Gareth Evans’ Havoc, which drops this Friday on Netflix, is a nasty piece of work. It’s a blood-soaked tale of corrupt cops, mistaken identity, and gang melodrama that feels like a far gorier heir to the Hong Kong invasion era of ’90s and aughts action cinema. These were films that often starred Chinese action heroes like Jet Li (Unleashed), Chow Yun-fat (The Corrupter), or Jackie Chan (take your pick), or were directed by Hong Kong legends like John Woo (Face/Off), Tsui Hark (Knock Off), or Corey Yuen (The Transporter). But those movies tend to have a certain sense of humor—or, given how many of them were made in France by Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp, a certain joie de vivre—that Havoc lacks. Evans, who became an international success with the Indonesian action films The Raid and The Raid 2, is one of the great action directors alive, a master at getting the pulse pumping, but he is not interested in camp, like Woo, nor is he filming a ballet of violence, like Hark. In Evans’ movies, people don’t so much get shot as they get torn apart by bullets. One memorable death involves a woman getting harpoon-gunned through the mouth, the camera staying on her as she slowly continues trying to walk down the length of the harpoon line toward her quarry.
That quarry is Walker, played by Tom Hardy, who doles out a truly shocking amount of brutality to an almost exclusively Chinese group of antagonists over the course of the film. Here Hardy delivers yet another of what might be termed his “Funny Accent” performances, where he adopts some weird-ass voice (in this case, a high-pitched, squeaky New Yawka, like Robert De Niro on helium) and you can’t quite tell if he’s intentionally undermining the film or following his muse, or both. He laces the performance with the usual bag of Hardy tricks: a carefully worked out system of grunts that he uses to reveal subtext and a lack of eye contact with his scene partners. In Hardy’s performances, he almost never holds anyone’s gaze. Instead, he mimes thinking by looking down and to the side, or flicking his eyes back and forth as if being hypnotized by an invisible watch. When he instead wants to telegraph intensity, he has a wild-eyed, squinting glare. Then there’s his devilish smile, all bright teeth and dimples, that brightens his face like a mischievous child trying to get out of being grounded. If you’ve just inhaled hours upon hours of Tom Hardy movies, as I did while working on this piece, you’ll notice these devices used again and again, and they provide, in Evans’ words, “a sort of swagger and a charm and a charisma to him, and maybe a dry sense of humor.”
Hardy is having a big moment right now—Havoc joins Guy Ritchie’s surprisingly enjoyable show MobLand on Paramount+—13 years after his first major Funny Accent performance, as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. The second of three movies he made with director Christopher Nolan (he also took more modest roles in Inception and Dunkirk), The Dark Knight Rises made him a household name despite widespread complaints that audiences could not understand a goddamn thing he said. Ever since this breakthrough, he’s been ever-present. He’s made small movies like Locke, gigantic movies like Mad Max: Fury Road, co-created and starred in a Taboo for FX, received an Oscar nod (for The Revenant), and played antihero Eddie Brock in the Venom trilogy. He even filmed an uncredited background extra role for the latest Matrix film.
But if I’m being honest, I’ve never cottoned to him as an actor. When I was asked by the good people of this website to write about Hardy, I wanted to turn the job down. I don’t like writing takedowns, and his work seemed to me to be the pinnacle of self-indulgence. He channels Brando, but the Brando of his check-cashing roles, where he often used prosthetics and bizarre accents to make it clear he held the project in a bit of contempt. Hardy’s tricks—particularly that downcast-eyes thing—were so clear! People really love Fury Road, but I’ve always found it dull. I’m not a big car chase guy, and “they all go one way and then U-turn and go back” is not enough of a plot to sustain my interest. But as I wrote the email to explain why I was the wrong guy for this job, I had second thoughts. What if instead I tried to like Tom Hardy, or at least understand what other people saw in his work. I’m always telling my students that when they feel most judgmental, they should instead cultivate curiosity. Perhaps this was my “physician, heal thyself” moment.
Unfortunately for us all, my first step on my quest for understanding the appeal of Tom Hardy was watching The Bikeriders. In the film, he plays Johnny, a man so obsessed with Brando’s turn as a motorcycle gang leader named Johnny in The Wild One that he starts a whole-ass motorcycle gang of his own. The Bikeriders puts a series of puzzling lampshades on its own derivativeness. Hardy speaks in a B-grade Brando imitation, while the film borrows so heavily from Scorsese it might as well be called Bikefellas. It pines for a vanished masculinity that I am happy to see confined to the dustbin.
I was getting nowhere fast in my quest for open-mindedness. I needed to phone a friend.
Or several friends, as it turned out. I texted people who are actors or worked in the industry and asked for their Hardy thoughts. The results seemed to break down pretty quickly by gender. Men, particularly male actors, love Tom Hardy and think he’s a genius. From them I got a list of movies to watch to confirm his brilliance: Locke, Stuart: A Life Backwards, The Drop, Warrior, and a few others. Women actors tended to say some variation of “I don’t really think about him,” or “He’s kinda sold out, hasn’t he?” But there was a third group: nonactors, who both thought Hardy was a genius and could not decide if he was actually a good actor or not. It turned out that this third group helped me figure out how to watch him. Because if Hardy actually was a genius, or at least an iconoclast, then, in all likelihood, he was inventing his own standard of quality. That, after all, is what Brando did. It’s what Nic Cage does. I love both of those actors. Perhaps Hardy is redefining what “good acting” means, or existing in a territory where questions of “good” become irrelevant, like those parts of the old maps that said Here Be Dragons.
Before I sat down to watch the recommended films list I had been given, I decided to check in with a role right at the beginning of his career: as Private John Janovec, in two episodes of HBO’s Band of Brothers. At this point, Tom Hardy had won a reality competition in the U.K. and briefly worked as a model, and, according to his own interviews, had become addicted to crack cocaine. He had also either left or been thrown out of Drama Centre London, a school that combined classical English training with American Stanislavski-based technique and even French clowning. At some point in his travels, he also picked up the exercises in unlocking the unique idiosyncrasies of the self that were created by Lee Strasberg, the father of method acting (he discusses one of them, which is called “Song and Dance” in this interview). This would lead to confusion later in his career, when the assumption was that he learned the kind of “method” that actors like Daniel Day-Lewis practice, one of full immersion in a role where you live as your character 24 hours a day until filming is over. He’s maintained in many interviews since that he is not a method actor in any sense of the term. As he told Forbes, “I don’t have a method. I’ve studied so many methods—so many—that you take a little bit from everything.” In other interviews, he name-checks enough acting gurus to make it clear that he is both an acting nerd and reluctant to discuss his own process in depth.
In Band of Brothers, Hardy is the pretty face of the ugly American occupation of Germany at the end of the war. We first see him wearing dog tags and nothing else. This being HBO in the year 2001, they had to find any way they could to put as many breasts into their shows as possible, and so in his first scene Hardy is being furiously ridden by a topless, unnamed fräulein, only for his coitus to get interruptus by a fellow private who is looting the woman’s house.
It’s a startling performance to revisit, not only because Hardy is so beautiful, but because the role lacks most of the silent thinking, brooding torment, and funny voices of his later work. He’s mostly there as comic relief, up until he helps liberate a concentration camp, and the camera lingers as his eyes register the unfathomable horror of the Holocaust. There it is! I thought, as the intense glare blossomed on his face. But here it didn’t feel like a stock gesture. It felt instead like he had entered fully into the imagined reality of a character experiencing something that (luckily) almost no one watching at home would ever have to see.
One of the jobs of the actor is to bring to life such extraordinary circumstances and make them believable, and one of the goals of acting training is to make this more possible, while also teaching you how to adapt this believability to the style of the project at hand. None of us know what shape our faces would take if we saw, for the first time, the emaciated body of Jewish survivors of the Shoah stumbling toward us like zombies in a Romero film.
Similarly, very few of us know what it would be like to be the character Hardy assays in Stuart: A Life Backwards. Based on the biography of the same name by Alexander Masters, the film tells the story of Masters (a pre-superstardom Benedict Cumberbatch) befriending Stuart, a mentally ill drug addict he meets in a care center for the unhoused. This role may be the most massive and tasteless work of Hardy’s career, and it is also the one that finally convinced me I was wrong about him.
If before his face was like a Wordsworth poem, now it is more like something by Philip Larkin.
As Stuart, Hardy gives a huge, risk-taking, fully committed performance. Part of the bravery of his work is that the reasons behind his character choices as Stuart—a mumbled line delivery mixed with a halting, shaky physicality, and a twitchy sense of constant pain—are not explained until the end of the film. Hardy’s performance helps create the mystery of the film. The audience thus asks what is wrong with Hardy and with Stuart simultaneously. We begin the movie judging both men (the former for hamming it up, the latter for being a drug addict with a tendency to violent crime) and then, over the course of the film, come to understand them both. Stuart, it turns out, has muscular dystrophy, and is a survivor of years of sexual abuse in various settings. His days are a constant struggle to not let the voices in his head convince him to end his life.
There is no tasteful way to play a character who in one sequence lights his apartment on fire, strips naked, and begins slashing himself with knives while screaming at the police. You can either live the truth of that character, one that requires you to risk humiliation, or you can deliver a performance that comforts the audience in their safety, and risks nothing. Hardy clearly is a risk-taker, and when it clicks with the right project, the results are quite powerful.
If you take risks, you risk failures. And I still maintain that there are a number of those in Hardy’s filmography, with The Dark Knight Rises being the big one. The film is a stinker for any number of reasons, from its incoherent script, to its hacked-to-death action editing, to its arguably fascist politics, but a fundamental problem is that Hardy’s performance is absurd when it should be scary. It’s simply impossible to imagine anyone following his character’s lead on where to eat for dinner, let alone manipulating commodities futures in order to plant a nuclear weapon in a stadium, or whatever it was that he was up to the whole time.
Yet even with TDKR, I cannot help but respect his chutzpah. Hardy didn’t want to play a stock villain with a “straight down the line evil voice … which we’ve heard a million times before,” but to use the specifics of the character to find a more truthful performance. Researching Bane from the comics, and specifically his Romany heritage, Hardy “found a guy called Bartley Gorman who was the King of the Gypsies. He was a bare-knuckle boxer, Romany gypsy from Romany,” and imitated his voice. Suddenly, “there was something to play that was not made up. It was a real guy.” Like many great actors before him, when confronted with a character he couldn’t quite figure out, he used research until he found an imaginative path into the character. That path was an iconoclastic and controversial one, but it was still rooted in something real.
In the years after, Hardy has often juggled relatively restrained performances in movies like Locke (in which he is the only actor on-screen) and Fury Road (in which his work may be overshadowed in the public eye by his feud with Charlize Theron) with ones where he can let his freak flag fly. Taboo, the project over which he’s had the most creative control, is an aggressively strange period piece, set in 1814, in which Hardy plays a world adventurer who may have magic powers, or might just be insane. In Capone, Hardy plays the gangster at the end of his life, as late-stage syphilis drives him mad. In Legend, he plays both of the infamous Kray twins, one of whom had schizophrenia.
You may at this point be noticing a theme emerge. Hardy is clearly drawn to certain kinds of perverse nutjobs, perhaps because they give him permission to deliver the kind of imaginative performances that put him on the map. Simultaneously, he’s done something fascinating: given up his youthful beauty. Hardy’s hair is thinning, his face is lined, his body is stocky, and his ears stick out. Many stars would’ve consulted various experts and surgeons to “correct” any one of these too-human flaws, but Hardy has embraced them. He’s still handsome, and that smile is still a killer, but his looks are no longer those of a typical movie star. There’s a kind of weariness to his handsomeness now; if before his face was like a Wordsworth poem, now it is more like something by Philip Larkin. It’s seen some shit and wants to tell us some truths we might rather not hear. This weariness undergirds his very fine, nuanced work in MobLand, a crime series written by Ronan Bennett and Jez Butterworth that punches way above its weight. In it, Hardy plays Harry Da Souza, a Cockney fixer for the Harrigans, an Irish crime family in London presided over by Pierce Brosnan’s Conrad and Helen Mirren’s Maeve. Harry is the Michael Clayton of crime, able to call in favors, cajole, and threaten his way out of almost every situation, but his uber-competence falters when he tries to prevent his psychopathic bosses from going to war with a rival clan.
MobLand is a show about compartmentalization, about how getting in bed with evil prevents you from ever being your full self. It thus requires a lead performance that is a simmering pot, never quite at full boil. Harry is always pretending he’s OK. In one scene, he’s like a charming little boy trying to dodge a fight with his wife, and in another, while shaking down a witness, he’s the most dangerous man you’ve ever met. Harry can turn that danger on or off like a table lamp, using subtle changes in tone of voice and physical presence. The whole performance is as intricate as the wrinkles in Hardy’s forehead, in a way that a more conventional star would’ve probably not bothered with. MobLand is compulsively watchable, but beyond its performances (the great Paddy Considine and Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt do excellent work as well), it’s pretty shallow. By taking the role seriously, even though it’s for a work of popcorn entertainment, he both anchors and deepens the show. The same is true for Havoc, which, if you like your action grim and relentless, will suit your fancy. Yeah, he does the eye thing, but watch closely, and you’ll see that he’s developed a total physicality for the role of Walker, one in which he is always listing slightly to the right, and somehow manages to lumber and move with ginger hesitancy at the same time, indicating a body that has taken its share of hits over the years.
But if I’m being honest, my favorite recent performance of his is probably his most bonkers of all. Yes, I’m talking about his work as Eddie Brock in the Venom films, a trilogy of movies about a space symbiote who likes to eat people and the investigative journalist inside whom he has taken up residence. Critics hate the Venom films—all three are “certified rotten”—but audiences love them, and, honestly, when I watched them for this piece, I realized I did too. Not only that, but I was particularly taken with the second two, for which Hardy exerted greater creative control, and which are, to use the technical term, crazytownbananapants.
What Hardy seems to have realized in the Venom trilogy is that the films work best when they are, essentially, The Odd Couple, with Tom Hardy playing Felix, Oscar, and the apartment all at once. The movies wring a lot of laughs out of Hardy bickering with himself, or the many sequences where his body, partially controlled by Venom, moves without his permission. In one hilarious sequence in Let There Be Carnage, Venom escapes from Eddie and takes over a series of bodies, eventually ending up at an all-night queer rave. This digression culminates with Venom giving a speech about the need for liberation to great cheers from the crowd. He’s talking about eating people, of course, but his audience thinks he’s talking about the freedom to love who you want.
Tasteless? Yes! But if “good taste” is what you want from a leading man, there’s any number of interchangeable guys around who can give it to you. In an ever-homogenizing industry, one with a very small range of acceptable masculinity available to its actors, it’s refreshing to have a weird little holdout, channeling his off-the-charts charisma into big choices. The results don’t always land, but life would be so much more boring if all our choices panned out. Besides, isn’t the film industry big enough to have room for both conventional stars and the occasional funny-voiced weirdos? Or, to put it in the words Venom says in his all-night-rave speech, “All of us should be able to live together upon this ball of rock, free to be who we be!”
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