a Hell’s Angels convention. It was like Cirque du Soleil meets fucking Slipknot.”
Though he wants to be home more — he’s got two kids — Hardy already has a multi-film Mad Max deal. Providing the “figures” work out after Fury Road’s release, Hardy will play Max in three more films.
Currently filming Alejandro Iñrritu’s (Birdman) The Revenant with Leonardo DiCaprio, Domhnall Gleeson and Will Poulter, Hardy spoke about how he was drawn away from Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell.
“Leo called me up and said, ‘Dude, you have to check this out, I think it’s a brilliant piece and Alejandro’s a genius - will you read it?’ I was supposed to be doing Splinter Cell, so I was like, ‘I’m going to jump out of helicopters, mate. I want to go and play soldiers!’ and he said, ‘Just read it, you idiot!’ I was like ‘Mmm, all right’.”
After The Revenant (and presumably in between filming Peaky Blinders), Hardy begins Taboo with his father and Ridley Scott.
If you’re a Hardy fan (who isn’t?), the full interview is damned delicious.