A brief history of Tom Hardy’s alleged behind-the-scenes bad behaviour: “Scared shitless”
At the moment, it’s getting almost impossible to work out whether Tom Hardy is actually a good guy or not.
The public-facing version of Hardy seems great, all CBBC bedtime stories and being nice to autograph hunters and ‘Aw, look, he likes dogs like us’ press junkets, but more and more, there are stories emerging of him not exactly being a paragon of virtue on the sets of the movies he makes. So which is it? Good guy or bad? Let’s examine the evidence.
Hardy’s most recent toys out of the pram moment has probably proved to be the most expensive to fix. Despite basically being the lead man of Guy Ritchie’s TV hit MobLand, he’s been given the boot from season three, thanks to falling out quite spectacularly with the show’s producers, reportedly demanding creative control, asking to change the scripts and dialogue and getting annoyed that some of the other name actors were starting to get as much screen time as he was, to the point that some working on the show were ready to walk.
But his co-star Helen Mirren was one of the few people who broke ranks to defend him after the allegations broke, making an Instagram post featuring a photo of him captioned, ‘Love you now and always’. Behind the scenes, however, the crew were talking about the actor apparently refusing to leave his trailer for hours at a time, which is never going to go down well. And for several years now, rumours about how Hardy operates when the cameras are off have made for somewhat uncomfortable reading.
There were the stories of Hardy wrestling with Shia LaBeouf on 2012’s seemingly well-titled Lawless, with the American telling Hot Ones that the pair of them would throw each other around constantly, especially on one occasion when LaBeouf had company. He explained, “The girl I was with at the time was terrified. She covered up, and she ran into the kitchen, and he picked me up, and I didn’t have nothing on, so now I’m naked on his shoulder. We’re in the hallway, we’re wrestling around… We wound up inching over to the stairs, and he fell down the stairs.”
Then there was 2015’s apocalyptic action movie Mad Max: Fury Road, which saw Hardy working with Charlize Theron. A book published in 2022 about the making of the movie, titled Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, painted a picture of barely restrained chaos, with the two leads at each other’s throats. Theron was said to be “scared shitless” of Hardy, and as a new mother, was constantly frustrated by his turning up hours late to shoot.
It came to a head, according to the book, when Theron said to Hardy, “How disrespectful are you?” calling him a ‘c**t’ to producers, causing him to aggressively run up to her and demand, “What did you say to me?”, which in turn led her to request a female producer be with her on set.
And as far back as 2002, just a year after Hardy had made his big screen debut in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, he was cast in Star Trek: Nemesis alongside British acting legend Patrick Stewart. The young man’s behaviour on set puzzled the older man profusely, as he later wrote in his memoir, recalling, “Tom wouldn’t engage with any of us on a social level. Never said, ‘Good morning’, never said, ‘Goodnight’, and spent the hours he wasn’t needed on set in his trailer with his girlfriend.”
He further added, “On the evening Tom wrapped his role, he characteristically left without ceremony or niceties, simply walking out of the door”. Appalled, Stewart firmly believed that Hardy was a flash in the pan, someone he told cast and crew wouldn’t be heard of again. He did, however, later say that he was pleased to be proved wrong on that prediction.
