The movie Tom Hardy was “really bummed out” to miss out on
It took a while for Tom Hardy to make his mark on Hollywood, but given the string of stellar performances he’s delivered across film and television over the last decade, it’s fascinating to remember the most famous co-star he’d ever worked with at the time didn’t think he had a future.
After making his big screen debut with a background role in Black Hawk Down, Hardy must have thought he was off to the races when he was cast as the villain in Star Trek: Nemesis. That didn’t turn out to be the case, with Patrick Stewart sharing his thoughts on the unknown actor’s prospects by saying, “There goes someone I think we shall never hear of again” after his final day on set.
To be fair, Stewart was proven right for a while, with 2008’s Bronson marking his true arrival as a force to be reckoned with. From there, further outings in the likes of Inception, Warrior, The Dark Knight Rises, Locke, Mad Max: Fury Road, and The Revenant helped turn him into a superstar.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s brutal survival epic landed him his first Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, but one of the downsides is that it forced him to drop out of a project he really wanted to be a part of. Initially, Hardy was cast as Rick Flagg in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, but scheduling conflicts forced him to drop out and be replaced by Joel Kinnaman.
Referring to his predicament as being “ass-slammed technically out of Suicide Squad“, Hardy explained that “Alejandro has overshot by three months in Calgary, so we’ve got to go back out to Patagonia or Alaska to continue shooting The Revenant“, with the film turning into “a much bigger beast than we thought”.
Hardy would inform Collider that he was “really bummed out” by missing out on the DC Comics adaptation, reiterating how “I wanted to work on that”. He didn’t, of course, but it may have been a blessing in disguise, looking at how his association with the superhero genre would eventually play out.
Ayer’s Suicide Squad was a massive hit at the box office, but its director wasn’t shy in revealing how studio interference had ripped the project from his hands, with the theatrical release nothing like what he originally had in mind. Meanwhile, Hardy would end up headlining Venom, which earned more money from cinemas than the comic book flick he nearly starred in, and it would spawn a much more successful sequel to boot.
James Gunn took over for The Suicide Squad and could only watch it flop in the throes of the pandemic, whereas Hardy’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage comfortably cleared half a billion in ticket sales despite releasing just three months later, and he also has the trilogy-closing chapter set to arrive November 8th, 2024.
