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 ‘ther
e 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.
The ‘team’ seemed to gel together on the set and Tom was able to teach some of the combat skills he’d learnt in Warrior to Ellen Page. The pair were photographed by paparazzi while they were practising their fighting and Page joked to Jonathan Ross on his chat show: ‘It looked like he was beating up a little girl!’ Tom also seemed to bond well with Leonardo DiCaprio, and their friendship continued off the set. Photos emerged of them in the crowd of spectators at a Lakers basketball game. When asked about the budding bromance by Alan Carr on his Chatty Man show in February 2011, Tom said of his new friend: ‘He’s really good, actually, he really looks after me.’
Filming Inception was a great experience for them all but hard work too. It took them to a variety of locations around the world including London, Los Angeles, Paris, Tangiers, Tokyo and Calgary in Canada (where the snowy chase scenes of the third level of Fischer’s subconscious landscape were filmed). Some of the actors had to give a great deal in physical terms, but Tom maintained that they were all determined to push themselves as far as they needed to for the sake of their director. Thanks to the atmosphere that Chris Nolan had created on the set of his film, all of the actors were prepared to give just that little bit extra for him. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, for example, when filming the scenes in which the characters appear to be floating weightless in the hotel, had to be suspended on a wire for three weeks. This would be a challenge for any actor, but according to Tom they were all willing to undertake whatever was required for the film. Of Nolan, he said, ‘That’s a very specific human being that can not only orchestrate this kind of movie but get trust from people like that.’
Trust is key ingredient on any Nolan set. He is a director famed for keeping the details of his films locked down prior to release – and this could be one of the reasons he chooses those familiar and loyal actors for repeat performances in his movies. Try as journalists might to winkle any information out of cast or crew about his projects, they always draw a blank. The director is firmly of the opinion that the audience will gain so much more from his films if they walk into the cinema without prior expectations. He commented: ‘I always believe that for me the most gratifying cinematic experiences as a viewer have always been films that I didn’t know what to expect.’ With a product as complex and innovative as Inception, it was easy to see why he wanted to keep an element of surprise up his sleeve. Would it be worth the wait?
The film came out in the UK in July 2010 and it was the most talked about movie of the summer. Although the Nolan shroud of secrecy had enveloped much of the detail of the film, in the months building up to the release, cinema audiences had been teased with enticing trailers showing phenomenal feats of CGI and mind-boggling special effects. Expectations were high and the film certainly delivered. The fact that it was a cerebral film with a challenging plot appealed to many of the critics and they were appreciative of how it performed on a technical level too. Philip French of the Observer remarked: ‘The film is the stuff that dreams are made on, a collaborative work of great technical skill and imaginative detail where everyone is working to help the writer-director realise a personal vision… Inception demands and rewards our total attention as well as our emotional engagement. You’ll want to see it again but not, I think, on the same day.’
Some found the film more an exhibition of style over substance and felt that, while it was visually impressive, the characters lacked emotional resonance. There’s no denying that it was a film that demanded concentration from its audience, but there was a danger of some coming away from the film a bit confused. Philip French’s comment that some might want to see it twice was pretty apt – the film moved fast and there was a lot of information to take in so it might have been necessary to watch it again to pick up things missed the first time around.
Although the film as a whole was a slick and impressive beast, oddly, it was Tom’s understated and idiosyncratic performance that drew a great deal of attention from audiences. Many marked out one of his lines in particular as being a highlight of the film. The scene in question occurs after the team of dream-stealers has infiltrated the mind of Fischer – but the ‘guards’ protecting the victim’s subconscious have detected the intruders’ presence and are starting to attack them by opening fire. At one point, Arthur is firing his assault rifle on the ‘projections’ of Fischer’s subconscious when Eames ambles over and says, ‘You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling,’ promptly producing a rocket propelled grenade with which he blows up their enemies in one fell swoop. The line is classically delivered and is wonderful in that it sums up the whole essence of the film: that in your dreams, your subconscious is limitless and you can change events with the power of your imagination. The line is one that has gone down in film history and helped Tom gain recognition as an up-and-coming Hollywood star. The Daily Telegraph referred to his part in the film as ‘a dry gift’.
Tom had been dying to make an impression in the USA for many years. Bronson had enab
led him to put one foot on the ladder, but thanks to Chris Nolan he was now able to step up a rung. With the success of his performance in Inception came recognition on a larger scale and in February 2011, it was announced that Tom had been shortlisted for the BAFTA Rising Star Award. Tom being placed in this category was a bit ironic as he had been grafting away as an actor for many years and eight years previously had been earmarked as the ‘next big thing’ before his life had taken a very different turn.
The nominations for the BAFTA Orange Wednesdays Rising Star award recognise five international actors and actresses whose talent has captured the imagination of the British public. It is a special award because it is the only one voted for by the public and, for the first time in 2011, Orange Wednesdays customers were allowed to be part of the selection process too. Tom was up against some pretty impressive competition in the category, with the other nominees being Gemma Arterton, Andrew Garfield, Aaron Johnson and Emma Stone. Previous winners of the trophy had been James McAvoy in 2006, Eva Green in 2007, Shia LaBeouf in 2008, Noel Clarke in 2009 and Kristen Stewart in 2010.
Film fans voted in the tens of thousands in advance of the British Academy Film Awards on Sunday, 13 February 2011. At the star-studded ceremony, it was announced that the public had voted Tom their 2011 Rising Star. He wasn’t actually there in person to collect his award on the night, but was genuinely delighted to have won and in his statement said: ‘Thank you very much. This is very kind of you and much appreciated. I genuinely am grateful just to be working at all. I’d like to thank everyone who voted, everyone who loves a good story and every artist in the house tonight for the work they do.’
Spencer McHugh, Director of Brand at Orange said: ‘We are delighted that Tom Hardy has been chosen as this year’s Orange Wednesdays Rising Star. The support for our award, in its sixth year, particularly from Orange Wednesdays customers, has been phenomenal. Tom is one of Britain’s most promising young actors and clearly has a glittering future ahead of him.’
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