How hip-hop inspired Tom Hardy’s obsession with accents
Tom Hardy is a pretty multifaceted kind of guy.
We know he’s one of Britain’s acting greats, having built up an arsenal of superb film performances in both film and TV over the last 20 years or so, able to bounce off the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio or Cillian Murphy while working under directors including Christopher Nolan. Offscreen, we know he’s a lovely bloke who likes dogs a lot and is a competitive mixed martial artist.
But he also likes hip-hop; really likes it, and always has done in fact. As long ago as 1999, he formed his own rap duo Tommy No 1 + Eddie Too Tall with a friend in order to record some demos and mixtapes, and he’s spoken of the fact that he originally started out rapping as young as 14. Although, due to his upbringing, it was a struggle, as he explained, “Because I come from a nice middle-class neighbourhood, it was a very hard sell. And I wasn’t very good!”
Once Hardy was cast as the lead and the monster in the Marvel franchise Venom, he was able to get his hip-hop influences as involved as possible in helping to create the characters and feel of the movie, along with the accent of the creature.
Famously, Eminem recorded a theme tune of the same name for the movie, which featured on his 2018 album Kamikaze. The song went multi-platinum, selling more than five million units worldwide and became one of the Detroit rapper’s most successful singles of the past ten years.
On the depth of thought that went into the voice of the monster in Venom, Hardy revealed to hip-hop podcast Crate 808: “One of the big inclusions that Kelly [Marcel, writer and director] and I put into the melting part of our sort of greater process is throwbacks to when we were kids, what did we enjoy? Rap music. It was hugely influential for me as an artist.”
Hardy took great inspiration from several leading members of legendary New York collective Wu-Tang Clan when working on Venom’s cadence, adding, “If you look at some of the great MCs, they’re larger than life, there’s something about them that’s larger and bigger and epic in the soundscape that they have.”
He threw light on why it had to be a particular set of rappers, noting, “It was logical that Venom had to fall into the canon of Buster Rhymes, Method Man, Red Man, James Brown. Big, opulent, almost comedic, comic voices that have a serious tone when they want to—they can be very serious, but they play.”
The second movie in the series came in 2021. Venom: Let There Be Carnage also had a deep involvement from hip-hop music, with more input from Eminem and a soundtrack featuring rap group Czarface and a song called ‘Today’s Special’ featuring Facepuller and Frankie Pulitzer, the rumoured rap persona of Tom Hardy himself.
The actor is well known for uploading Dubsmash videos where he raps along dramatically to tracks from the likes of Kano, Dizzee Rascal and 50 Cent, usually securing the approval of the artists themselves.
His last outing as Venom came with last year’s Venom: The Last Dance which definitely left the door open for plenty more monster-morphing shenanigans, but lately Hardy has been seen in Guy Ritchie’s violent gangland series MobLand and he’ll be a major part of the next Mad Max movie from George Miller titled Wasteland.
Serving as a prequel to 2015’s Fury Road, it will feature Anya Taylor-Joy once again as Furiosa and bring Hardy back to the dusty post-apocalyptic universe after ten years away.
