Tom Hardy’s bizarre interest in a Ricky Gervais vs Danny Dyer cage fight: “I don’t want to say fuck ’em, but fuck ’em”
Plenty of actors have played tough guys onscreen despite being unable to wrestle their way out of a wet paper bag when the cameras aren’t rolling, but Tom Hardy isn’t one of them. Even if he was, he still has the look of somebody who’d be able to kick your head in without breaking into a sweat.
After he’d packed on the muscle to play an MMA fighter in Gavin O’Connor’s searing drama Warrior, Hardy developed a keen interest in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It wasn’t until several years later that he began taking his training seriously, which gained headlines when he showed up completely out of the blue to win a tournament.
Not only did he appear under his real name, Edward Hardy, to compete in the UMAC Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Championships in September 2022, but he ploughed through the competition to claim victory in all three of his fights and take home the trophy. He’s not somebody you’d want to get in a fight with, then, but the same can’t be said about the bizarre fantasy match-up he tried to will into existence.
They might be British institutions in their own unique way, but it would be fair to say Ricky Gervais and Danny Dyer don’t exactly travel in the same circles. The former has used his deadpan persona to become an international comedy star, whereas the latter has maintained his geezer schtick since the very beginning and has never been interested – or invited – to make a movie or TV show outside of the UK.
Dyer likes to think of himself as something of a hard case, but whether that would stand up to scrutiny remains entirely up for debate. Would he be able to kick the shit out of Gervais? Probably, even if he once won a boxing match against Grant Bovey of all people in 2002 to raise money for charity.
In an interview with The Guardian, Hardy suggested having the creator of The Office and the frontman of Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men go one-on-one in a cage. “I would pay good money to see those guys carve each other up,” he admitted. “If they didn’t, I’d be trying to instigate it: ‘Go on, fellas, let’s turn the lights off, feel our way around this ring.”
It wasn’t the most obvious combination, but perhaps due to the business acumen he’d acquired in Hollywood, Hardy suggested that it had the potential to be a goldmine. “You aren’t telling me you wouldn’t watch that. That’s a good pay-per-view fight,” he explained. “That would get a lot of people interested in MMA. Actually, it’s not MMA; MMA has rules. We shouldn’t have rules.”
Why exactly did Hardy want to witness Gervais and Dyer beating the ever-loving shit out of each other in an unsanctioned brawl? Not to put too fine a point on it, but shits and giggles, basically: “I don’t want to say fuck ’em, but fuck ’em. I don’t care.” Fair enough, but as of yet, his dream remains unrealised.
