“Gorilla” or gentle giant? Exploring Tom Hardy’s reputation among his co-stars
Any actor who dedicates themselves entirely to getting into character and gives everything of themselves to a performance carries the potential for potentially rubbing their co-stars the wrong way, and Tom Hardy is no different.
It’s undisputable that he’s one of the most gifted performers around. He cultivated a reputation for adopting the method technique to such an extent that he’s never used the same accent or possessed the same physique for two films in a row, but that extreme approach can occasionally be a double-edged sword.
Even at the beginning of his career, Star Trek: Nemesis co-star Patrick Stewart revealed that Hardy “wouldn’t engage with any of us on a social level,” to the point he found it “challenging to establish any rapport with him”. He was relatively wet behind the ears at the time, and the movie was shite, so that makes his perceived aloofness somewhat forgivable.
One colleague who was ready to snap was Charlize Theron, though, with the fractious production of Mad Max: Fury Road driving a wedge between the film’s two top-billed stars. The Academy Award winner admitted she regularly “felt threatened” by Hardy, with things getting so heated she said to his face that the producers should “fine the fucking cunt a hundred thousand dollars for every minute that he’s held up this crew” after he arrived on set three hours late one day.
No stranger to antagonising his scene partners, Shia LaBeouf called him “a bit of a gorilla on set” before explaining that his perception was of Hardy wanting to establish dominance. “It’s his set, you know it when you get there,” he offered. “It doesn’t feel like a shared space, it feels like his space. And he’s a very good actor and also super-loving, but on a set, you’re in his church.”
The Bikeriders colleague Austin Butler had always “pictured him to be this grizzly bear” in another animal analogy, before outlining the duality of Hardy to Interview. “He’d be joking around until action is called, and then go into being the most intense guy I’d ever seen.” From those accounts, intensity tends to be the operative word, but that doesn’t always seem to be the case.
Leonardo DiCaprio personally thanked Hardy when he finally won his Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ in The Revenant, Cillian Murphy – his co-star in Peaky Blinders, Inception, and The Dark Knight Rises – celebrated him as “one of the best actors in the business”, Joseph Gordon-Levitt called him both “a badass” and “one of the greatest actors alive”, Michael Caine labelled him a “wonderful actor and a lovely guy”, and Michelle Williams compared him to a “puppy dog”.
Only those in Hardy’s foremost inner circle know the truth, but what’s readily apparent is that even the people who have spoken of their disagreements and tension with the Oscar nominee wouldn’t consider downplaying his talent. Really, it all depends on the circumstances, with the star evidently adept at being easy-going and distant in equal measure based on what he’s working on and who he’s working on it with.
