“He’s going to be a star”: Tom Hardy only needed 30 seconds to have his future told
Those of you old enough to remember the late 1990s will know all about The Big Breakfast, the pre-work, pre-school slice of chaos fronted by a variety of presenters that featured all kinds of celebrity guests, one of whom quite memorably was Tom Hardy, long before he found any real fame.
It was 1998, and he was appearing on the show as a wannabe model, nervously perched on the end of a bed, clad in the de rigueur vest and cargo trousers of the day with an additional Beckham hairband, sitting quite uncomfortably, sandwiched by two women, one of whom was the flirtatious, to put it mildly, Denise Van Outen, who stopped just short of climbing on top of him throughout the segment.
What is very interesting about the clip is that, watching it back almost 30 years later, you can see genuine star quality in Hardy, then an acting student, almost as soon as he opens his mouth. He delivers an anecdote about an incident on holiday in such a way that everyone in the room immediately sits up and takes notice, and then proceeds to spend the rest of the clip staring down the camera as if to convey the sentiment: ‘keep a close eye on me, big things are coming’.
Of course, that’s exactly what happened, although to say it occurred overnight would be doing him a disservice. He won that aforementioned TV modelling contest and enrolled in drama school, but almost immediately began his career onscreen after landing a small part in the legendary HBO WW2 drama Band of Brothers alongside Damian Lewis around 18 months later.
In 2001, he was cast in Ridley Scott’s fantastic drama Black Hawk Down, and that sparked a few years in which Hardy took on several small roles in films like Daniel Craig’s Layer Cake, aside from working in theatre, where he made a big impression, winning an Evening Standard award and being nominated for a Lawrence Olivier award on the West End.
Further confirmation of his abilities, if any were needed, came via British director Ed Blum, who brought Hardy in for an audition on a 2006 romantic comedy film called Scenes of a Sexual Nature.
He told the NME, “Tom was only one of two who had to audition at that point… I was looking to crack on, I think it was only about a week, ten days before we were filming, and [casting director] Emma Style said, ‘Ed, you’ve got to wait, you’ve got to wait to see this young actor. He’s going to be a star, and he’s brilliant.’”
Blum decided to take the bait, and what he saw moved him, as he added, “He was just absolutely phenomenal in the audition. He made really brave decisions, really intelligent decisions, and it was a no-brainer, we basically…I actually just called it a day, I found the person who wanted to play that part.”
Although Blum’s movie, which costarred Ewan McGregor received mixed reviews, Hardy was by that point well on his way to becoming a major presence, a journey that would see him in a first leading role in 2008’s prison drama Bronson, then in Christopher Nolan movies like Inception and memorably as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, through to an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ in 2015’s The Revenant opposite Leonardo DiCaprio. And to think it all started on that Big Breakfast bed.
