This photo released courtesy of Fox Searchlight shows Tom Hardy as Bob in the film, "The Drop."The Associated Press
Tom Hardy's eyes are locked into mine. This is no small thing.
He's sitting on a hotel sofa during the Toronto International Film Festival, dressed as an urban warrior in black T-shirt, olive fatigues and work boots. His wrists are thick with bracelets, bands and strings. His face, though handsome, is not pretty: His nose and mouth are slightly smashed, like they could stand up, or have stood up, to a punch. His beard is short, his sandy brown hair slicked back. As he talks, he frequently reaches up with both hands, running them over the top of his head and bringing them to rest, elbows out, on the back of his neck. This causes his broad chest to widen further, and makes his biceps pop under the tattoos that cover both his upper arms. He's not tall, but there's nothing wasted on him. Every molecule makes maximum impact.
He also vibrates. He thrums. Sitting across a narrow coffee table from Tom Hardy is like sitting opposite a compact, ingeniously designed generator. His energy is coiled right now; he's engaged and charming, but I'm certain that if he let it loose, it could blow me backward into the hall.
Actors do a lot of talking about transforming themselves for roles, but the London-born Hardy, who turns 37 on Monday, means it – he goes undercover for every part he plays. So it's taken North American audiences a while to realize that Bane (in The Dark Knight Rises), Bronson, Heathcliff (in a telefilm) and Locke (who is mesmerizing, despite being stuck in a car for 90 minutes) are all one guy, the same guy as the private in Band of Brothers, the mixed-martial-arts fighter in Warrior, the Olivier Award nominee on the British stage, the gangster in RocknRolla and the con man in Inception. What they share is that Hardy hum, the high-tension-wire buzz he emanates even when sitting still. You may not realize it's him on your stage or screen, but you know you can't look at anyone else.
That eye contact – I asked for it. Hardy's new drama, The Drop, which opened yesterday, is a testosterone-fuelled ride through wee-hours Brooklyn, where mad Russian mobsters use a rotating series of bars as depositories for their ill-gotten gains. Hardy plays a bartender named Bob, alongside James Gandolfini (in his final performance) as Bob's uncle and Noomi Rapace as a woman who catches his eye. Bob knows how to stay alive by staying out of the way. His voice, thin and quiet, is part of the "character silhouette" Hardy creates for each role (along with physicality and costume). It's nothing like his real voice, which is deep and growly, like being licked by a panther.
"Bob has to be invisible; he can't be seen," Hardy says, rapid-fire in a bloke-y English accent. "It's the sound of somebody who's in darkness – you can hear they're there, but only just. A watercolour, no bold strokes. A skivvy. His voice is an external symptom of his personality."
But when Bob makes eye contact, look out. "When someone stares at you, if you stare back long enough, something is going to happen," Hardy says. "Sometimes you're going to end up in bed, sometimes in a fight. That's the lock-in, innit? When you look someone in the eye, you've got to know your shit." At this point I'm trying to keep my gaze steady, while trying not to blush, and I'm getting a little clammy. Hardy may sense this. When I blink first, he grins.
Eye contact can also be "posturing," Hardy continues. "When we shake our spears at another person, and hope they get the message and not attack. That's what acting is: We posture hard. But we don't cross the line. In fight scenes, sex scenes, rape scenes, violent scenes, you have to push right up, further than most people would like to go, right to the point where anything goes. Then you hit an area where some pretty magical stuff can happen on screen. You cross that line where you might get arrested for it, if it was someone you didn't know. If Matthias [Shoenaerts, who plays Hardy's rival in The Drop] bit me in a fight scene, I wouldn't hold it against him. I'd just say, 'Dude, you bit me!'" He laughs. It sounds like the rumble of a truck.
Hardy believes in going all-out; he wants "to pursue the investigation of aggression and sex and violence," and he appreciates co-stars who will go there with him. "I like intimacy as well, but boundary-busting is key," he says. He's had co-stars say, "That's enough," and call cut. But Hardy doesn't play that way.
"If the script says, 'He gets stabbed relentlessly,' the word relentless means it's relentless," Hardy says curtly. "That's your fucking job; you need to be relentless. If you're not willing to be, why are you here? If I sign up to be stabbed relentlessly, I expect to be relentlessly stabbed. I put a pad on and let you go to town."
For a while, Hardy lived relentlessly, too. He married and divorced, had a son (who's now six), battled addictions to alcohol and crack cocaine. Now, he says, he channels his intensity into acting, and the only vice I see is an e-cigarette, which between puffs he tucks under his I-beam thigh.
With The Drop (written by Dennis Lehane, based on his short story Animal Rescue), Hardy saw a chance to delve into "love, loneliness, hope. All the Greek stuff. We're not thinking in black and white. We're looking at greys of the human condition, and the veil of suffering. Anyone who said that you would get through life without suffering, they lied to you. Shit is going to happen. So who is a good guy in that situation, and who is a bad guy, becomes much greyer. Instead of running the camera on good and evil, let's run a camera on normal, and see how chaotic and crazy that is. And see whether you can find somebody likeable or charming, even though they've done something heinous."
Hardy doesn't judge his characters; he inhabits them, and lets the audience decide. "I'm a defence counsellor for every character I play," he says. "When I take a character, it's like I stand up for him in court. I don't care if he's guilty or innocent, I plead his case. That's it. And he's getting off."
He laughs again, pleased with that one. A handler, who's been hovering, moves in to wrap things up. Hardy treats me to one final eye-lock.
"This could all end tomorrow," he says. "I'm prepared for failure. But it's a good day to be me today, yeah." It was a good 15 minutes to be me, too.
Johanna Schneller