That Touch of Venom

If I were to say to you, dear Reader: ‘Venom’, what images are conjured up in your head? The 2018 rap song by Eminem, perhaps?
‘Venom, (I got that) adrenaline momentum’. Gangster.
Or maybe you think of Eddie Brock? Not as gangster as Eminem. Investigative journalist, rather, from Spider-Man’s Marvel-Sony Universe? Ya know, that character that plays host to Venom itself—that black reptilian symbiote vigilante—played by the always-fantastic Tom Hardy?

Starring in this year’s biggest Marvel film, Venom: The Last Dance (to be directed by Kelly Marcel), this acting legend takes this goofy and weird (and unnecessarily gooey) anti-hero to new heights. So whenever I hear ‘Venom’: I think of Hardy. The Bane-in-the-2012-superhero-film-The-Dark-Knight-Rises Hardy. The Reggie-or-Ronnie-Kray-in-the-2015-crime-drama-Legends Hardy. The Dunkirk Hardy. The always-humble-and-always-motivated-like-a-pheonix-rising-from-the-ashes Hardy. The Commander-of-the-Order-of-the-British-Empire Hardy. Tom Hardy, who tackles it all, white-knuckled; no bravado, always with a touch of venom. He seems to cast his web wide, like a spider himself, whenever he tackles a new character and leaves behind a touch of venom too.

Born in Hammersmith to an artist mum and a comedy-writer dad, Edward Thomas Hardy (later renamed casually as just Tom) came into this world a bit of a wild child. Growing up in East Sheen, a wealthy south-London suburb, to a middle-class household, there was no indication at the start of Hardy’s life that he would ever become a Hollywood movie star. Anything but, actually. The youngest of three siblings, the young Tom loved using his imagination, and exploring, and running around causing mischief.

Despite attending prestigious boarding-house private schools (and then volleying over to public education at age 10) to get the best start in life, learning never seemed to interest young him. He often got into playground disputes and wagged class.

‘I learned Latin at the age of nine,’ Hardy told Filmatic, ‘and certain expectations were made of me to go to St. Paul’s, Oxbridge, maybe, and all that kind of thing. And I failed systematically to meet the mark—who I am and what I should have been are two very different things.’

At the age of 11, Hardy’s debauchery really started to kick in. He has started hanging out with the wrong crowd, and loitering-about, listening to rap music. He started sniffing glue at 11 (on school grounds, consequently being expelled), and dabbled with hallucinogens by age 13. By the time he was 16, he was hooked on dirty crack cocaine and was facing 14 years behind bars for stealing a flashy brand-new Mercedes and waving a Glock at onlookers. Reportedly, he described those six weeks to hear back from the Crown prosecutor the scariest time of his life. No surprise. Obviously his parents wanted nothing to do with him, having kicked him out of the family home. He was let off scot-free, but only because of a technicality—the lad he was in the car with was the son of a well-known diplomat.

‘I would have sold my mother for a rock of crack,’ he told Yahoo! News New Zealand in 2018, proudly 15 years sober, whilst on-the-road promoting Mad Max: Fury Road. ‘I was a shameful suburban statistic. I was told very clearly, “You go down that road, Tom, you won’t come back. That’s it. All you need to know.”’

As Tom was living this rebellious lifestyle, he was thinking of ways to make-ends-meet independently. He unwillingly auditioned for in London’s Richmond Drama School, thinking that that was the only thing he could potentially be good at. He got accepted into the course (suprising him greatly) and went on to feature in some amateur stage productions, treading the boards, in Measure for Measure, Tartuffe, The Matchmaker, Ivanov, Filumena and Anatol.

When asked about how he got into the acting game, he said: ‘In the end there was nothing else I could do. I had a busy head and I didn’t really want to do things I found boring. 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.’

At age 20, just starting out in acting school, Hardy also tried his hand at modelling, appearing on Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast and consequently winning the series competition. He was named the winner of the Find Me a Supermodel section and took home a sizable cheque (which unfortunately, reportedly, went on drugs) and (quite bizarrely) a toolbox. He was also signed (very briefly) to Europe’s leading London-based modelling agency, Models 1. Hardy had introduced himself on The Big Breakfast as a ‘20 year-old Virgo’ who ‘love[d] Eddie Izzard and hates football’, and whose acting heroes were Gary Oldman and Steven Berkoff.

Funnily enough, Oldman still is his main source of inspiration to this day. During his tenure at drama school, Hardy replicated Gary’s style in several assignments and plays.

I bet Hardy would have been so absolutely star-struck, and wouldn’t have believed his luck, being cast years later in the 2012 crime-drama film, Lawless, where he got to work with the man himself.

Hardy hit-hard at the audition circuit, trying his luck independently at getting on TV, to unfortunately no avail. As his dream was starting to fade, Hardy was certainly scrambling for anything. Tom got in touch with an old childhood friend, Edward Tracy, who he used to go to school with, and vibe-out smoking and listening to music together. Tracy (under the stage name Eddie Too Tall) convinced Hardy (who went by Frankie Pulitzer) to record a mixtape with him. They did, allowing Hardy the chance to have a brief stint as a rapper. They recorded a mixtape together, Falling On Your Arse in 1999, but that failed to be released until 2018.

‘Rap music was hugely influential for me,’ Tom told Buzzfeed this year, ‘as an artist and the spoken word, and what you can create with just a voice and some words.’

Hardy had taken influence from hip-hop in the shaping of his Marvel Cinematic Universe character, Venom. The final instalment—Venom: The Last Dance—debuted in cinemas last month. He went on to reference and praise the tonal qualities of rappers like Method Man, Redman, Busta Rhymes, and Biggie Smalls, adding that ‘something about them is larger, bigger, and epic in the soundscape that they have.’

So what with his rap career going nowhere, his modelling offering next to nothing and his acting turning into a distant dream, difficult to obtain, it was at a chance meeting at a pub where he was talking to as friend that everything changed. The friend, who was also part of the drama school he was attending, told Hardy that he had heard rumours of local audition calls for a new super-big TV series based on a book by Stephen E. Ambrose called Band of Brothers, developed by Tom Hanks. Tightened bootstraps and off Hardy went.

‘Band of Brothers was my first job,’ Tom Hardy told IGN in 2002, ‘so I was virtually out of the frying pan and into the fire, really. I’d not had previous experience with working in front of the camera, so there was dealing with that.’

The Tom Hardy Band of Brothers role was that of Private John A. Janovec. Hardy suitably slotted in with the rest of the cast. The war had come to an end, and after he had been relieved, Janovec was killed in a jeep accident.

Though the guy didn’t get massive worldwide attention for the role, his contact list got decidedly bigger. He was rubbing shoulders with big names, like Michael Fassbender, Jimmy Fallon, Donnie Wahlberg, and Dominic Cooper. The list goes on.

After wrapping on Band of Brothers, Hardy continued to achieve at school. It was after a night-out, in which he woke up on a random street covered in his own blood and vomit, that he decided to get the help he needed. He had realised that the addiction was the thing that ultimately would have destroyed him.

In a 2017 interview he is quoted with saying: ‘If I had four pints of lager and half a bottle of vodka I could turn this room into an absolute f**king nightmare in about three minutes. I could destroy everything in my life I have worked so hard for.’

In his 28 day rehab stint, Tom got successfully clean and started finding a passion for fitness. He started to find that keeping his mind occupied was the best way for him to curb his cravings; jujitsu and working out were his two go-to activities whilst in recovery.

Hardy explained to reporters that being sober isn’t easy and it is hard to stay clean, but he says his tattoos serve as a reminder of how far he has come.

Leaving rehab (and understanding that he couldn’t get his next craving from drugs), he fully invested himself into acting, got an agent, and scored his next on-screen role in Ridley Scott’s book-to-screen 2001 war-film, Black Hawk Down.

Maybe he had taken to war films, purely because he too was living in a type of battlefield?

The film, a brutal depiction of the Somali Civil War’s Battle of Mogadishu, showed Hardy as Army Ranger Lance Twombly getting separated from his unit with Shawn Nelson (played by Trainspotting’s Ewen Bremner), who lost his hearing after Twombly discharged his gun near his ears.

Whilst preparing for the role, he wanted to fully invest himself into the character by learning everything he could. He told IGN: ‘There are these people who have fought and will fight and will die. It’s a responsibility if you’re going to go in there and play a character like that, and the pressure is enormous.’

It’s with that humble mind-set that he started taking off in his career, for sure. He started getting roles chucked at him left, right and centre. On TV, stage and screen. And the hard work was paying off too. He was receiving awards, like the London Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Newcomer, and was even nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award.

In 2008, Hardy’s role as infamous prisoner, Charles Bronson, in Danish director, Nicolas Winding Refn’s biopic prison drama, Bronson.

Charles Bronson, for those of you who don’t know, is the UK’s most violent and notorious incarcerated prisoners.

To prepare for the role, Hardy insisted to speak to the man himself, calling him several times and having lengthy phone conversations before finally meeting him in person.

Having only five weeks to prepare for the roll, Hardy put on 14kg by ‘eating and my arse very quickly got very fat’, Hardy said in an interview with Ask Men.

He had a very haphazard diet of ‘chicken and rice, pizza, Häagen-Dazs, and Coca-Cola’. Hardy needed to become a big guy, a brawler.

‘To ‘become’ Charlie Bronson I had to quickly put a lot of weight quickly on my forearms, chest, and neck. By the time I’d finished, my legs looked like those of a stork in comparison to the top half of my body.’

The film garnered wide-spread acclaim, and critics went bonkers over Hardy’s performance and transformation. Even the man himself was impressed! ‘I honestly believe nobody on the planet could play me as Tom did,’ Bronson told The Times in 2019. ‘He is more like me than I am!’

Maybe it was his demons that he needed to revisit when playing the violent characters that gave Hardy an idea. In 2010, Hardy became an ambassador for the Prince’s Trust, a UK-based youth charity that provided training, personal development, business start-ups and mentoring.

It was also with his newfound willingness to adapt his body and mind-set and drive to encompass a role that really set Hardy aside from the rest. He played US Marine Tommy Riordan who (after returning home from service) took to the world of MMA.

‘Violence still has a romance for me,’ he told Far Out.

Hardy, who always goes that extra mile, gained a reported 13kg of pure muscle for the role. Buffed.

He kept that body weight stable for what remains as one of his most memorable transformations—that of Bane, the super-villian who is renown for ‘Beating the Bat’ in Christopher Nolan’s 2012 The Dark Knight Rises. Hardy certainly packed on the muscle to play the villain, Bane, but some Batman fans felt his physical transformation didn’t do the character justice. Sod what they think. Hardy knew what he was doing, and he did it well. Starring alongside Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne’s Batman, Anne Hathaway as Selina Kylie (aka Batwoman), and his personal acting hero, Gary Oldman who played Inspector Gordon. Hardy had played alongside Gary in several tinier films before Batman, fanboying at the star. They had first worked together in Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of the John le Carre novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy where Oldman played George Smiley, an intelligence officer working for ‘The Circus’.

‘I spent my entire experience with Gary staring at him, and not returning any lines,’ Hardy revealed. ‘He’s basically God, you know?’

The film received a wave of positive reviews and cemented Hardy as a force to watch. His versatility, too, was really starting to show.

Talking about versatility, Hardy took some down time from the big screen, by playing Alfie Solomons in the BBC crime-drama, Peaky Blinders, before his next big roles that showed his versatility in a new light. It came in 2014 when it was announced that Brian Helgeland would direct Legends, an adaptation of John Pearson’s book, The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins with Hardy starring as the main leads. Yes, you read that right. Leads. Two of them, to be exact.

Ronnie and Reggie—the Kray twins—for those of you who don’t know, were ‘celebrated’ English gangsters in 50’s and 60’s London, and headed The Firm, a gang well-known around the UK for owning the underground. The Firm became renown as murderers, gamblers, robbers and arsonists.

Helgeland spoke to Ropes of Silicon in 2014 into adapting the film and told the reporter that he had hung-out with a well-known Kray associate, ‘Brown Bread’ Fred Foreman, in London once. ‘I had drinks with him in his local haunt,’ he said. ‘When we finished he got up to go and they feted him at the bar. I said to him, ‘what about the bill?’ and he replied, ‘we don’t pay.”’ Spooky.
When offered the role by Helgeland, Tom Hardy was so keen on playing Ronnie Kray that he even suggested to Helgeland that if he gave him the role of Ronnie, Hardy would play the role of Reggie for free.

‘[The Kray’s] are about as familiar as a red telephone box in many aspects really,’ Hardy said to Red Carpet News TV in 2015. ‘That was then and playing them now was a question of going back to look at all the source materials that’s available. There’s a lot of source material on the Krays.’

The film drew huge acclaim for Hardy, and took over the Top 10 list in Britain for several weeks. It also nabbed him awards in Britain, the US and the UK for his phenomenal performance.
Over the next three years, Hardy continued delivering acting gold by starring as the villainous fur trapper, John S. Fitzgerald in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant (where Hardy also received his first Oscar nomination). He created, co-produced, and took the lead in the eight-part historical fiction series Taboo alongside none other than his dad, Edward ‘Chips’ Hardy. He played a Royal Air Force Fighter Pilot in Christopher Nolan’s 2017 Dunkirk. And all the while staying grounded and cool as they come. And hardworking, of course. He works at whatever is thrown his way.
No better way to introduce the titular Venom, his star superhero magnum opus, than with the 2018 Ruben Fleischer-directed film of the same name.

In the 2018 film, Eddie Brock tries to take down the notorious Carlton Drake, founder of the Life Foundation. Whilst investigating one of Drake’s experiments, Eddie’s body merged with the alien, Venom, who tries to control the new and dangerous abilities.

The film took over the Marvel cinematic world and garnered a huge following from adoring fans.

The sequel film, Venom: Let There Be Carnage was released in 2021 (with so much hype) and the final chapter, Venom: The Last Dance, was released last month.

For superhero films, the Venom franchise was sort of like an amusement park ride, maximizing of over-stimulation and whacky concepts. But it was with Hardy’s hearty performance that it provided a career highlight and treat for the audience.

‘I’ve loved every moment of Eddie and Venom and I was really fond of them,’ Hardy told IGN this year. ‘I’d play them any time, you know, because there’s a special place that exists within me to want to operate those two characters wherever you put them in whatever capacity. I feel like a sense of obligation and responsibility and duty of care to those two that will never end. I’ll always be with them.’

The great thing about Tom Hardy is that he is doesn’t just ‘go there’. He ‘goes there’. From his rocky childhood, to rehab, to starting off in Band of Brothers, to taking the world as the Kray twins, to encompassing Venom, he has a range that is rarely seen in Hollywood today.

He commits, and will continue to commit. No matter the character, Tom Hardy will hit any role harder than any other actor in Hollywood. With a little touch of venom.