British actor Tom Hardy turns 44 today. He played a fiend – an enemy of Batman, the most bloodthirsty of British criminals of the XNUMXth century, a desperate adventurer of the early XNUMXth century and a traitor in the ruthless New World, an imperial stormtrooper … But Hardy is not like his heroes. For example, the actor himself believes that he is perhaps even somewhat worse.
If it weren’t for his bright red quilted jacket, you’d think he’s trying to go unnoticed. Black jeans, black velor boots, black polo shirt with long sleeves to hide his famous tattoos.
This man of medium height, devoid of gesticulation and lively facial expressions, with an attentive look and polite restraint, clearly does not want to draw attention to himself. It is understandable: after the roles in Bronson, The Dark Knight and The Revenant, he already has enough attention.
But Tom Hardy does not suffer from celebrity social phobia either: I have an appointment on the terrace of the Bingham Hotel in Richmond upon Thames, the London area where he grew up and lives. On the terrace, despite the cool autumn weather, because it is impossible to use the electronic tube inside the restaurant.
We are surrounded by 20s elegance, beautiful hedgerows and the hotel’s artfully manicured garden. In everything here one can feel the old English calmness, the regularity of being … And I think about the taste of the person who chose this place to meet with a journalist. This is not at all the hero of unbridled passions that we saw on the screen.
True, colleagues say that hardy takes on his own account hardy’s opinions about films with his participation. Like, he got turned on more than once by an unsuccessful question and abruptly interrupted even a press conference, not like an interview.
They advise you to be more careful with him, but at the same time you don’t know what can get him out of the state of polite benevolence with which he usually begins a conversation. Although considerations of caution are, frankly, alien to me: why even take an interview if you can’t ask questions that seem important to you? If the one who agreed to the interview is offended that, you see, he was asked the wrong question?
I look at his defiantly red jacket and act like a bull in a bullfight – I rush into battle.
Psychologies: Tom, why do you sometimes refuse to answer questions and react so abruptly to them – suddenly ending the conversation? Is it an image issue? But the abrupt end of, say, a press conference is much worse for the image…
Tom Hardy: Do you mean any specific situation?
Yes. At the Legends press conference, in connection with one of your heroes (he is gay in the film), a journalist asked a question about your own homosexual experience, and you …
Do you want to ask this question again?
No, I want to understand why you reacted so sharply, although before that you spoke quite openly on this topic.
That’s right – before that. For five years. Do you admit that we can evaluate our experience differently at different stages of life and allow ourselves this weakness – no longer want to talk about it?
You know, no. I do not allow. For me, what was, was, and there is nothing to evade.
And I think that a person has the right to close the topic of personal past. Especially if that experience was not useful. I recently read a book by a Russian writer who has been a prisoner of the Gulag for almost two decades. His book is the stories of a hellraiser. A description of absolute evil (apparently, Hardy means Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov. — Approx. ed.). And he writes that it was a painful but useless experience.
This experience gained in the Gulag is not only unnecessary in normal life, but harmful. Of course, I do not compare my past with the Gulag, but my youthful experiments, different types of rebellion, ways of unconscious self-destruction … This is an unnecessary experience.
But there is an opinion that it is to personal experience that you may owe a unique gift to embody evil on the screen …
However, in “Dunkirk” I’m definitely kind – a savior pilot … And in “Taboo” I am contradictory, but definitely on the side of good …
And yet, your hero almost always exists in the circumstances of a tragedy, at least a drama …
The truth is that I really looked into the abyss. And I looked at her for a long time. Now the abyss sometimes, perhaps, looks out of me – according to Nietzsche.
Alcoholism. Crack. For years. I was going to Los Angeles to meet John Woo, the great director, that was my chance then.
But I woke up the next day in a place I didn’t know. And with a cat on his chest, which he also did not know.
My first marriage broke up because of whiskey and cocaine (Tom divorced producer Saira Ward in 2004. – Approx. ed.). One day, after a particularly incendiary party, I woke up on the floor in a pool of blood. Then I surrendered to the hospital – that “I” was already disgusting to myself, even I could no longer find excuses for it. That’s disgusting.
You see, when you start drinking, you are free from the clamp and cheerful – you can talk to girls, you seem interesting to yourself.
But at some point you fall, literally and figuratively. And this could be the end.
I ended up in a hospital when I saw this end clearly – 15 years after the beginning of adventures, experiments with sexuality, drugs. It became clear to me that this experimenter was not really me: the real me was definitely not going to die in a pool of blood. But the existential abyss is familiar to me.
Excuse me, but as a person from such a prosperous background as yours – father is a significant person in the advertising industry and a famous playwright, mother is an artist, a beautiful house in London’s East Tire, private schools … You speak fluent French, right? And how does a person from such an environment end up in that same puddle?
Adrenalin. I was a groovy teenager – too much energy, and she could not find an outlet. No, she still found some way out in a rebellion against her parents. For some reason, I wanted to annoy them with my behavior. Them, such typical representatives of the middle class.
I’ve always been shy about origin. In well-being, I saw hypocrisy. I felt guilty for being privileged because I was outgoing and friendly with the boys, not only from our East Sheen with its career-cardigan population, idyllic deer in Richmond Park and curtains from Laura Ashley, behind which swarming demons.
It took a lot of time to understand: the fact that you are from a private school is not a complete description of you
But then, at 13, the cure for this strange feeling of guilt and the release of adrenaline was beer. And rolled. I was kicked out of two private schools. At 15, my friend and I were arrested for stealing a Mercedes – we decided to take a ride. And we had a gun.
We did not sit down just because the father of a friend, a diplomat, pressed former classmates at the top of the police. To be completely honest, I practically do not remember what happened to me until the age of 25. I won a TV modeling contest – but how was it in specific details? Everything is erased. I played some first roles, but I don’t remember the circumstances.
So some new you came out of the asylum?
No, it’s not. I came out of the hospital, which … You see, life after alcohol and drugs … it’s like life next to a huge orangutan. In a limited space, in one apartment. He, it would seem, is tamed, but you know: this is a beast, you cannot predict his behavior. He can kill for no apparent reason. Churchill talked about his “black dog” – about the ghost of depression, which is always there. My orangutan is somewhat similar to his black dog. He is constantly with me and can get out of control.
You are talking about a rebellion against your parents, but now you are obviously very close with your father, and it was he who, as a screenwriter, was entrusted with your innermost plan – the series “Taboo” …
In which the main spring of the hero’s actions was, among other things, irreconcilable contradictions with his father! Yes, this is an important part of my life – the relationship with my father. Perhaps I went into acting to become someone my father could be proud of. Strange, he never put pressure on me, did not condemn, I had a feeling that my parents should accept what I would do.
The idea of acting came from my mother. That is, now I understand: she was desperately looking for something to do with me, a teenager, and found it. I played in the children’s theater, but I didn’t really know how to do anything else, I didn’t demonstrate other abilities. And when I was 18, my mother said something like: would you try …
I entered the School of Drama at the University of the Arts London. And that’s it. I just got it. So sometimes I’m even surprised by the laudatory reviews, because I’m just doing this job. I just know how to do it. intuition and practice.
Alone with myself, it’s hard for me to call this occupation an art. For me, this is a job in which you yourself are your instrument … And then … By nature, I, like many actors – just not everyone admits it – is a liar and a manipulator. We lie professionally – a lie is exactly what the profession requires. And to lie professionally, you need to be a liar by nature. We must remember this and not ask especially.
You are unique: I do not remember that one of your colleagues characterized the profession so ruthlessly.
But on the other hand, not everything in it can be qualified as a lie. For several years I was one of the hosts of the Bedtime Stories program on the children’s television channel CBeebies. It is for the little ones. And in it you are an actor, but you do not pretend to be anyone. You just read, act out a fairy tale or a poem-story. I really like this work.
She really needs talent. But not acting, but some other kind – so that the listener of three or four years that way would believe the story. Some purer talent than what is needed to convince an adult audience. Adults know about your professional deceit.
Reading these poems in Bedtime Stories, I, like probably all the actors in my place, imagine that I am reading them to my children. Even, perhaps, trying to prevent their future rebellion … After all, the teenager that I was was no exception.
Many men have experienced rebellion against their father in the past, but not all have overcome it. It seems to me now that the main thing that eventually reconciled us was my own fatherhood.
When you yourself become a dad, sometimes you make irreparable mistakes, you rethink what you have done with hindsight, you suffer because of an incorrectly spoken word … you finally begin to understand your own father!
Your grievances seem almost unreasonable, and his parental blunders are quite forgivable. Yes, it’s true, the best way to reconcile with your parents, to understand their past, to accept the present is to have children.
Not the last of the Jedi
There is a joke in Hollywood: if you are a man of childbearing age and have played prominent roles in a serious, auteur film, you will also find a place in the Star Wars epic film – so that you decorate this film construction that is difficult for an ordinary earthling to understand. “Star Wars. The Last Jedi is no exception: Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver and Joseph Gordon-Levitt starred in it.
But in the arsenal of the cosmic epic there is also a completely inhuman weapon: cameos of very large stars, roles from the category of “blink – you’ll miss it.” The larger the star, the shorter the moment of presence on the screen. And even if the actor is not in the credits at all … This is the stardom of the “God degree”. Tom Hardy received such a cameo in The Last Jedi. Hardy’s participation in the film became the main intrigue of the loudest premiere in December.
“Star Wars. The Last Jedi” by Rian Johnson at the box office from December 14th.
For you, children are a way of “taming the obstinate”?
In a way. And also an incentive. And the path to understanding something about yourself … My eldest son, Louis, is nine (the boy’s mother is an assistant director for working with actors Rachel Speed, with whom Hardy had a romantic relationship from 2005 to 2009. – Approx. ed.), and he was born just in time.
Then I was clearly tired of myself, of demons and obsessions, of fears. And then he appeared. He, who was more important to me than me. I don’t go to Los Angeles from London because of him. Luis lives here with his mother, they are not going to move.
That is, we must certainly sacrifice something for the sake of children?
Oh, you didn’t understand anything! I’m not leaving because I want to be with him. I want to, not because I have to! It’s important to me that he’s there. Louis opens me to myself. For example, I found out that I am very sentimental. I can cry when my son says before bed after a day spent together: “Dad, I love you.” I can shed a tear when he meets me at the airport. I sob when I see my youngest son fall asleep – snoring so peacefully … (now the boy is six years old, his mother and wife Hardy are British actress Charlotte Riley. – Approx. ed.)
When he was born, I finally realized how, in principle, my world should be arranged. And now it’s like this: the family is the center of everything. Well, I found out only closer to forty!
I may look like a macho, and I tried to show … hardness. In addition, I have friends from the army or with army experience. But that’s because I need discipline from the outside – I’m definitely not disciplined on the inside. It was the children who revealed to me that I am not a macho at all, that you can not be ashamed of your sensitivity. And that being someone’s dad is perhaps more important and certainly more valuable than… just being.