‘Bronson’: the definitive role of Tom Hardy’s career
As one of Hollywood’s favourite chameleons, Tom Hardy is an actor who virtually guarantees quality whenever he appears on-screen, or at the very least, a performance that’s going to be memorable in one way or another.
There’s no doubt that he’s among his generation’s most gifted performers, one willing to shed every aspect of themselves in service of the character, which is exactly the reason why his turn as the titular prisoner in 2008’s Bronson will always be the defining role of his career.
Anyone who’d been following Hardy’s career up until that point may not have had an inkling he could be so transformative, but everything that served him so well in Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2008 prison movie is the very tools he continued to lean on as he forged his reputation as an elite-level talent.
An early villainous role in the sci-fi sequel Star Trek: Nemesis, bit-parts in war stories Black Hawk Down and Band of Brothers, supporting characters in crime capers Layer Cake and RocknRolla, and playing the rakish Raumont in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette were hardly going to catch the eye of major Hollywood casting agents, with almost every actor on the hunt for a star-making turn.
Drastically bulking up, shaving his head completely bald, and sporting a hefty moustache would allow anyone to look like Charles Bronson, but that’s not what the unique biographical drama required. Well, it was on a superficial level, but the movie also needed an actor who could not only make a ruthless and violent prisoner equal parts engaging and disarming, but navigate the tonal minefield that sees Winding Refn weave through countless different genres from drama and thriller to absurdism and farce.
In lesser hands, those shifts would seem jarring, forced, and self-indulgent to the point of pretension, but Hardy makes it feel effortless. His famously intensive and exacting preparations certainly helped, but Bronson is far from being a film that any method actor could headline, provided they were given enough time to get ready. It’s a very strange tightrope that he walks from the first to the last minute, and even the slightest stumble would have knocked him off it completely.
Instead, it was an announcement to the world that even though he’s a handsome chap with presence and charm to spare, Hardy was a ferociously committed and fiercely professional thespian who would willingly leave everything on the table and throw it up onto the screen in service of story, character, and artistic vision.
It’s not a coincidence that Bronson kicked open the doors that he’d previously been trying to barge down to no avail, and while there are an infinite number of handsome actors who can be plucked from independent cinema and parachuted into a mainstream Hollywood production, there aren’t many of them Hardy can’t act circles around. This was his first time being asked to prove it to a meaningful extent, and he aced the assignment.
While it remains entirely up for debate as to whether or not Bronson can be called the greatest work of his career – and it’s certainly not the best film he’s ever been a part of – it’s a lot harder to argue that it won’t be remembered as the one that defined his career. After all, there’s the perception of Hardy before he played the part and the perception of Hardy today; the two are completely unrecognisable from each other, and the latter only came to be because of the role that kickstarted his ascension.
