Finally, LD50 was filmed between October 2002 and early 2003 (also the year of its release). In it, Tom plays a character called Matt, a member of a group of animal rights activists. Having been involved in animal liberation raids on research laboratories in the past, this time the group reunite to rescue a friend who was left behind at a facility when a previous raid was interrupted. The group receives a message indicating that their friend is being subjected to a traumatic ordeal. Their mercy mission takes a sinister turn and they get more than they bargained for as they attempt to track down their missing friend. Classified as a ‘psychological horror’, the film was probably most notable for the fact it co-starred Melanie Brown, aka Scary Spice. It was first shown in the USA at the Detroit International Horror Film Festival but in most territories it went straight to DVD and made little impact.
Underneath it all, Tom was still a troubled soul. Like many other young actors, he was plagued by insecurity, as he recalled in a 2009 interview with Daily Variety: ‘I came back from Star Trek, and I didn’t have any work, and I panicked.’ To make matters worse, he was still a slave to his drink and drug addictions. While acting was occupying his ‘busy head’ to a degree, the only way he could really calm the noise in his mind was by seeking escape into the fug of alcohol and drug binges.
With the benefit of hindsight, he more recently reflected on this period of his life when he met up for a second time with Lodown magazine and remembered an interview he had done with them during the press junkets for Star Trek. Talking to them in 2011, he looked back on what his state of mind had been in 2002: ‘I wasn’t even on the f*****g planet. Let’s make no bones about it, I was on rocket fuel. Man I was f****d. And I thought that film was going to make me a superstar. How wrong was I?’
Tom is famous for his candidness in interviews and one story in particular (that has been repeated time and again) demonstrates the extent to which he seemed hellbent on derailing a potentially remarkable career. Speaking on The Jonathan Ross Show in 2010, he admitted that there had been many occasions on which he’d blacked out whilst bingeing on either drugs or alcohol. He recounted a time when he had been in LA for a meeting with director John Woo about a possible film role. Thanks to who knows what kind of misdemeanours, he missed the meeting, instead waking up in a bed in an unknown location in the city, next to a naked man with a gun – and a cat. It might sound like a scene from The Hangover but this was Tom’s reality at the time. As he told Ross: ‘The safety of the gun was off, so I must have fallen asleep looking down the barrel of a gun.’
As Tom is now acutely aware, talent alone is not enough to build an acting career – it takes hard work and commitment, and his exorbitant behaviour was proving a massive impediment to his progression. ‘There comes a point when the world will stop rewarding potential and talent, natural gifts. There’s only so long that people will put up with the potential of working with someone who could be brilliant,’ Tom told Men’s Health magazine. Fortunately for his health and his career, his exhausted body forced his hand in cleaning up his act.
Excessive indulgence in potentially lethal substances is a habit that can only be endured for so long before the body – and often the mind – gives up. Inevitably things build towards a critical point and, in some cases, an addict will take heed of the warning signs and choose that time to change their behaviour. For actor and comedian Robin Williams, for example, the wake-up call came in the form of the drug-related death of his friend John Belushi, in whose company he had been the night Belushi died. The tragedy brought into focus the danger of his own addiction to cocaine. He checked into rehab and, since becoming clean, has had the most remarkable film career. In other cases, sadly, these warning signs are dismissed and can lead to tragic and untimely deaths. In press interviews with Tom, the point at which he woke up to himself is repeatedly referred to – and why not? It makes great copy for journalists and it gives Tom a unique selling point: the bad boy from the right side of the tracks who pulled himself back from self-destruction.
Towards the end of 2002, during the nocturnal hours when London’s West End truly comes alive, Tom was often to be spotted out and about on the busy streets, chasing highs. The superstardom he had expected had not been forthcoming and he didn’t have work on tap to occupy his restless mind. His insecurities piled up and he quietened his inner turmoil by participating in a lifestyle that blurred the hard edges of reality. One night, on Soho’s Old Compton Street, his indulgence went too far and he collapsed, crack pipe in hand, covered in blood and vomit. His burnout was so severe that he was taken straight to hospital. Upon his release, he returned to his parents’ house in East Sheen and they helped him enrol on a recovery programme. ‘That was a lesson to me,’ he told the Mail & Guardian in 2011. ‘I was fed to the Kraken and popped out the other side. In death I was reborn…’
Sadly, one casualty of his breakdown was his marriage to Sarah. For obvious reasons, Tom doesn’t go into great detail about this aspect of his recovery but part of his rehabilitation was to make amends to his parents and his ex-wife for his past behaviour. His recovery also signalled that he had finally grown up and taken responsibility for himself and his actions. ‘It was the end of a childhood which had gone on too long, that didn’t grow into adulthood and wasn’t going to work alongside my profession,’ he admitted.
What his bad behaviour did do, though, was to give him experience of the terrifying side of human nature. His predilection for dangerous substances and situations pushed him mentally – and often physically – into all kinds of desperate places; corners of the world and of the mind where most would rather not go. And he has exploited his knowledge of these grim recesses of the soul for some of his most spectacular performances.
Although he had ditched the drink and drugs, he was all too aware that there was still chaos inside his head that needed some kind of outlet. ‘I can’t stand being in my head, that’s why I have to get out of it. That’s where the drugs and drink came in. I don’t do any of that any more, though. That’s why I have to act,’ he explained to The Times in 2007. To the delight of critics and fans, Tom had decided to channel his adrenal fizz into his work – a wise choice, considering the breathtaking results that have followed.
It was fitting, then, that the first role he undertook as the clean and sober Tom was that of a desperate drug addict. Guided by his agent Lindy King, the direction of Tom’s rebooted career was to have its foundations on the stage rather than the screen. In Arabia We’d All Be Kings, by Stephen Adly Guirgis, is set in New York in 1996, at the time when mayor Rudy Giuliani was redeveloping Times Square. The action of the play takes place around a bar in Hell’s Kitchen, where the misfits who constitute the characters of the play gather. The production was directed by Robert Delamere and staged in April and May of 2003 at the Hampstead Theatre in London, which touted the play as ‘an uplifting tragi-comedy capturing the vibrancy of a unique precinct under threat’.
Tom’s character was the aptly-named Skank, a junkie who turns to selling his body for money to fund his increasing drug dependency. It might seem ironic that this was the role that restarted Tom’s acting career, but for him it was a gift: ‘After I came out of hospital, my first job was playing a crackhead alcoholic rent boy in a play, which was tremendously cathartic because I was re-enacting a load of stuff I had just lived,’ he said in an interview with the Irish Times.
It should also be remembered that this was Tom’s professional stage debut. Since he left drama school to be in Band of Brothers, all his jobs had involved acting for film. For someone who has admitted – and demonstrated – that he has a debilitating fear of failure, to go from rehab straight to a stage performance must have been daunting, to say the least. On the stage, there are no second takes, no re-shoots and the actors have to bring everything to their performance, night after night. Speaking to the Evening Standard a few months after the play had ended its run, Tom described how he felt when acting on stage. ‘Terrified – every time. You’re bringing a
character to life in a gladiatorial ring where people want to see you fail.’
When the theatre critics came to assess the play, failure was not a word they juxtaposed with the name Tom Hardy. Quite the opposite, in fact. Whatever their comments on the production itself, they were united in their praise of Tom’s performance. Nicholas De Jongh of the Evening Standard described it as ‘a remarkable stage debut’ and Paul Taylor of the Independent described Skank as ‘brilliantly played by Tom Hardy’.
Barely had Tom taken his final bow at the Hampstead Theatre than he found himself travelling up to Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre to work under the direction of Robert Delamere once more. This time, the play was The Modernists written by Jeff Noon, a writer better known for his fantasy novels than for his plays. The Modernists is set in Soho in the early 1960s and the drama centres around four musicians who are Mods in the old sense of the word. They live at a time before Mods became associated with violence, parkas and scooters; they follow a strict dress code and they speak using a very specific vocabulary. In fact, they are somewhat dandy and not at all like the popular projection of the Mod. Tom’s role was to play Vincent, who is described as the ‘alpha male’ of the group. Critics mostly agreed that the play had a lot of potential but was lacking in drama. Dominic Cavendish, writing for the Daily Telegraph, commented: ‘The play’s main event proves to be the leader Vincent’s psychological collapse, mirroring this hermetic sub-culture’s own implosion. But the crisis always feels more aridly theoretical than theatrically true-to-life.’
Once the short run of The Modernists came to an end, there was no rest for the reinvigorated young actor and, in the autumn, he went on to consolidate his stage craft by appearing at the Royal Court Theatre in Blood, by Swedish playwright Lars Noren. Without wanting to give too much of the plot away, Blood is a modern reworking of the Oedipus story and Tom’s character, Luca, is a medical student who was orphaned as a child. His psychoanalyst, Eric (Nicholas Le Prevost), is also his lover and, through the course of the play, Eric’s wife (Francesca Annis) develops a sexual relationship with him as well.
The play itself didn’t fare well in terms of the critics’ reactions. Paul Taylor writing for the Independent found it so farcical that he felt the ‘most impressive feature of the evening is the heroic way Ms Annis and Mr Le Prevost manage to keep a straight face’. Other critics were less harsh: Michael Billington of the Guardian felt the play was flawed but found it ‘exquisitely gripping’. He described Tom as giving Luca ‘intemperate rage’ and Nicholas De Jongh of the Evening Standard was even more enthusiastic, stating: ‘Superlative Tom Hardy invests Luca with raw energy and suppressed desperation.’
It seemed that Tom had staunch support from the Evening Standard camp so it was perhaps unsurprising when his name was amongst the nominations for that newspaper’s theatre awards for 2003. The category in which he found himself nominated was ‘Outstanding Newcomer’ and his shortlisted rivals were Lisa Dillon for her role as Hilda in Ibsen’s The Master Builder and Amanda Drew for Eastward Ho.
The lavish awards ceremony was held at the Savoy Hotel in November 2003. The great and the good of London’s theatreland were present and the proceedings were presided over by Rory Bremner. The award for Outstanding Newcomer was presented by Nicholas Hytner, then the newly appointed director of the National Theatre. As a prelude to presenting the award, Hytner gave a light-hearted speech in which he congratulated all three of the shortlisted nominees and quipped that he hoped they would only do enough ‘dodgy television’ to finance their loft conversions.
The award, of course, went to Tom for his performances in both In Arabia We’d All Be Kings and Blood. He admitted he was very nervous as he collected his statuette and amongst his obligatory thanks were the Hampstead Theatre and those involved in getting the production off the ground there, as well as his parents, his girlfriend, his agent, Lindy King and all his friends and family, who he referred to as his ‘support unit’. And not to be forgotten was his dog, Max, who he said would be very grumpy if he was left off the list. Finally, he expressed his gratitude to the Evening Standard, Nick De Jongh and everyone who had voted for him.
To further boost Tom’s credibility, his performance in In Arabia We’d All be Kings also garnered him a nomination at the 2004 Laurence Olivier Theatre Awards, again in the category of Most Promising Newcomer in an Affiliate Theatre. Sadly he didn’t win the double this time and the award went to playwright Debbie Tucker for Born Bad, also staged at the Hampstead Theatre.
It is gratifying to observe just how successfully Tom had managed to turn his life around in the space of a year. As 2003 drew to a close, he was sadly without his marriage – but there were so many positives on which he could draw as 2004 dawned. He had conquered his drug and drink addictions and, although recovering from such dependencies are battles that are never truly won, he was in a new frame of mind and could see that his new-found sobriety was bearing fruit on the work front. He had achieved recognition for his acting and was determined to capitalise on this. It was starting to look as though Tom’s time might yet come.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE PLAY’S THE THING
It was no surprise that, towards the end of 2003, the name Tom Hardy started to appear in the obligatory end-of-year round-ups heralding British stars of the future. The Evening Standard included Tom in their list of Bright Young Things, alongside fellow actors Rosamund Pike, Sienna Miller and Orlando Bloom; and W magazine numbered him among their collection of fresh talent that was, apparently, ‘filling up casting directors’ wish lists on both sides of the Atlantic.’ His new-found dedication to his craft had started to pay dividends and, thanks to the canny agent he had in Lindy King, offers of work were piling up. ‘I’ve played a range of different screen and stage characters and it’s all because of Lindy,’ he told The Stage. ‘I’m 100 per cent committed to her.’
In March 2004, the play Festen opened at the Almeida Theatre in London’s Islington. Adapted from the 1998 Danish art-house film of the same name, it deals with the traumatic subject of sexual abuse within a family. In its filmic form, Festen had been the first work of the Dogme movement, a group of Scandinavian film-makers whose desire was to produce films in a far more pared-down style than their Hollywood contemporaries. Writer David Eldridge adapted the film for an English stage production, to be directed by Rufus Norris. The simplicity of the film’s production and direction allowed for a smooth transfer from the screen to the more intimate environment of a theatrical production.
The action of the play unfolds over the course of two days of festivities as a family gather for the 60th birthday celebrations of its patriarch, Helge. Three of his children are present: Christian, Michael and Mette (Christian’s twin, Linda, having recently committed suicide for reasons that later become apparent). During the party, Christian reveals that Helge sexually abused both him and Linda when they were children and, from this shocking disclosure, the tension of the play builds.
In this production, Christian, Michael and Mette were played by Jonny Lee Miller, Tom Hardy and Claire Rushbrook respectively. The production as a whole received unanimous critical acclaim: the writing, the sound staging, the set design, the direction and the acting were all deemed to be outstanding and it was agreed that an intense and powerful drama had been created and executed perfectly. ‘This Festen is an embodiment of what theatre should be,’ proclaimed Paul Taylor in the Independent.
Tom’s character, Michael, is an aggressive brute of a man who is shown to be a racist and a bully. Once more, the actor’s job involved getting to grips with the dark underbelly of human nature and, true to form, Tom gave a captivating and nuanced performance. Michael Coveney of the Daily Mail referred to him as ‘electrifying’ while Tom’s long-time supporter Nicholas De Jongh said he turned in a ‘remarkable, quicksilver performance’.
Speaking about the succession of troubled characters he had brought to life for the stage, Tom commented: ‘I do feel alive when I play these char
acters, like I owe them something. There’s no such thing as a coincidence.’ His experiences of the bleaker side of life were still feeding into his work and illuminating his characters with an authenticity that was continuing to attract a lot of positive attention. While Tom’s own experiences helped him to have an affinity with some of the disturbed characters he played, he was always aware that it was not within his remit to impose his own opinions or personality on them.
Having finished his stint at the Almeida, Tom journeyed across the River Thames to south London, where he undertook another fringe play, Roger and Vanessa, this time at Theatre 503, a small performance space above the Latchmere pub in Clapham. The decision to stage the play had come about when Tom happened to meet the play’s American writer, Brett C Leonard. This fortuitous encounter occurred at RADA, where a rehearsed reading of the play was taking place as part of a showcase of American writers’ work. Coincidentally, at this reading, the part of Roger was taken by none other than Stephen Adly Guirgis, the writer of In Arabia We’d All Be Kings, the play that had been responsible for launching Tom’s career.
Tom felt a connection with both the playwright and his work and, in his typically energetic fashion, decided he wanted to stage the play himself as soon as possible. Getting Roger and Vanessa off the ground was a frenetic experience for all involved. The ethos behind the enterprise was for the play to be brought together at lightning speed, and for the professionals involved to fit it in around their usual work commitments. Tom, who would play Roger, had just finished his run in Festen and was tied up with filming the TV drama Colditz. Linda Park, the American actress who was to play Vanessa, was flown in from LA during a gap in her schedule. Robert Delamere, with whom Tom had worked on In Arabia We’d All Be Kings, was enlisted to direct and had a production opening at the Almeida just 24 hours after Roger and Vanessa was due to open! No mean feat, but as Tom put it, ‘We were all busy but we just jammed the work together. It was a workshop vibe, for the love of the work.’
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