The director Tom Hardy found hard to work with: “He didn’t like me, I didn’t like him”
There have been a number of strained collaborative relationships over the years that have somehow still led to exceptional works of art, from the feud between Faye Dunaway and Roman Polanski, David O Russell and George Clooney and Jake Gyllenhaal and David Fincher. While there are many actors whose time on set was disturbed by more than just creative differences, being subject to abuse and harassment, there are some who simply didn’t see eye to eye with the person helming the project, citing differing perspectives and a lack of common ground. However, while Tom Hardy is no stranger to on-set conflict, he described one relationship that was particularly burdensome.
Nicolas Winding Refn is an incredibly stylistic and modern director known for blurring the line between genres as he contrasts brutal violence with tender romance, creating a clash between worlds that leaves the audience in a dream state of limbo. This is perhaps most prevalent in his 2011 film Drive, which follows a Hollywood stuntman who is employed as a getaway driver and hurled into a world of violence and danger, desperately trying to protect the woman he loves. It is a stunningly beautiful and haunting film, with a devastating tenderness at its heart that opposes the mindless violence.
Because of this, Refn seemed like the perfect person to realise the true story of Charles Bronson, capturing the discord between a tough facade and gentle interiority that comes to define a person. However, while a director like Refn would have a pick of the bunch when selecting his actors, he wound up working with someone who he struggled to get along with, leading to an interesting production.
Bronson, directed in 2008, follows the life of a young man who was sentenced to seven years in prison after robbing a post office and later spent 30 years in solitary confinement, leading him to develop an alter ego called Charles Bronson. Tom Hardy first met with the director about the script during the very early stages of pre-production after the film had gone through the hands of many different directors.
When describing his involvement in the movie, Hardy said, “Then it went to Nicolas Winding Refn, and he didn’t like me, I didn’t like him, and he offered the film to someone else. Then, a year later, he came back to me, and I started writing to Charlie. Charlie got very angry because he thought I didn’t want to play him, and that wasn’t the case at all, and he demanded to see me, and I ended up calling his sister and got in touch with the family, and then I started visiting him for two years and then the story slowly got financing”.
The film went on a long journey over the course of many years before it was ready to be brought to the screen. After anticipating the movie for so long, you’d think this might give Hardy and Refn a chance to put their differences aside for the sake of a smooth production, but Hardy revealed that this wasn’t the case: “Yeah, we just didn’t see eye to eye as human beings. We just rubbed each other the wrong way and continued to rub each other the wrong way”.
Some people are just not compatible, and while this is unavoidable, perhaps it is hardest to deal with when working on a multi-million dollar film and the stakes are so high. Despite the strain in their working relationship, the pair achieved a captivating portrayal of a complex character that is cited as one of Hardy’s best performances.
