Other actors on set had been delighted to work with Tom. Young William Miller commented: ‘The crew is nice, the actors are nice, especially Tom Hardy, he’s really cool.’ And Rob Brydon had nothing but praise for him, saying: ‘Tom is an extraordinary talent and an impressive individual.’
‘I’m an actor, for f***k’s sake. I’m an artist. I’ve played with anything and anyone.’
Tom Hardy is known for his honesty when being interviewed. He is forthcoming, entertaining and rapid-fire. Just occasionally, though, his unchecked truthfulness can create an undesired media storm. The above quote, for example, was Tom’s response to a question asked of him during an interview with Attitude magazine in 2008. The question was ‘Have you ever had sexual relations with men?’ and had been asked because Tom’s latest character, Handsome Bob in Guy Ritchie’s film RocknRolla had come out as gay during the course of the film.
The press, of course, went into overdrive and the quote was re-quoted, written about and pulled apart for days afterwards. Subsequently – and probably growing increasingly tired of having the statement thrown back at him – Tom explained that he was referring to the work he had done as an actor, not about his personal life. In 2011, he clarified matters further in an interview with Marie Claire magazine, still annoyed that his words had been misconstrued: ‘I have never put my penis in a man,’ he declared starkly. ‘If that’s what you like, cool. But it doesn’t do it for me.’ Sorted.
Guy Ritchie had made a name for himself as a director with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels in 1998. It was a stylised, punchy criminal caper and was credited as being the film that revived the gangster genre for the modern era. He followed it up in 2000 with Snatch, which was in a similar vein and also well received. Unfortunately for Ritchie, he then turned out two commercial flops in the form of the much-ridiculed Swept Away (made with his then-wife Madonna) and Revolver, which was given a hearty thumbs down by reviewers who criticised it for having an overly complicated, pretentious plot. RocknRolla was being touted as Ritchie’s return to form as he revisited the familiar territory of a pacy gangland tale – albeit a more cuddly one than conventional underworld films. ‘I just like the underworld because it is an efficient polarisation of humans. My protagonists flirt with the law and have probably done a few naughty things but are actually good guys,’ he stated when asked about the nature of the films he made.
The plot was, unsurprisingly, formulaic. It seemed that Ritchie’s earlier triumphs were a blend of certain ingredients which had equalled success and he was sticking to his recipe. The film weaves itself around a story involving a property scam and a bunch of shady characters including a rather obviously named Russian billionaire Omovich (who just happens to have a stake in a London football club – wink, wink); gangland boss Lenny, played by Tom Wilkinson; underworld minnow One Two (Gerard Butler) and his two sidekicks Mumbles (Idris Elba) and the aptly-named Handsome Bob (Tom Hardy). Also roaming around in the action are junkie pop star Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell), a crooked accountant played by Thandie Newton and Mark Strong as Lenny’s right-hand man. As usual, there’s a spider’s web of relationships between the characters, each of them owing money to another higher up the food chain or being in possession of valuables that belong to someone else.
Handsome Bob is the getaway driver for the rag-tag gang of hoodlums headed up by One Two – ironic considering at this point Tom had not yet learned to drive! Bob also turns out to be the lynchpin of the surprising sub-plot. In this testosterone-fuelled, macho film, Ritchie throws the audience a curveball by having Handsome Bob reveal that he is gay. This narrative strand marked out RocknRolla as being different from his other films and perhaps, as it came out 10 years after Lock Stock, the storyline was a gesture at giving the film a more up-to-date feel.
The pivotal scene for Tom’s character comes the night before he is about to be sent to prison. One Two has organised what he thinks will be a send-off to remember for his friend, involving strippers and excess. Handsome Bob, though, is not cheered by the prospect and, while in the car with One Two, admits to him that he is gay and that it is One Two who is the object of his desire. There follows a scene that brings a smile to the face in which Bob and One Two dance, awkwardly, in a clinch in a salsa club. This touching moment was, according to Tom, his favourite part of filming.
Handsome Bob was based on a real-life gangster who had apparently come out to one of the writers of the film. ‘But the real guy sounded a lot tougher than Handsome Bob,’ admitted Tom to Out magazine. He went on to make it clear that he was pleased that his character had been taken in this direction by Ritchie, that it felt good to shake up perceptions in a film that would generally be considered fodder for alpha males: ‘Playing a gay man in a Guy Ritchie movie is a finger up to that whole attitude of men talking about men doing men’s thing, which is so f*****g narrow-minded. Handsome Bob is what a man should be – except for the part of him taking a crowbar to the back of someone’s head.’
When recalling the making of RocknRolla, Tom confessed that there had been a great atmosphere on set and a lot of ‘schoolboy humour’. Although the cast was almost entirely male, the presence of females on set prevented things from becoming too laddish. He got a shock, though, when a very notable female appeared on set one day. Just as Tom was sitting in Bob’s Land Rover, preparing for his big confessional scene with Gerard Butler, who should appear in the back of the car but Madonna herself! So in awe was Tom that he admits he can’t recall the conversation they shared.
One thing he can remember, though, is what happened next. Gerard Butler had apparently been feeling under the weather that day and Madonna insisted that he have a Vitamin B12 jab. But not in the arm… ‘Then she gave Gerard Butler a shot of Vitamin B in the arse in the back of the f*****g Range Rover! Gerard Butler’s flabby arse came through the window and she shot it with a jab of B12. Right in his arse! As attractive as he is, his arse just has no appeal to me. It’s a distraction when I’m trying to learn my lines!’ he told Attitude magazine in 2008.
A lot of filming took place in London, which has a strong presence in the film. Shooting was also a swift affair, according to the stars: Ritchie was efficient with structuring his work, always knowing what he was setting out to achieve. Unlike a director such as Ridley Scott who shoots as he wants to edit, Ritchie would tinker with the look, feel and structure of his story at editing stage. ‘There’s the film that we all read on the script and then the film that’s in Guy’s head and sometimes you’re not going to know what that is… until I saw [sic] the final edit,’ remarked Tom.
Unfortunately, the film contained several out-of-date references which jarred and gave the impression that it was too much of a hark back to the Ritchie films of the nineties. In RocknRolla, Tony Blair is still the Prime Minister and we are told in the opening sequence that London property prices are on the rise (which was far from the truth towards the end of 2008). Some enjoyed the film not for its plot but for its atmosphere and sense of fun, but most were unimpressed. Christopher Tookey writing for the Daily Mail thought it was an ‘embarrassing piece of self-parody’.
Tom, though, had wanted to work with Guy Ritchie for a long time and was delighted to have been able to do so. ‘He’s my boy,’ he once said of the director. At the end of the movie, there had been an indication that sequels were in the offing, but it’s not particularly astonishing that none has been forthcoming. Besides, Ritchie has since had his renaissance with the Sherlock Holmes films starring Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law. When Tom was asked in an interview what would become of his character if a sequel were to be made, he replied cheerily that he would get to wear ‘sparkly boots and better clothes’.
Ritchie could perhaps have taken a lesson about pared-down, less ostentatious film-making from a young man called Charlie Belleville. At just 23 years old, Belleville directed his first full-length movie. It was shot in 11 days on a budget of just £5,000 – shame on you, Hollywood blockbusters. The Inheritance was written by Edi
nburgh-born producer Tim Barrow and told the story of two estranged brothers who travel from Edinburgh to the Isle of Skye to claim the legacy left to them by their father. By day, Belleville worked in PR but had fitted in the directing project around his nine-to-five job.
Belleville knew Tom Hardy through friends and, with a stroke of luck, he managed to get him – as well as the other actors who appeared – to star in the film for free. The cast was small, with Tim Barrow and Fraser Sivewright playing the brothers, Tom Hardy playing their father and Imogen Toner as Tara, a hitchhiker the brothers pick up on their road trip. Shooting took place entirely in Scotland and only in natural light, so the filming schedule was compact to say the least. The scenes with Tom were used as flashbacks in the film and shot in London.
Charlie Belleville expressed huge gratitude to Tom for giving up his time when he was just fresh off the set from RocknRolla. He was also very impressed with Tom’s grasp of a Scottish accent for the film, which sounded totally authentic.
The Inheritance premiered at London’s Raindance Film Festival in the autumn of 2007 and was shortlisted with four other films in the Best UK Feature category in the Raindance awards. ‘We were so lucky to get Tom Hardy,’ Charlie enthused to Edinburgh’s Evening News. ‘He is such an accomplished actor and it has given the film a terrific sense of legitimacy when we are competing against so many other low-budget films.’
Although the film missed out on the prize at the festival, it was then nominated – and won – the Raindance Award at the British Independent Film Awards later that year. On top of that, it was nominated for Best First Time Director and Best First Time Producer at BAFTA Scotland’s 2007 New Talent Awards. It also boasted a wealth of positive reviews, with Time Out referring to Belleville as ‘a talent to watch’.
Tom said that when he saw the final cut of the film at the festival, he was thrilled with what had been achieved. ‘Everything that was stacked against The Inheritance… it’s incredible that the piece actually made it to the screen, for starters – and then I think the bonus of it is that it’s an award-winning film.’ He also pointed out that it was a spectacular achievement, given that it was made with scant finance.
It’s perhaps ironic that just as Tom was carving a name for himself as the go-to man for tough guy roles, something happened in his life that brought the nurturing, softer side of the actor to the fore – he became a father. On 8 April 2008, Louis was born to Tom and Rachael Speed.
Becoming a parent means that priorities in life change and everything centres around the new life that has been brought into the world. For Tom, having a son was undoubtedly a grounding experience and one which drew a line under the life he’d previously lived. ‘Having my son stripped away so much unnecessary baggage,’ he reflected a few years after Louis was born.
During the filming of RocknRolla, Tom had noted the irony of being cast as the getaway driver even though he was not able to drive. That changed, however, when he realised that he needed to be able to drive Rachael to and from hospital during the pregnancy. By this time Tom was 30 and it was probably high time he got his licence – the fact that he hadn’t done so until this point was a hangover from his wayward youth. In an interview with the Observer, he said: ‘I couldn’t be trusted with a car when I was younger, so I got used to travelling by tube… I love it because it’s new to me. I’ve got years of driving to catch up on.’
The fact he can now drive has brought additional benefits for Tom. Car manufacturer Audi saw something in the actor they liked and he currently has a promotional deal with them so is now only to be seen behind the wheel of an Audi motor. ‘People ask me about cars and I am all about the Audis. All I ever drive.’ No surprise there – these deals are lucrative and the manufacturer will always want to guarantee exclusivity for the relationship between the product and its celebrity endorser. You’ll never see Roger Federer holding anything other than a Wilson tennis racket, for example.
Tom makes no secret of how proud a father he is, often taking photos of his son to show journalists when he pitches up for an interview. A burgeoning career and supportive family have played their parts in helping Tom on the path to rehabilitation but Louis is a very real reminder as to why he can never go back to his old ways. ‘There are two things that are great in my life,’ he told Marie Claire magazine in 2011, ‘One is my family and the other is my work, and I will protect both to the death.’
He has also mused about the contrast between the disturbed, psychotic screen characters he has become so synonymous with and the doting father that he really is. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it? The characters I’ve played have been mostly violent, and I’m so far from being violent or aggressive. I spend a lot of time watching Fireman Sam with my three-year-old son Louis,’ he reflected when speaking to the Daily Telegraph in 2011. There’s an image that’s sure to make women’s hearts melt – hard man Tom snuggled up on the sofa with his little boy watching children’s TV.
As Tom’s career grows and he becomes an international star, inevitably he will have to endure long periods of time away from the UK – and from his son. He has spoken of his concerns about being a long-distance father but is aware that if he suffers a little bit for it now, hopefully in the future he might be able to pick and choose his commitments a bit more freely, just as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie now do in order to look after their sizeable brood. Plus, of course, he wants to keep working so that he can make sure Louis has everything he needs as he is growing up. ‘I am very much aware of being a Skype father, which is really sad sometimes,’ he told Hello magazine in 2012 as he prepared to up sticks in order to start filming Mad Max. ‘But one reason I’m away so often is to secure enough finances, so that in the future I can choose to go away for shorter periods and command enough money to bring my family with me. At the moment I’m just doing what I have to do.’
Whilst he obviously doesn’t like being apart from Louis, he is able to rest safe in the knowledge that when he’s not in the UK, his son is looked after by Rachael and her husband – and he also told Hello that Rachael is now pregnant again, so Louis will have a half-sibling to keep him company.
It was good fortune that just as Tom took on the responsibility of being a father, so his career started on a steep upward trajectory. He was chosen to portray two very different but equally challenging real-life characters in dramatisations of their lives. The two performances would be the start of establishing Tom’s reputation as one of the finest actors of our time.
CHAPTER SEVEN
TOM: A CAREER TRANSFORMED
‘Tom is a shape shifter. His best work is done when he is entering into a character that isn’t himself.’ These words were spoken by Tom’s friend, the director Robert Delamere, and never was the actor’s transformative ability more in evidence than when he took on first the role of Stuart Shorter in Stuart: A Life Backwards and then Charles Bronson, Britain’s most notorious prisoner, in Bronson. These two utterly contrasting roles were pivotal in shifting Tom’s career up a gear and marked the beginning of his metamorphosis from jobbing actor to big star.
Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters was published in 2005 and went on to become an unlikely bestseller. It was an unconventional book in many ways. Its hero was, at first glance, something of an anti-hero – a homeless man with multiple drug addictions; an alcoholic with a disturbed mind who was prone to unpredictable bouts of rage. The book also fell somewhere between biography and memoir – plus, as its title suggests, it tells the story of a life in reverse chronological order.
Masters first encountered Stuart in 1998 in Cambridge, where they both lived – albeit in very different circumstances. Masters was a writer who worked part-time as a fundraiser for Wintercomfort, a day shelter for rough sleepers in the city. When the two people who ran the shelter were wrongfully arrested and imprisoned over drug-dealing allegations at Wintercomfort (it was in fact some of the homeless people who used the centre who were dealing drugs on the premises, unbeknown to the manager
s), Alexander was, rightly, incensed at what had happened and launched a campaign to Free the Cambridge Two. It was at one of the meetings about the appeal that he met Stuart and the two became unlikely friends.
At the start of the book, Masters describes Stuart as a ‘thief, hostage taker, psycho and sociopathic street raconteur, my spy on how the British chaotic underclass spend their troubled days at the beginning of the 21st century’. He was at first fascinated by Stuart but, as he came to spend more time with him, a genuine friendship evolved between them. Masters was intrigued by Stuart’s life and what had made him the man he became, so persuaded Stuart to let him write his life story. The first draft took two years to complete but was rejected by its subject. Stuart felt that the structure of the story was boring and that it should be more like a murder mystery, where the plot builds towards the revelation. As he put it, he wanted the reader to discover ‘what murdered the boy I was…’.
Although the subject matter is not the usual sort of fodder for a biography/memoir, the book was a hit and went on to win awards, including the Guardian First Book Award in 2005. The critical acclaim and healthy sales were thoroughly deserved: the book’s structure was unique and captivating, and the author’s depiction of Stuart inspired tears, laughter and frustration – we see Stuart through Alexander’s eyes and we feel for him as the author does. It was an important book to have written because it was a story that needed to be told – people like Stuart are rarely given a voice, especially one as eloquent as Masters’.
Literary critics were united in their praise for Stuart. Minette Martin in the Sunday Times described it as: ‘One of the most remarkable and touching biographies I’ve ever read. It also raises more urgent, contemporary questions about the human condition than any other biography I can think of.’ Anne Chisholm, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, said the book was ‘humane, instructive and entirely original’.
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