Interview: Tom Hardy, from East End gangster to romantic hero

From telegraph.co.uk

The star of Sky1's new drama The Take, and of ITV1's new adaptation of Wuthering Heights, is now hot Hollywood property, too

By Serena Davies
Published: 6:06PM BST 11 Jun 2009

Tom Hardy barrels into a hotel room, fresh from the set of The Take, Sky1’s shiny new gangster serial, bristling with energy. The actor’s three stone burlier than when he played Stuart Shorter in 2007, the wasted junkie in BBC Two’s Stuart: A Life Backwards and Hardy’s first bravura turn for television. He’s also got enormous, bruised-looking lips that you’d swear were familiar with the collagen syringe were he not the wrong gender. Instead, they make him look like he’s just had a fight.

He orders a steak. How would he like it cooked? “Bloody”. Yes, of course, bloody. Like his parts. Stuart the drug addict spent most of his time smashing things, and himself, up. Freddie Jackson, Hardy’s character in The Take, smashes other people up. “Freddie’s like a rabid dog” is how Hardy’s Take co-star, newcomer Charlotte Riley, describes him.

Hardy’s also played Charles Bronson, the notoriously violent prisoner, and Bill Sikes. And he’s going to be Heathcliff in ITV1’s upcoming version of Wuthering Heights. In episode one of that he bashes his head against a wall with such force that you can hear a crunch.

“Initially I took on these kinds of roles to make a noise,” he explains. “No one’s ever sat up when I’ve played someone nice or easy to watch.” But they are sitting up now. Hollywood is all over Tom Hardy. He’s auditioning for the big studios, and currently filming his part as a cage fighter for a US movie called The Warrior. The 31-year-old ex-public school boy from East Sheen is hot property.

Sky1 has been lucky to net him between jobs. The Take, which begins next Wednesday with a double-bill, is their big-budget attempt at being taken seriously in home-grown television drama. It’s adapted from popular crime novelist Martina Cole’s 2005 book of the same name, and charts the bitching and betrayals within one East End gangster family – with Freddie at its apex – through the Eighties and Nineties.

“It’s got blood, sex, religion, family and human desires,” says Hardy. “That’s such a melting pot, and [a story about] gangsters is such a wonderful way to bring all that to the table. It’s incredible, dramatic stuff.

“It’s not one of those social naturalistic pieces about knife crime in Peckham. It’s more of a Western in that way. A classical story.”

A “classical story” is the kind of thing that floats Hardy’s boat. He’s interested in archetypes, the “rehashing” of age-old sagas, which is what he thinks The Take is: a tale of dynastic infighting comparable to those found in Greek myth. He admires The Oresteia, Romulus and Remus, Iago and Othello, Tamburlaine the Great – and Pride and Prejudice’s Mr Darcy.

The last is a role he’d love to play. Despite his appearance, Hardy doesn’t actually just want to play thugs; nor is he one. He’s eager to hold forth about his teenage walk on the wild side, which included times when he hung around “lads that looked like the guys who were on trial for the murder of Stephen Lawrence”. (He would later become a crack addict in his twenties.) But he says that he loves “duvets and ice-cream and cuddles” now, and, after a divorce, he’s had a baby son, Louis, with his new girlfriend, Rachael Speed, to look after.

In fact, Hardy says he very nearly won the part of Darcy in Joe Wright’s 2005 film of Pride and Prejudice, where Matthew MacFadyen in the end played opposite Keira Knightley. And he was gutted when the very powerful Stacey Snider, ex-head of Universal Pictures, now CEO of Steven Spielberg’s company Dreamworks, told him: “Babe, every woman in the world has an impression of who Darcy is and you’re just not it.”

“That hurt, that really hurt,” Hardy recalls now. “I’d worn a blue shirt and jeans and a blue blazer and been doing my best Hugh Grant impression. But now I was back to playing the wonky skewiff-teeth kid with the bow legs.”

Hardy does himself down with that description: he’s good looking. And he will certainly fit some women’s fantasies of Heathcliff, romantic literature’s sexiest brute. He’s already got the measure of the character’s dangerous side. “If you put [Heathcliff] in Sao Paolo in the modern day, he’s gonna be a bad boy,” he says. “You put him in Cuba, in Scarface, he’s gonna be quite a nice foundation for a gangster.”

In a preview of the ITV1 adaptation of Wuthering Heights, it’s hard to tell whether Hardy’s Heathcliff is going to hit or kiss his Cathy (who will be played by his The Take co-star Charlotte Riley) – which is just how you want him. And there’s a tenderness to his performance that he hasn’t had the chance to show before now.

Hardy fears that he’s inevitably going to attract criticism – or as he puts it, “take casualties” – playing a character as famous as Heathcliff, but there’s a fighting chance that he’s nailed his man. In which case it won’t matter much if he never does Darcy: one legendary literary hero’s enough to be going on with.

- The Take begins on Wednesday on Sky1 and Sky1HD at 9.00pm; Wuthering Heights will be on ITV1 later this year

I really hope he does play Darcy though. Very insightful interview.

As do I.