All it the Great Hollywood Testosterone Shortage. For the past few years, the movie biz has been desperately searching for that next square-jawed, powerful leading man, as greats like Clint Eastwood aged out of roles, and ’80s icons, such as Sylvester Stallone, became more hammy than hot.
They stripped off his shirt and served us doe-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal in “The Prince of Persia.” They laughably tried foisting Taylor Lautner on us in “Abduction.”
Step aside, wusses. Tom Hardy is here to toss you one-handed through a plate-glass window.
In just a few short years, the 34-year-old English actor has become the go-to guy for brutish, physically imposing parts. He’s also become quite the sexy pin-up, if you’re so inclined.
This is a guy who did 2,500 push-ups a day for five weeks to bulk up for his role as England’s most notorious convict in 2008’s “Bronson,” a guy who stalks around every movie looking like he might at any second decide to uncoil a sledgehammer punch. A guy who basically owns every scene he’s in through sheer strength and charisma.
In this summer’s “The Dark Knight Rises,” he transformed what could have been a one-note thug, Bane, into a fascinating baddie with a mysterious mask and an even more mysterious accent. In last year’s “Warrior,” he played a emotionally tortured cage fighter. He took on the role of Heathcliff in a 2009 British TV version of “Wuthering Heights,” leading the movie’s writer, Peter Bowker, to remark, “Tom is the first Heathcliff I’ve ever seen who you honestly feel could beat the living daylights out of you.”
“Initially I took on these kinds of roles to make a noise,” Hardy told the UK’s Telegraph. “No one’s ever sat up when I’ve played someone nice or easy to watch.”
Hardy’s latest is, at times, also difficult to watch. “Lawless,” opening Wednesday, tells an interesting story about a family of backwoods Virginia bootleggers caught in a violent war during Prohibition.
Three Bondurant brothers — sensitive-but-indestructible Forrest (Hardy), drunken Howard (Jason Clarke) and ambitious Jack (Shia LaBeouf) — are making a nice living running moonshine until a sadistic city lawman (Guy Pearce) moves to shut them down.
Runty LaBeouf has admitted that playing kin to “big boy” Hardy was intimidating. “Standing next to him, I felt like Josh Groban — meek,” he joked on “The Tonight Show.”
But Hardy is not all muscles and violence, says “Lawless” director John Hillcoat. “The most interesting thing about him is the contradictions,” he says. “He has this masculinity to him, physically, but there’s this real feminine side to him. He has these large lips. There’s a softness underneath it all.”
Hardy wanted that softness to translate to his “Lawless” character. The actor saw Forrest, the eldest brother, as a matriarchal figure.
He modeled the character on Granny, the owner of Tweety from the “Looney Tunes” cartoons, who goes from knitting to a sudden burst of violence. He even suggested a scene in which his character darns socks, but Hillcoat nixed the idea.
Despite his tough-guy roles and his deep, gravelly voice, Hardy didn’t exactly grow up on the streets. He was raised in suburban, middle-class London, and attended a posh boarding school. His mother was an artist and his father wrote comedy and novels.
“I always had a sense of shame about being privileged,” Hardy told the Guardian.
Whether from that sense of shame or some other reason, the young Hardy was soon acting out. He was reportedly expelled from his school for stealing and, at 15, arrested for riding in a stolen car and possessing a gun. In his late teens and early 20s, he became an alcoholic and a crack addict.
“I went entirely off the rails, and I’m lucky I didn’t have some terrible accident or end up in prison or dead,” he told the Guardian. “Now I know my beast, and . . . how to manage it.”
Despite his demons, Hardy managed to win a TV modeling contest at 19. He also studied at London’s prestigious Drama Centre under Christopher Fettes, who’d also worked with Anthony Hopkins.
And, yet, in 2003, Hardy collapsed, covered in blood and vomit, on a London street after a crack binge, and he decided to head to rehab. He says he’s been clean ever since.
But his addictions were not without a price. His marriage to Sarah Ward, whom he’d known for just three weeks before getting hitched in 1999, ended in 2004. In 2008, he had a son named Louis with his girlfriend, actress Rachael Speed. The two have since split up, and Hardy is now engaged to Charlotte Riley, an actress he met on the set of “Wuthering Heights.”
Next, Hardy will step into Mel Gibson’s boots in 2013’s “Mad Max: Road Fury,” and he’s set to play Al Capone in 2014’s “Cicero.”
“You think of Michael Fassbender and Jeremy Renner and Ryan Gosling. There’s a whole bunch of these newer guys who are breaking in who play complex characters underneath these very masculine characters,” Hillcoat says. “Tom is part of that. He’s looking for [a career of the] Gary Oldman or Daniel Day-Lewis variety.”
And Hollywood, if you know what’s good for you, you best give him one.