Tom Hardy (17 page)

It was typical Martina Cole territory and her loyal readers (of whom there are plenty) were unlikely to be disappointed by the adaptation. Martina Cole writes a book every year and has an army of fans who delight in knowing that she will deliver exactly what they want with her books: gritty gangland crime fiction. Cole published her first book,
Dangerous Lady
, in 1992 – she had, in fact, written it some years earlier but had stuffed the manuscript in a drawer and
forgotten about it. When she finally rediscovered it, she realised that what she had written was actually rather credible and so sent it to a literary agent. The agent recognised that her writing style and the subject matter were quite unlike anything else that was on the market and within days she had struck a publishing deal. Three of her books, including
Dangerous
Lady
and
The Take
have been turned into hit TV dramas.

The drama boasted a fine selection of actors for its leading roles. Kierston Wareing, who had received critical acclaim for her role in Andrea Arnold's film
Fish Tank
was perfectly cast as Jackie, and Charlotte Riley, fresh from filming
Wuthering Heights
with Tom, was to play her more even-tempered sister Maggie. Jimmy was played by Shaun Evans and the legendary Brian Cox played Ozzy. It was Tom, though, who commanded the most attention with his seething, snarling, brutish Freddie.

Freddie is a horrific man with few – if any – redeeming features. He spends most of his time eliminating anyone who stands in the way of his advancement through the ranks of the East End underworld. He drinks heavily, gets off his face on drugs, has sex with countless women who aren't his wife and sets an appalling example to his children. Worst of all, in a particularly harrowing scene, he rapes his wife's sister. Charlotte Riley, in fact, described Freddie as ‘like a rabid dog'. Could this character perhaps be the nastiest piece of work in Tom's expanding catalogue of dysfunctional, aggressive types?

Tom, as usual, wanted to find the heart of his character, to work out where he might be able to add layers of complexity to him in order to make him three-dimensional. ‘Everyone has
a point of view,' he explained to i
ndieLondon
website. ‘So when approaching these characters – if they're soldier, terrorist, cop or criminal – you're going to find human traits in every walk of life, in every hole, under every rock. There's going to be a tale of hope or competition or love or rivalry – a human story.'

The actor was used to channelling aggression through the characters he plays and Freddie was no exception. There were scenes that required him to behave brutally and, as someone who brings maximum intensity to his work, Tom gave it his all. His co-star Kierston Wareing told of a scene they had to film where the couple are in the midst of an explosive argument. So completely immersed in the moment and fired up was Tom that Wareing said she at one point thought he might hit her. ‘He slammed the door and the glass panel fell out, so the children were actually really scared and instead of stopping we both just carried on and got on with it, and I actually thought he might hit me. But I was quite prepared…' She was obviously aware that Tom would not have deliberately hit her, but she could see that his character had taken over and wanted to go with what was happening for the sake of making the action authentic.

Charlotte Riley, who had to film the rape scene with Tom, spoke of the trust between the two of them that helped to make the filming of the scene as painless as possible. The fact that they had worked together so closely on
Wuthering
Heights
meant that they had an existing understanding of how the other worked and this made a complex and difficult part of the drama that bit easier for them to deal with. ‘Because we'd worked on
Wuthering Heights
– when the love
scene was really passionate – we had a good shorthand between us and knew what we were doing. But as well as we knew each other, it had to be handled with delicacy and trust,' she told the
Daily Mail
.

The series was a four-parter and had a strong narrative arc across the episodes. Reviewers were quick to praise Kierston Wareing's impressive performance, but they all seemed to be of the opinion that, out of everyone, it was Tom who shone. In what could have been an average television crime serial, his charismatic portrayal of Freddie had made
The Take
worth tuning in for. Matt Baylis of the
Express
called Tom's Freddie ‘certainly the most arresting villain to grace our screens since Tony Soprano'. Kathryn Flett, meanwhile, found the character terrifying and said that he ‘oozed psychoses'.

Tom was generously quick to give credit to others who had contributed to the success of the drama. ‘If everything is all lined up – good writing, good directing, good DOP, all of that – then there's a profound story to tell and an opportunity for performers to come up with something good. And I do think
The Take
is that.'

Freddie Jackson was just one in a long line of threatening, intense characters to have been played by Tom, and he was now seen as the actor of choice when it came to such dark roles. Tom has always displayed a sense of humour about the fact that he is so often cast for these kinds of parts, and towards the end of 2009 fans were treated to a glimpse of a slightly different side to him when he appeared in the
first-ever
celebrity led advertisement for Kleenex tissues.

Kimberly-Clark, the company that manufactures the tissues, were aiming to create a TV campaign which would
build on their 2007 ‘Let it Out' adverts. These had featured members of the public sitting on sofas and giving vent to their emotions. The idea driving the new campaign was to show certain celebrities revealing emotions not usually associated with their public personas. Bob Geldof is shown to be crying with laughter in an important meeting; Emma Bunton dances around the room like a rock chick and Sven Goran Eriksson is seen alone in a room playing keepy-uppy with a
scrunched-up
tissue. He heads it into the wastepaper bin and then runs around performing a goal celebration with his jumper over his head. For Tom's part, they wanted to show the softie behind the hard man and he is shown sitting on the sofa cuddled up to his dog, crying his eyes out as he watches something sad on television – and of course wiping away his tears with a particular brand of paper tissue. The advert was the brainchild of JWT Advertising and was filmed by none other than photographer and film-maker Rankin. It was an inspired and funny idea and can still be seen on YouTube if any Hardy fans missed it and want to see the gentler side of their hero.

The contrast between the two movies in which Tom appeared during 2009 and 2010 could not have been more marked. In February 2009, a film originally called
The Code
and subsequently renamed
Thick as
Thieves
was released straight to DVD. The fact that it didn't warrant a theatrical release probably tells you all you need to know about it. To all intents and purposes, it looked to be quite an appealing prospect. It stars Morgan Freeman and Antonio Banderas and is the story of a master thief who undertakes the ‘heist of a lifetime' to break into a seemingly impregnable vault and
steal the last two original Fabergé eggs. Tom's role was as a cop called Daniels, who only appears in a few scenes of the film (with an American accent nowhere near as good as he had put on for many other roles). While those that made it declared it was a heist movie that transcended its genre, the end result seemed to be a tedious muddle of a film that didn't seem to really know what it was trying to be and failed to inspire emotion towards any of its central characters. In its review of the DVD,
The Independent
took a pretty dim view, stating, ‘The dialogue is stilted, the plot is as thin as Banderas's hair, and even the plethora of twists can't rescue the movie from mediocrity.'

Heist movie
Thick as Thieves
may have been, but it couldn't have differed more from
Inception
– a high-concept, futuristic and accomplished movie from director/writer Christopher Nolan about a ‘reverse heist' – with a big difference. The film tells the story of Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo Di Caprio), who is an expert in a special kind of industrial espionage: he is able to infiltrate people's dreams to extract information from their subconscious. He makes a living by doing this for rich business clients who are desperate for information on their rivals. He carries out his missions with his colleague Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). A wealthy Japanese businessman hires Cobb for a special assignment that is different from the ones he has carried out before: this job involves ‘inception': entering the subconscious to plant an idea (as opposed to extracting it) in the mind of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), heir to a large business empire. To carry out this reverse heist Cobb assembles a skilled team to assist him: Ellen Page (of
Juno
fame) plays the aptly named
Ariadne, a gifted architecture student who will construct the landscape of Fischer's subconscious and guide the others around it; Tom Hardy plays Eames, a devious master forger with the ability to assume the appearance and personalities of those around him. The group undertake the daring mission to invade three layers of Fischer's subconscious and the result is a thrilling, imaginative venture into a state of unreality where the possibilities are endless – and high risk.

Nolan is an accomplished and gifted director who had ventured into the territory of the subconscious mind in his 2000 film,
Memento
. This cleverly constructed piece of cinema tells the story of a man who has lost his memory – but tells it in reverse, and through the lead character's eyes so, as he pieces together the fragments of his life, so does the audience; we are as confused and as desperate for clues as he is. Nolan had also been highly praised for breathing dark new life into the revitalised
Batman
films,
Batman Begins
and
The Dark Knight
.

A highly ambitious and big-budget venture,
Inception
was an idea he had been developing for many years and which he wrote as well as directed. ‘This is a concept that has been locked in Chris's mind for eight years now so, for me, a lot of the preparation came from being able to sit down with him and understand that he had this extremely ambitious concept of doing a highly entertaining Hollywood film that is existential and cerebral and surreal,' explained the film's star, Leonardo DiCaprio.

In fact, it was necessary for the whole cast to sit down and talk face to face with Nolan about his vision for the film. So complex was the movie that it wasn't enough to go by what
was written on the pages of their scripts – the director had to share with them what he was trying to achieve in each part of the film. Luckily, Nolan is so respected as a director that the actors who work with him trust his judgement implicitly. The whole project was his brainchild, so there was no room for individual actors to take over – they had to work as a team for the film to succeed and ‘there was no ego on the set amongst all these very famous and brilliant actors. Because everyone just defaults to Chris. We're all very grateful to be here,' said Tom when speaking to
Cinematical
.

When talking about what inspired him to create the concept for the film, Nolan referred to his own ability to dream lucidly in the cryptic state that exists between sleep and wakefulness – and the infinite possibilities that being in that state presented. He was fascinated by the concept of being able to control the state through a shared virtual reality. ‘You can look around and examine the details and pick up a handful of sand on the beach. I never particularly found a limit to that; that is to say, that while in that state your brain can fill in all that reality,' the director told
The Times
.

Tom has made no secret of his huge admiration for Chris Nolan, and he is not alone in being an actor who loves to work with him. And once you are on board the Nolan ship, it's usually a lasting relationship. Familiar faces reappear in his films as he likes to work with people he knows and trusts. Michael Caine, who had appeared in
Batman Begins
and
The Dark Knight
turns up in
Inception
as Cobb's father. Similarly, Cillian Murphy, who is Fischer in this film played the Scarecrow in
Batman Begins
. When
The Dark Knight Rises
was announced, it was not unexpected for some of the names
associated with it to be Nolan old hands – Tom Hardy and Ellen Page to name two. Tom and Nolan had not worked together before
Inception
, but Nolan had apparently enjoyed Tom's performance in
RocknRolla
and seen in him an actor with whom would like to work.

Eames was a part with which Tom could have a bit of fun and he certainly seemed to relish the chance to do so. He gave a lot of thought to how he wanted to craft this quirky character. To assist him, Nolan apparently gave him a book to read about the fake Vermeer paintings by forger Hans van Meegeren. Hardy also felt that the bond between him and Nolan as fellow Brits from similar kinds of neighbourhoods helped them to share common ideas for the development of Eames. Tom explained exactly what he thought Eames should be like: ‘There's something very old school, MI5 about this guy as well. He's got the Graham Greene,
Our Man in Havana
type – old and faded, a slightly shabby down-and-out diplomat. A bit unscrupulous and off-the-radar.' He also maintained that Chris Nolan himself had been something of an influence on his character: ‘I think Eames is Chris,' he stated, and admitted that he'd often adopted Chris's vocal mannerisms when delivering his lines.

It was new – and a little daunting – for Tom to suddenly be sharing a set with the cream of Hollywood. He'd done his fair share of work with the best British actors but these were his first tentative steps into the big-time. He was a fan of the work of those he was starring alongside such as Tom Berenger (a childhood acting hero of Tom), Ellen Page and Leonardo DiCaprio, and the overwhelming desire to be a functional part of that great team, not to let the side down,
helped motivate him to perform to the best of his ability. ‘In my world these are very, very prolific people to do a good job with. I was concerned about letting the team down,' he told
Cinematical
.