Tom Hardy

by James Haydock

  Tom didn’t stop there, though. In February 2012, he announced that he would be embarking on a road trip – across Siberia – in order to raise money for FLACK. Again, his popularity meant the press were all too eager to run any kind of story he gave them so it didn’t take long for his fans to learn of his latest fundraising venture. He said on his JustGiving page: ‘So please do cheer me on as I brave the Siberian Steppes by donating whatever you can afford. I hope to send the odd pic from along the way if I can work out how to use my phone without taking my gloves off!’

  FLACK isn’t the only charity Tom is heavily involved in. He is also an ambassador for the Prince’s Trust, a charity that helps young people to change their lives for the better. It offers practical and financial support and, since it was established in 1976, has helped more than 600,000 young people. It aims to reach out to those who have had problems at school, been in care, who are long-term unemployed or who have been in trouble with the law. In short, it gives a second chance to young people who have struggled – something Tom was bound to identify with.

  In May 2010, The Prince’s Trust announced Tom as one of its new ambassadors. To mark the announcement, Tom met eight young people aged between 19 and 24 who had turned their lives around with the help of the charity. They had all overcome their own setbacks which ranged from drug addiction to homelessness – areas familiar to Tom. He did some role plays with the group to help build their confidence and self-esteem. ‘I find their enthusiasm incredibly infectious, partly because I can really relate to their struggles,’ he said. ‘It’s great to be able to put my personal experience to some use, and help them build up some confidence.’

  In March 2012, Tom presented an award at The Prince’s Trust Celebrate Success Awards. He was joined by a host of other stars including Emma Bunton, Emeli Sandé and Ant and Dec – as well, of course, as Prince Charles with whom Tom had a chat in the obligatory star line-up. Speaking from the depths of his newly grown bushy beard, Tom said: ‘I got involved with the Prince’s Trust because I believe what they do is fantastic. I wanted to give back in any way that I could to my community and Great Britain, and I was looking for something to get involved with.’

  It was great to see Tom using his fame to support two causes close to his heart. He knew he’d been lucky to get a second chance in life and wanted to help others to do the same. Soon his new lease of life would take him Stateside and a step closer to realising his dreams.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  YOU MUSTN’T BE AFRAID TO DREAM A LITTLE BIGGER

  If ever there was a leading character from English literature that Tom Hardy was born to play, it is Heathcliff from Emily Bronte’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights. Looking at the characteristics of Heathcliff is like reading a Tom Hardy attribute checklist: brooding, intense, passionate and menacing. In 2009, Tom won the role of Heathcliff for an ITV drama adaptation written by Peter Bowker and directed by Coky Giedroyc, with whom Tom had now worked a couple of times. Speaking of his motivation for choosing Tom as his Heathcliff, Bowker commented: ‘Tom is the first Heathcliff I’ve ever seen who you honestly feel could beat the living daylights out of you. He brings great pain to the role.’

  Adapting Wuthering Heights for the screen is no easy task: the timeline of the narrative is complex; the power of the wild setting of the Yorkshire Moors is an integral part of the book and, while it lives on the page, it is difficult to capture its magnificence when filming; it has a broad narrative that spans the themes of obsession, betrayal, revenge and class. Wuthering Heights has been remoulded for countless adaptations and Heathcliff has been played by a host of outstanding actors such as Lawrence Olivier and Ralph Fiennes – but no screen version has ever quite lived up to the original source.

  Peter Bowker had enjoyed huge critical acclaim for several of his previous productions including Blackpool, a 2004 musical drama about a casino owner played by David Morrissey and Occupation, a drama about the Iraq war starring James Nesbitt. But how would he fare with condensing this classic and creating a programme suitable for prime-time transmission?

  Bowker had his work well and truly cut out and made some fairly hefty changes to the novel for his screenplay. He dispensed with Mr Lockwood, thereby losing the story’s narrator; he added several controversial elements such as Heathcliff digging up Cathy’s grave so that he can lie next to her corpse, and committing suicide as opposed to simply passing away of an unknown ailment as he does in the book. He also chose to open the drama with scenes that occur some way into the book, such as Edgar bringing Linton back to Wuthering Heights, which may have been confusing for viewers, particularly those not already familiar with the characters in the book. A proportion of the violence in the book was also expunged for TV audiences.

  One thing on which there would be no compromise, though, was the landscape that is so much a part of the atmosphere and mood of the story. Although at the time many dramas were being filmed in Eastern Europe because it is cheaper than filming in the UK, Wuthering Heights was filmed on location in Yorkshire. To have shot it anywhere but on the windswept, wild Yorkshire Moors would have been to deprive the drama of one of its vital components.

  Various locations around Yorkshire were used for filming. The village of Halton Gill boasts sweeping views of the moors all around it, so was chosen for filming the scenes at Gimmerton fair, while St Oswald’s Church in Arncliffe was recast as Gimmerton Chapel. Wuthering Heights itself is a central character to the story, so much care was taken to find a property with exactly the right appearance for the gloomy gothic farmhouse. There are, of course, no such houses perched up on the Moors so the production team found a house in Keighley to use for the exterior shots of the farmhouse. The magic of computer imaging was then used to place the Heights on top of the Moors for distance shots of the house in situ. The interior scenes were filmed at Oakwell Hall, in Birstall near Bradford, which closed for two weeks to accommodate the cast and crew. ‘It was very exciting having the film crew here and it will be interesting to see how much of Oakwell Hall we can recognise. Many of the museum’s historic items such as furniture, ornaments, paintings and wall hangings had to be removed into safe keeping to allow the crew to prepare the sets,’ observed Kirklees museums operations manager Deborah Marsland.

  At times, the Yorkshire Moors proved inhospitable for the cast and crew of Wuthering Heights. Transporting camera and sound equipment up to the moorland above Sheffield was by no means an easy task as the terrain was so rugged. The weather was also unpredictable (with plenty of rain making regular appearances) and predominantly windy – a lot of the actors found themselves suffering from wind burn and very tousled hair!

  While Tom’s profile had been increasing steadily over the past few years, the actress who was to be his Cathy was a newcomer. Charlotte Riley, originally from County Durham, had trained at LAMDA and won the role of Cathy just six months after she had left drama school. She remembers well the events leading up to discovering that she had been cast in the role. She was appearing in The Cherry Orchard at the Chichester Festival Theatre when her agent contacted her to let her know the good news. ‘I remember running outside and into the courtyard where Diana Rigg and Maureen Lipman were standing talking, and I screamed with happiness. I couldn’t believe it,’ she told the Daily Mail.

  Riley, of course, couldn’t wait to share her news with her family and rang her parents immediately. Her father Michael is an engineer and her mother Margaret is a nurse and bereavement counsellor. She also has a brother, Simon, who is 10 years her senior. Before going to drama school, Riley had not strayed far from home when she studied English at Durham University and clearly remains close to her family. Between attending university and going to drama school, she taught drama to disabled children, and also won an award for a comedy she wrote called Shaking Cecilia.

  Prior to working on Wuthering Heights, she had completed shooting on Stephan Elliott’s adaptation of Noel Coward’s Easy Virtue, in which she had starred alongside Colin Firth and Kris
tin Scott Thomas. Naturally, she had been nervous about the job: not only was she fresh out of drama school but she would be acting alongside luminaries of stage and screen. ‘Working with actors of that calibre really made me step up to my game,’ she said.

  It is testament to her talent and determination that she won such a meaty role as Cathy so early in her acting career. It was a big challenge to be playing such an iconic character, but to Riley it was ‘a dream come true’. Although she had not read the book prior to landing the role, she subsequently read it three times so that she could really get to grips with Cathy and was soon clear about how she wanted her take on the character to differ from others. ‘I wanted my portrayal of Cathy to have an earthy feel about her. From memory, no one seems to have played Cathy as a northerner, so I felt I could explore this aspect of her.’

  It might well have been daunting to be sharing the screen with an actor who has received as much critical acclaim as Tom and who is known for bringing so much to the characters he plays. For Riley, though, his earnestness proved to be inspiring rather than intimidating and his energy and dedication meant that those who acted alongside him were required to turn up the volume on their own performances. ‘If you’re playing opposite someone like that, you have to give as much as you are getting,’ she observed. ‘I knew there was going to be no holding back with his Heathcliff.’

  As the two of them were to play a couple who shared so much passion and pain, it was natural for them to want to get to know each other before shooting their scenes. When she first approached Tom, she was a little taken aback when he greeted her with one of his Charles Bronson impressions – apparently a party trick he often uses to entertain those around him. But the pair soon bonded – apparently over many cups of tea – and it wasn’t long before they were travelling to and from the filming locations every day. ‘I hadn’t met Tom before, so after the first day of rehearsals I thought, as we are going to fall so madly, deeply in love, we had better get to know each other,’ she recalled to the Daily Mail.

  As well as finding a companion in her co-star, Riley discovered she had a mentor in him too. She was new to television but Tom had been appearing in TV dramas for years so knew all about the technical aspects of putting them together. He helped her out and offered her advice to make the whole process easier – and so that she could concentrate on the job of playing her character. ‘We were in an embrace and Tom kept turning me around in between takes. He explained that it was to keep me in full camera view all the time. Little things like that were so helpful and really generous.’

  As for Tom, he was relishing playing the tough guy once again. He had the darkness of Heathcliff pegged and knew just how dangerous a character he could be. When talking about the role, he made it clear that when preparing for Heathcliff, he had drawn inspiration from contemporary references. ‘If you put [Heathcliff] in Sao Paolo in the modern day, he’s gonna be a bad boy. You put him in Cuba, in Scarface and he’s gonna be quite a nice foundation for a gangster,’ he told the Telegraph. Tom often pre-empts criticism of his work by openly declaring that he is expecting people to find holes in his acting. He had done so in the past when playing well-known characters, and Heathcliff was no exception. ‘Everybody knows Heathcliff, so I know I’m going to take casualties on it.’

  He needn’t have been anxious. Four million people tuned in to watch the drama and there was plenty of praise for Tom’s fierce and menacing Heathcliff. Some viewers and critics weren’t keen on how the story had been carved up or that certain liberties had been taken with it. Some also found fault with the dynamics of the relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy and felt that Charlotte Riley’s performance didn’t capture Cathy’s fickle nature well enough. They all, however, sang the praises of the leading man. The lauding of Tom’s performances was beginning to make familiar reading as, for several years, he’d been getting exceptional reviews for his work. The Independent on Sunday described him as: ‘One part smirking malevolence to two parts laser-eyed psychosis,’ and Rachel Cooke in the New Statesman went so far as to say that Tom was ‘the best Heathcliff I have seen’. She added that: ‘There is something about Hardy’s mouth – perhaps it is the unsettling contrast between his soft, pillowy lips and the teeth that they conceal, which look like mossy, tumbledown gravestones – that has you hanging on his every word, menace mingling with charm like the scent of cat’s piss on roses.’ The exact characteristics that had made Hollywood give him a swerve for Mr Darcy were now coming into their own and contributing to Tom’s glowing notices. It was as if he was finally coming home.

  Tom and Charlotte Riley meeting on Wuthering Heights was not just the start of a working relationship – over time, it developed into a romantic attachment. Although they became close on set, at this point Tom was still with the mother of his child, Rachael Speed, and both Riley and Tom were at pains to point out that they only started seeing each other after he had parted from Speed. The British press would have loved the story to have been different and desperately wanted a whiff of scandal but there was none to be had. At the time the press were trying to make something out of nothing, in the summer of 2009, to put any rumours firmly to bed, Riley stated: ‘I share a flat in West London with three other girls. There is no man in my life.’

  It wasn’t long before matters changed, though, and in September 2010, Riley confessed that she and Tom were engaged to be married. At the time of writing, they remain engaged with seemingly no date fixed for the nuptials. In March 2012, when asked whether they would be tying the knot in the near future, Tom replied: ‘You’d have to ask Charlotte when we’re getting married. She’s a difficult woman to pin down, as she’s always so busy with work.’ The pair are often photographed at events together and are clearly very happy. Tom is often singing his fiancée’s praises in interviews, obviously impressed with her talent as an actress. But with both of them so tied up with their respective work schedules, their friends and family may have a little while to wait before they have to buy new hats.

  When inhabiting the skins of some of his more brutal or psychopathic characters, Tom Hardy builds these roles out of what he finds frightening himself. Those who interview him often want to know just what it is that inspires him to give such convincing – and at times terrifying – performances. His reply usually focuses on how he allows himself to delve into what it is about the character’s actions that would intimidate him. Speaking about Freddie Jackson in The Take, he noted: ‘A lot of the scary characters and scary moments I’ve played have come from what’s scared me. I visualise these people doing it to me. So when I’m playing Freddie doing something – killing… that’s some cold s**t and that would hurt me.’

  The Take was Sky 1’s big-budget summer drama serial of 2009. Based on the Martina Cole novel of the same name, it is a crime saga that follows the lives of a family of East London gangsters over the course of a decade. At the start of the action, 1984, Freddie has just been released from prison. While incarcerated he befriends crime boss Ozzy, who recruits him to the firm he operates from the inside. As well as being psychopathically violent, Freddie is power hungry and will stop at nothing to work his way up the criminal career ladder. Freddie’s partner in crime is his rather more cerebral cousin Jimmy who is at first an idolising sidekick to Freddie, but ultimately proves to be smarter and more calculating than him. Freddie is married to the long-suffering Jackie whose sister Maggie also happens to be Jimmy’s girlfriend. It’s a tale packed with violence, sex, jealousy, betrayal and greed. ‘It’s incredible, dramatic stuff,’ said Tom.

  It was typical Martina Cole territory and her loyal readers (of whom there are plenty) were unlikely to be disappointed by the adaptation. Martina Cole writes a book every year and has an army of fans who delight in knowing that she will deliver exactly what they want with her books: gritty gangland crime fiction. Cole published her first book, Dangerous Lady, in 1992 – she had, in fact, written it some years earlier but had stuffed the manuscript in a drawer and forgotte
n about it. When she finally rediscovered it, she realised that what she had written was actually rather credible and so sent it to a literary agent. The agent recognised that her writing style and the subject matter were quite unlike anything else that was on the market and within days she had struck a publishing deal. Three of her books, including Dangerous Lady and The Take have been turned into hit TV dramas.

  The drama boasted a fine selection of actors for its leading roles. Kierston Wareing, who had received critical acclaim for her role in Andrea Arnold’s film Fish Tank was perfectly cast as Jackie, and Charlotte Riley, fresh from filming Wuthering Heights with Tom, was to play her more even-tempered sister Maggie. Jimmy was played by Shaun Evans and the legendary Brian Cox played Ozzy. It was Tom, though, who commanded the most attention with his seething, snarling, brutish Freddie.

  Freddie is a horrific man with few – if any – redeeming features. He spends most of his time eliminating anyone who stands in the way of his advancement through the ranks of the East End underworld. He drinks heavily, gets off his face on drugs, has sex with countless women who aren’t his wife and sets an appalling example to his children. Worst of all, in a particularly harrowing scene, he rapes his wife’s sister. Charlotte Riley, in fact, described Freddie as ‘like a rabid dog’. Could this character perhaps be the nastiest piece of work in Tom’s expanding catalogue of dysfunctional, aggressive types?

  Tom, as usual, wanted to find the heart of his character, to work out where he might be able to add layers of complexity to him in order to make him three-dimensional. ‘Everyone has a point of view,’ he explained to indieLondon website. ‘So when approaching these characters – if they’re soldier, terrorist, cop or criminal – you’re going to find human traits in every walk of life, in every hole, under every rock. There’s going to be a tale of hope or competition or love or rivalry – a human story.’