Tom Hardy

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Name: Edward Thomas Hardy
Also Known As: T-Hard, THard, Edward Thomas Hardy, ETH, Tommy
Occupation: Actor
Medium: Film, Theatre
Works: Stuart: A Life Backwards, RocknRolla, The Take, Wuthering Heights, Bronson, Inception, Warrior (released in US late 2011), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011), This Means War with Chris Pine (post-production), The Wettest County in the World (post-production, filmed in Georgia, US February 2011), The Dark Knight Rises (post production as of Nov 2011) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Venom (2018)
Official Website(s): IMDB page, Wikipedia article
Fan Website(s): Tom Hardy Party, Tom Hardy dot org, Tom Hardy Fan
On Fanlore: Related pages

Tom Hardy is a British actor who first caught the attention of the internet playing Eames in Inception in 2010.

His sincerity, charm, intelligence and occasional silliness as well as his bad-boy-made-good history attract many fans. Tom grew up in the posh part of East London and attended public school (private in the US). At 15 he was caught joyriding in a stolen Mercedes with a gun and only escaped charges because his companion was a diplomat's son. He was kicked out of acting school twice then won roles in Band of Brothers and Black Hawk Down. In 2002 he played the villian in Star Trek: Nemesis but the movie flopped and with it his hopes for an international career. He became addicted to drugs and alcohol, ruining his first marriage. One time he woke up in LA naked in bed with a strange man, a cat and a loaded gun with the safety off.[1] He eventually decided to get clean after passing out in a London street and ending up in hospital.[2][3] He has been clean since 2003.

Tom describes himself as obsessive compulsive and now channels his energy into work. He is well-known for his chameleon-like ability to inhabit the skin of a character and to lose or gain muscle and weight for roles.

The problem for me is psychological," he says. "So I have to be careful about obsessing about anything. Food could be as dangerous for me as drink or drugs. I could either binge or starve. On a film set, I might have breakfast at 5am and just keep eating all day. Right now, I'm rehearsing a play, and I could easily go without meals for two days.

And I could just as easily become a gym-junkie, too. Recently I went through a period where I was lifting a lot of weights, and I had to stop that, not just because I had to slim down to play Stuart, but because it was becoming addictive."[4]

Wanting to be a hero, Tom joined the Parachute Regiment "for about five minutes".[5][6] Tom has a two year old son[7] with a former girlfriend and is now engaged to his Wuthering Heights co-star Charlotte Riley.[8] His personal trainer and mentor Pnut is also his best friend and godfather of his son Louis.

Many fans are intrigued by his past history with men and his fetish for shoes:

Interviewer: Have you ever had any sexual relations with men?

As a boy? Of course I have. I'm an actor for fuck's sake. I'm an artist. I've played with everything and everyone. But I'm not into men sexually. I love the form and the physicality but the gay sex bit does nothing for me. In the same way as a wet vagina would turn someone else into a lemon-sucking freak. To me it just doesn't compute now I'm into my 30s and it doesn't do it for me and I'm done experimenting.

Interviewer: Have you done it all?
Not all but I can imagine. We've all got an *beep* and I can imagine. It just doesn't do it for me, sex with another man. But there's plenty of stuff in a relationship with another man, especially gay men, that I need in my life. A lot of gay men get my thing for shoes. I don't think I'm metrosexual but I'm definitely my mother's son. I have definite feminine qualities and a lot of gay men are incredibly masculine.[9][10]

Tom Hardy has also appeared in the romantic comedy This Means War (2012) with Chris Pine and Reese Witherspoon, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011), Lawless (2012) (an adaptation of The Wettest County in the World), the Mad Max series revisitation Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) as the titular Max Rockatansky, and Venom as Eddie Brock.

Internet

Tom had a MySpace until deleting it for career reasons and is infamous for being a camwhore, taking random cameraphone pictures of himself with idiosyncratic captions and setting them free on the internet to the glee and amusement of fans everywhere. There are a number of tumblrs dedicated to posting pictures of Tom, the least serious being not my hair it is a palm,[11] inspired by a pic Tom posted of himself in his apartment with a housepalm behind his head entitled "This is my place x not my hair it is a palm xx." Since then a number of pics and videos of Tom with palms have been discovered or created and some fans hold that palms are Tom's true love.

Tom Hardy Party[12] is a fansite started in 2010 with news, extensive photo galleries (collated by THILF - the Tom Hardy Image Liberation Front), an interview and article archive, filmography, twitter and The Tom Hardy Research Institute (discussion boards). It is co-run by the creator of notmyhairitisapalm. Other fansites are Tom Hardy Fan and Tom Hardy Dot Org.

Fan Activity

Aside from the above mentioned tumblrs, fans create picspams, icons, graphics, and fanvids of Tom. Many fans are entertained by his antics and some suspect he is too unbelievable to be real; this has become a popular meme.

RPF

RPF with Tom Hardy is sadly not very common; reflecting the popularity of their charcters' pairing Arthur/Eames, he is most often paired with Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Communities & Tumblrs

Livejournal:

Tumblr:

References

  1. ^ Youtube - Tom Hardy on Jonathan Ross 2010.06.18 (part 2), 4:30 - 5:20 "I woke up in a bed, in Los Angeles, when I was supposed to meet - I think it was John Woo - one morning for something like, I think it was Bulletproof Monk. I woke up, in a bed with a dude and a gun. Naked. With a cat, as well. I don't remember the cat, you know. Or the dude. [..] And the safety was off, that was the scary thing. Cos I must've fallen asleep looking down the barrel," Jonathan Ross, 18 June 2010
  2. ^ Tom Hardy: the rake's progress, The Guardian, 4 July 2010
  3. ^ 'I want adulation', The Guardian, 23 June 2009
  4. ^ Middle class boy with a dark side, London Evening Standard, 7 November 2006
  5. ^ 'Maybe feeling alive is only possible in the presence of death', The Guardian, 23 September 2007
  6. ^ IMDB Transcript "I went to an insight course at the parachute regiment. I thought, "I want to join up, do three years, go to Iraq, do my bit, get physically fit." So I went to White City barracks and I realized I had a real phobia about groups of men. I’m frightened of them, I feel much more comfortable around women. I’d love to be one of the boys but I always felt a bit on the outside. Maybe my masculine qualities come from over-compensating that I’m not one of the boys. Anyway, it was *beep* horrible man. I signed up for three years and after forty minutes I had to talk my way out of it. They don’t need people like me, they need someone who’s prepared to go over and kill people." Attitude Magazine, December 2009
  7. ^ Tom Hardy's life lessons, Men's Health
  8. ^ This time Heathcliff and Cathy will marry, 10 July 2010, Daily Mail
  9. ^ Tom Hardy Did Make Gay Sex Comments, The Advocate, 4 August 2010
  10. ^ IMDB transcript Simon Gage, Attitude Magazine, December 2009
  11. ^ notmyhairitisapalm
  12. ^ Tom Hardy Party
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