Tom Hardy’s road to stardom hasn’t always been easy. From battling addiction to navigating on-set feuds, the 47-year-old British actor, best known for roles in TV and film projects such as “Peaky Blinders,” “Venom,” “Inception” and “Mad Max: Fury Road,” has proven he has what it takes to overcome adversity and become one of Hollywood’s leading men.
From an early age, Hardy, who stars alongside Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren in the Paramount+ series “MobLand,” faced a wave of challenges.
As a young teen, the London native found himself often at odds with the law and quickly developed an addiction to alcohol and crack.
TOM HARDY, CHARLIZE THERON OPEN UP ABOUT ON-SET FEUD WHILE FILMING ‘MAD MAX: FURY ROAD’
“What I have is indiscriminate, like a bullet. If you are an alcoholic, that is what you are,” Hardy told The Mirror in 2014. “If I had four pints of lager and half a bottle of vodka, I could turn this room into an absolute f—ing nightmare in about three minutes. I could destroy everything in my life I have worked so hard for.”
Hardy, who made his big-screen debut in 2001 with his role in “Black Hawk Down,” checked himself into a rehab center after wrapping “Star Trek: Nemesis” in 2002.
“I didn’t want anyone to know I was out of control, but I couldn’t hide it,” he told The Mirror. “I went in thinking I’d do it for a little bit until I can go out and drink and people forgive me. But I did my 28 days, and after listening to people who had been through similar circumstances, I realized I did have a problem.
“I did something particularly heinous that allowed me to wake up,” added Hardy, whose rock-bottom included waking up in a pool of his own blood and vomit. “I had to lose something. Sometimes you have to lose something that is worth more to you than your drinking.”
Despite the challenging road ahead, Hardy, a father of three, said he found a way to use his troubling past as a stepping stone in his career.
While discussing his role in the 2011 film “Warrior,” in which he plays the son of an alcoholic former boxer, Hardy said his experiences helped with character development.
“In the [alcohol abuse] scenes with Nick Nolte, if you’ve been to those depths, experience allows you to think ‘this is right’ or ‘this is wrong’ and know how to react,” Hardy, sober since 2003, told ShortList at the time.
“There’s only so much imagination you can use before you have to go out and live life again. You see these kid actors who work from 10 to 21 and then, all of a sudden, they disappear for a bit. They’ve got nothing to draw upon apart from a life of working, so you need to go out and catch up and then come back in again.”
Hardy’s past is what pushed him to pursue acting in the first place.
“In the end, there was nothing else I could do. I had a busy head, and I didn’t really want to do things that I found boring,” he told The ShortList in 2011. “The only thing that kept my attention was to play and have fun and manipulate. I’ve always been a liar, always been able to manipulate. I pretty much get whatever I want.
“Acting really is a mixture of bulls—ng and manipulating and the study of action-reaction,” he added. “And camouflage — hiding yourself in other languages, bodies and shapes. Acting channeled me into something. I found some self-esteem and thought, ‘I’m actually quite good at something.'”
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And he enjoys playing the villain.
“I play a lot of scary blokes, and there are probably a few reasons why,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. “First, villains are much more interesting than hero leads, who are, for the most part, really boring. The thought of going into work day in and day out to play someone who is just mind-numbingly boring fills me with dread, so I don’t bother.
“Another part of it is when I was younger I remember being frightened a lot, of being small and skinny and vulnerable and feeling that I could have been preyed upon easily. So, everything that I play is what scared me.”
Throughout his run in Hollywood, however, Hardy has gotten some press for being difficult on set.
According to “Blood, Sweat & Chrome,” a book that sheds light on “Mad Max: Fury Road,” Hardy once sent co-star Charlize Theron into a rage after showing up late to set.
Camera operator Mark Goellnicht alleges in the book that Hardy “was notorious for never being on time in the morning. If the call time was in the morning, forget it. He didn’t show up.”
After arriving three hours late to set, Theron allegedly ripped into Hardy at the time, calling him “disrespectful.”
“She jumps out of the War Rig, and she starts swearing her head off at him, saying, ‘Fine the f–king c— $100,00 for every minute that he’s held up this crew,’ and ‘How disrespectful you are!'” Goellnicht claimed. “She was right. Full rant. She screams it out. It’s so loud, it’s so windy — he might’ve heard some of it, but he charged up to her and went, ‘What did you say to me?’ [Hardy] was quite aggressive. She really felt threatened, and that was the turning point.”
“It was like two parents in the front of the car. We were either fighting or we were icing each other — I don’t know which one is worse — and they had to deal with it in the back,” Theron explained in an excerpt, according to Vanity Fair. “It was horrible. We should not have done that; we should have been better. I can own up to that.”
“In hindsight, I was in over my head in many ways,” Hardy told Esquire in 2020 about the confrontation. “The pressure on both of us was overwhelming at times. What she needed was a better, perhaps more experienced partner in me. … I’d like to think that now that I’m older and uglier, I could rise to that occasion.”
Hardy once told THR he’s fully aware of the rep he’s earned.
“There’s this myth, which is quite asinine, that circulates about me — usually by those who haven’t worked with me,” he told THR. “There’s only one thing worse than being talked about and that’s not being talked about in this game. So, I’d rather it be that, I guess. But there are other people who I work with consistently who know that’s not the case, who just wouldn’t risk having somebody like that in their midst because there’s too much at stake. Obviously, you’re going to rub people the wrong way … and I’ve been a d—. But then, who hasn’t?”
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These days, Hardy’s most important role is being a dad to his three children — Louis, 17, whom he shares with ex-girlfriend and casting director Rachael Speed, and his two children he shares with wife Charlotte Riley.
“There is no harder and more important job on the planet than parenting,” he told Esquire in 2018. “You’ve got the military, police, doctors, service personnel — massive respect, huge consequences — but parenting? It’s beyond a job, isn’t it.
“In trying to protect my children, I’ll probably give them their own dose of problems,” he said. “But I don’t want them to go through what I went through.”
