Of course they wanted Hardy for bartender Bob (whose nickname should have been “Silent”, an honorary twin to the small-time crook “Handsome Bob” Hardy played in Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla).Īccess unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime Video Sign up now for a 30-day free trial Sign up But Hardy is mesmerising with none of the bombast he brought to his Batman villain Bane or Bronson, the actor steers a course of quiet, restrained magnetism, until the trigger is inevitably pressed and the violence within unleashed.
As a tightly wound saga of gangsters, have-nots and life’s wounded strays healing each other, The Drop has the sting of over-familiarity.
“James was a great actor, a great artist and such a beautiful guy,” says Hardy. The film also features James Gandolfini in his final role as the bar’s beaten-down owner, who’s in over his head with the Chechen mafia. Hardy stars as the impassive, taciturn barman of a dive bar in Brooklyn who rescues an abused puppy from the fragile Nadia’s (Noomi Rapace) rubbish bin, where it was dumped by her thuggish ex (Matthias Schoenaerts). Dennis Lehane, chronicler of America’s dark underbelly, adapted it from his own short story “ Animal Rescue”. It is directed by the Belgian film-maker Michael Roskam, whose 2011 crime drama Bullhead, about a steroid-addicted cattle farmer, was nominated for an Oscar. The Drop is a far more comfortable fit for Hardy. Somehow, he even ended up in a Reese Witherspoon action-comedy directed by McG, This Means War, in which he looked less relaxed than a penguin in a shark pool. Wearing a snug olive T-shirt, jeans and a camouflage hat and puffing throughout on an e-cigarette, the 37-year-old actor sports multiple tattoos, proudly showing off the one on his right bicep that reads “Figlio mio bello” – “My beautiful son” in Italian.Īs it turned out, the Fury Road shoot ended up being postponed until summer 2012, but Hardy’s itinerant lifestyle only became more hectic in the interim with his rampant post-Bronson ascent. Meeting Hardy to discuss his new crime drama The Drop, on a warm, sunny day in Toronto, he does indeed prowl into yet another sizeable hotel suite, striding up and extending his hand in greeting, then circling the table before he takes a seat. It’s energy as well as a crippling emotion.” For a man who says he thrives on fear (of the inward rather than outward variety), perhaps that’s not an entirely bad thing.
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His demons have been well documented (booze and crack addictions in particular) and may be impossible to banish completely. Up close and personal, Hardy wouldn’t be described as threatening – in fact, he is pleasant, open, accommodating and unfailingly polite – but it seems that he’s perpetually suppressing turmoil and conflict, and just barely at that. It’s a restless, dangerous, coiled energy that film-makers like Winding Refn, O’Connor, Christopher Nolan, John Hillcoat and Steven Knight have exploited magnificently in films like Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Lawless and Locke. The make-up artist and I exchanged a nervous glance. Even though he was confined to a chair while a make-up artist applied menacing clown paint for one of the film’s fantasy stage sequences, the actor’s legs were in rapid motion under the protective smock it felt like being in confined quarters with a manacled carnivore that was struggling to stay calm until it was finally free to pounce on his prey, even more so because Hardy admitted to me that he was “ready to punch” Bronson’s director, Nicolas Winding Refn. He just couldn’t bear to sit still.Īnother time, I was sent to speak to Hardy in his make-up trailer while on location for Bronson, the film that first pushed his career onto its inexorably upward trajectory. I recall when I interviewed him for Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior, he hardly sat during a 40-minute conversation, instead roaming the large Soho hotel suite we were in, smoking out of the window or demonstrating martial-arts moves and training routines with Peanut, the African-American ex-Marine who was his personal trainer/best friend at the time and who he insisted on having by his side during the interview.