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Tom Hardy in Pieces: An Encounter With a Singular Movie Star in One Winnebago and Five Parts

From a trailer in Wales, the star of Venom: Let There Be Carnage opens up about the challenges of becoming a Marvel superhero, his history of playing “’grrrr’ characters”, life in his “engine room years”, and a potential business meeting with Spider-Man

Miranda Collinge

10/08/2021

1. The part where he's not there

Tom Hardy’s trailer is stationed in the carpark of a film studio on the outskirts of Cardiff. It’s one of the flashier kind, with a kitchenette and seated area and some other rooms at the back I don’t see which presumably contain a toilet and a bed or, I don’t know, chaise longue. The seated area has a wipe-clean, upholstered bench down one side, which I’m sitting on, and a white leatherette armchair in the opposite corner which, it must be said, has the slight quality of a throne. There are letterbox windows high up on either side, a flat screen TV on the wall, and a strange mirrored panel in the ceiling. There is a bag of sweets on the table by the chair, and some bumper packs of chewing gum, and no other notable items to report besides a dog bed and two dog bowls on the floor, which have a blingy, coppery finish that draws the eye.

It’s the kind of trailer — and they are the kind of dog bowls — you’d hope would be made available to one of our most beloved actors who, in a poll earlier this year, was voted the number one “male British film star of the 21st century”. However, there is one thing that is conspicuously lacking from Tom Hardy’s trailer and that is Tom Hardy.

Instead, the armchair is occupied by his assistant, Natalie, an elegant blonde who carries her phone on a cord around her neck and checks it sporadically. It was Natalie who met me at the station, along with Hardy’s driver and security guard Luke, who is young and chatty and has trained in both boxing and Krav Maga. Natalie can also handle herself, one suspects; before becoming Hardy’s assistant, around the time he played both Ronnie and Reggie Kray in the 2015 film Legend, she worked for more than a decade with Liam Gallagher. But though I glean this from a very enjoyable chat we have in Tom Hardy’s trailer while we wait for Tom Hardy, she’s not the one who signed up for an interview so I will, as Ronnie Kray might say, leave her out of it.

As it happened, I’d been waiting for a few weeks for a summons from Hardy to an unspecified destination — maybe London! Maybe Wales! Maybe, God forbid, on Zoom! — so another hour here or there was no big deal. Having interviewed him a few times before, I knew time-keeping not to be his strongest suit.

I’d also learned not to second-guess the setting: the first time, when he was shooting The Revenant for director Alejandro Iñárritu and promoting George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, we painted ceramics in a Calgary strip mall. Another time, when he was preparing to launch his debut superhero movie Venom, we pottered around the Richmond-upon-Thames branch of Homebase. He likes to keep you on your toes.

Even in the car with Natalie and Luke, driving past clapped-out industrial buildings and a surprising number of horses — owned, Luke informed me, by a local Traveller community who keep them tethered at the roadside — I knew nothing of what would be happening, other than that I had taken a train to Cardiff because Hardy was somewhere nearby filming a movie called Havoc: an action film for Netflix about a “bruised detective” pulled into the criminal underworld while on the hunt for a politician’s wayward son. I knew they were taking me to the studio for a Covid test, but it wasn’t until we were back outside in the carpark, mounting the little steps to the door of a trailer bearing a sign that said “Walker”, his character’s name, that I realised this was to be our final destination. So obvious! And therefore so unexpected! It made a strange sort of sense. And it was still, after all, a glorified shipping container in a carpark. “‘Glamour,’ they said,” I hear Natalie deadpan, more than once. Also more than once: “Tom’s on his way.”

While we wait, members of Hardy’s “team” — the coterie of people he brings with him from one production to the next, perhaps because he trusts them, perhaps because they make it all feel a bit more normal — come in and out. There’s Natalie and Luke, who have an easy, jocular camaraderie, and Hardy’s make-up artist Audrey, who bustles about in the kitchenette before rushing out again to practise some prosthetic scars on an extra who is temporarily doubling for him. But then there’s an almost imperceptible change in air pressure, like the breath of wind before a storm, or the tremble of leaves at the mouth of a tunnel before a train comes. Natalie’s eyes flit to the window as an Audi estate pull in.

He appears through the door of his trailer, in a tight-fitting T-shirt and baseball cap, looking muscly and lean and not like any of the other 43-year-old dads I know, followed by his dog Blue, a soft-grey mixed-breed with more than a hint of French bulldog and a permanently quizzical expression. He gives me a hug — my first full-body hug with anyone outside my immediate family for more than a year and a half! What a way to go! — and sits down in the armchair that Natalie has vacated and next to which she has placed an espresso in a tiny cup. Blue settles into the dog basket next to the coppery bowls, into one of which Natalie has just, for reasons, I’m going to assume, of convenience rather than diktat, squeezed water from an Evian bottle. At last, Tom Hardy, number one male British film star of the 21st century, is here.

Brown wool-mohair jacket, £2,700; brown ribbed technical-knit turtleneck, £950, both by Dior.

GREG WILLIAMS

2. The part where we talk about his new movie

Midway through the closing credits of Venom, which was released in 2018, there is an additional scene. Hardy’s character (or more specifically, Hardy’s human character, but more on that later), motorbike-riding investigative reporter Eddie Brock, is escorted through the security gates of California’s notorious San Quentin Prison. After being led through a series of grimy corridors, he and a gruff-talking guard arrive at a large metal cage in which Woody Harrelson, in manacles and a curly auburn wig, is waiting. Harrelson is Cletus Kasady, an eccentric serial killer, and he wants Eddie to deliver a message: “When I get out of here, and I will, there’s gonna be carnage.”

Not only does it provide a handy parallel to what’s happening now that, I’m sorry, I can’t resist — Hardy’s summoned me! In mysterious circumstances! And here we are! Eyeball to eyeball! In a box! — but it also sets up the premise of the imminent sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, directed by Andy Serkis, in which Harrelson’s Kasady looks set to make good on his promise. And, of course, Hardy hasn’t invited me to come so he can ask after my family (though he does, which is nice), or so that I can ask about his — he and his partner, the actress Charlotte Riley, have two young children, and Hardy has a 13-year-old son from a previous relationship — but because he has a film to promote and, perhaps, a point to prove.

“Venom and Eddie Brock are part of a universal canon among those who know about superheroes. I’d like to be part of that legacy and not bugger it up completely”

In at least a couple of ways, the original Venom had been a litmus test. It was the first film released under the umbrella of the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters — attractively shortened to SPUMC — an eye-wateringly complicated deal by which Sony is allowed to develop a separate cosmos of superhero movies based on selected characters from Marvel Comics, notably not including Spider-Man. Hardy was cast as both the aforementioned motorcycling journalist Eddie Brock, and also, through the magic of CGI, as Venom, a loveable, brain-eating alien symbiote who inhabits Brock’s body and is, confusingly, one of Spider-Man’s most iconic adversaries. On a broader scale, Hardy’s job was also two-fold: to launch the new SPUMC Spidey-free universe, and, despite having starred in (or as he’ll later argue, co-starred) and successfully rebooted Miller’s beloved franchise with Mad Max: Fury Road, and having played Batman’s adversary Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, to show that he had what it took to carry a superhero blockbuster all on his own.

“There were other objectives with Venom, but they were minor compared to the main objective: can I land Eddie Brock and Venom as an established Marvel superhero?” says Hardy, from the leatherette armchair-throne. “Venom and Eddie Brock are part of a universal canon among those who know about superheroes, so I don’t want to scratch the record. I’d like to be part of that legacy and not bugger it up completely. Not bring shame on it. Ha! You’ve got Black Panther, Thor, Wonder Woman, Venom; there’s not one that you go, ‘Ooh God, have you seen that? That’s fucking terrible! Avoid the fucking terrible one!’ Maybe people dislike it, maybe people really like it, but it’s not dismissed.”

Hardy’s summary is actually a fairly accurate representation of the reactions to Venom. Some people disliked it (critics), some people really liked it (audiences), but with an ultimate box office gross of $856m on a $100m budget, dismissal was never on the cards. Even the haters couldn’t help but acknowledge that there was something winning about Hardy’s performances as Venom and Eddie, who develop a screwball, odd-couple dynamic as they struggle for primacy in Eddie’s body. (In an ingenious marketing ploy, for the home entertainment release Sony issued a spoof trailer reframing Venom as a romcom: “I am Venom and you are mine,” et cetera.)

In some senses the role was made for Hardy, or he for it. The only child of Chips and Anne Hardy, an advertising executive and artist respectively, he has a much-rehashed history of drug and alcohol abuse that started in his teens in East Sheen, south-west London, and continued into the early years of his acting career, when he went straight from the Drama Centre London to bit parts in big deals including Steven Spielberg’s Band of Brothers and Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down. He went to rehab in 2003, but if there’s an actor who knows about the push and pull of destructive impulses that threaten to overwhelm, be they demon drink or alien symbiote, it’s him.

“Things find you,” he says. “You go, ‘Oh, I can bring something to that,’ or someone else has ID-ed me, like, ‘Oh, you’ve got mental health issues, why don’t you play this!’” He gives a wheezing laugh. “I don’t know. But it’s a nice fit.”

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In fact, he brought enough to the first Venom to pitch a storyline for Venom: Let There Be Carnage, created along with an old friend, the British screenwriter Kelly Marcel. They got the gig. As well as getting a “story by” credit, he’s also a producer this time, though he says this distinction is almost moot: “A producer is what I’d be doing anyway if I was just acting, I’d just be arguing with the studio about it.”

With great power comes great responsibility, apparently, and also, unusually for Hardy, compliance. “I’m pleased with it. I’m really pleased with it,” is all he’ll commit to when I ask him, in a variety of different ways, how he wanted the Venom-Eddie relationship to evolve in the new one. “I’ve got to be careful how I speak, because I’m a studio man. I’m an exec! Believe it or not.”

He does allow the odd thing to slip. Like when he describes picking new Marvel baddies: the trailer reveals that besides Cletus Kasady (now thankfully minus the fright wig) and his symbiote Carnage, it will also feature Shriek (played by Naomie Harris), while comic aficionados have spotted clues to a possible appearance from Toxin (on the topic of which Hardy gives me some frantic hand gestures I can’t decipher but which I think mean “stay tuned”).

“I’m thinking about the third movie as well, because I think you need to write that at the same time,” he says. Later, when I ask him if he and Marcel will also be writing the story for the third, he turns coy: “A third won’t be greenlit until the second is successful, but the studio were really, really pleased with number two.” I think that’s a strong maybe.

It’s all quite tricky, given that I haven’t yet been allowed to see Venom: Let There Be Carnage, but I have a last stab with another question that seems to get Marvel fans’ juices going: whether Venom and Spider-Man can at some point in the future — fiendish business-deal permitting — appear in the same film. Is that something Hardy would be keen on?

“I would be remiss if I wasn’t trying to steer any kind of connectivity,” he says, drawing on his vape. “I wouldn’t be doing the job if I wasn’t awake and open to any opportunity or eventuality or be excited by that. Obviously, that’s a large canyon to leap, to be bridged by one person alone, and it would take a much higher level of diplomacy and intelligence, sitting down and talking, to take on an arena such as that.

“Should both sides be willing, and it be beneficial to both sides, I don’t see why it couldn’t be. I hope and strongly, with both hands, push, eagerly, towards that potential, and would do anything to make that happen, within what’s right in business. But it would be foolish not to head towards the Olympic Games if you were running 100 metres, so yeah! I want to play on that field.”

I think that’s a yes.

Black wool-cashmere-blend coat, £895, by Belstaff. Brown cotton sweatshirt, £120, by Sunspel. Black cotton trousers, £90, by Tentree

GREG WILLIAMS

3. The part where Tom Hardly stops by

An hour or so in, there’s a knock on the door. A man with brown hair, about Hardy’s height and age, enters the trailer.

“Jakey!” says Hardy.

The man proffers me his elbow as a greeting.

“Jake is tested every day,” assures Hardy. “PCRs.”

“I’m an every-dayer,” says Jakey.

“Me and Jakey have been the same person since Mad Max,” says Hardy. “We do everything together. He’s Venom, he’s Eddie Brock, he’s the Krays, he’s Mad Max. We’re twins. He’s the face-planter and I’m the face-puller. If it demands landing on his face, that’s Jakey.”

It’s possible my own face still betrays some confusion, so he continues:

“I did ask Jakey to come and meet you, actually. Devoid of fun things to do, Jakey’s a barrel of laughs. Now I’m going to hospital-pass the entire interview off to my stunt man! You’ll do some yoga! Some hot yoga! With the dog!” (Blue, lapping loudly from his water bowl, does not look up.)

Jakey, I finally grasp, is Jacob Tomuri, who is Hardy’s stunt double and has been since Mad Max: Fury Road, he explains, when a friend who was doubling for Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa spotted their likeness and recommended him for the job. Tomuri has the easy manner of someone who spends large amounts of time many thousands of miles away from the hot-tempered silliness of Britain and America, as he indeed does, being based, except when called upon by Hardy, in his native New Zealand. I see afterwards that Hardy has co-opted him to join in interviews before, perhaps because it makes them more fun and gives him a chance to hit a different, playful register, or perhaps because, as with Eddie and Venom, two heads are better than one.

Still, I’m not quite sure what my line of questioning’s supposed to be. I ask Tomuri if he has to keep tabs on Hardy’s body while he’s at home in Auckland, to make sure their physiques match.

Tomuri: “We do kind of text back and forth and I say, ‘What are you thinking of for this role?’”

Hardy: “And I lie! I say I’m 90kg, and I’m 75kg.”

Tomuri: “Or he goes, ‘I’m about 80kg.’ And I turn up and he’s 85kg. So I’m the smaller Tom, the ‘Tom Hardly’ at that point.”

Hardy: “We had a laugh about the trap suit...”

Tomuri: “You really want to go there?”

Tom Hardy and Jacob Tomuri at a Mad Max: Fury Road press conference in 2015

VERA ANDERSONGETTY IMAGES

The “trap suit”, it turns out, was a prosthetic undergarment that Tomuri had to wear beneath his jackets on Legend because he has a different shoulder line from Hardy: fake trapezius muscles basically. Its memory prompts much mirth.

Tomuri: “A beige onesie with traps in it!”

Hardy: (hooting with laughter): “That’s so inelegant!”

Tomuri: “It was! I sent you a photo. Like, ‘Thanks buddy’.”

Hardy: “You’re welcome.”

Also fondly recalled are the lip-syncing videos they made while snowed in in Canada on The Revenant, compilations of which are still floating around the internet (they do a delightful Simon and Garfunkel); their mutual love of Brazilian jiu-jitsu (“We’re baby jiu-jitsu practitioners because we’ve only been doing it three years,” says Hardy); the fact that Hardy’s legs are on the slender side and that when he comes on set in shorts Tomuri likes to ask, “Why’s Tom riding an emu?”; and also Tomuri’s early acting experiences on a teen fantasy series in New Zealand in which he sported blue hair. Not that Tomuri is going down without a fight.

Tomuri: “What was that film you did?”

Hardy: “Minotaur.”

Tomuri: “Minotaur!”

Hardy: “If you’re ever having a bad acting day, please look at this movie and remember…”

Tomuri: “We all start somewhere.”

Hardy: “Not start! I was well into my career when that came out! I was mid-flight! If you ever feel like giving up, don’t! [Checking himself] No disrespect because it was a paid day’s work, and it was somebody’s heart and soul poured into that… ”

Tomuri: “True.”

Hardy: “That aside, if you watch it, I may not have transmuted that expertly to screen. Ha! So if you feel like you’re having a shit day and your acting’s not very good, please feel free to watch and know that you’re not alone, and maybe no one will ever see what you’ve done!”

Hardy and Tomuri collapse in giggles.

I’m not sure what all this is supposed to demonstrate to me, other than the fact that there are still people in Hardy’s orbit who will take the piss out of him, but nonetheless the effect is endearing. (I watch Minotaur later and it is pretty special: a racy, cod-mythological fantasy drama about hot teens in a labyrinth that includes lines such as, “I ask that you bear my seed.”)

Tomuri and his inferior trapezius muscles were called upon once again for Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which was shot in Leavesden Studios (near Watford) and San Francisco, so I ask him if he has seen it yet. He hasn’t.

Hardy: “Do you want to see a bit of it now?”

Me: Are we allowed?

Hardy: “No. Of course we’re not allowed. But I’m allowed to watch it on my own. And if you stand outside the trailer and I open the window I can’t stop you from looking in. But if I spot you, I’ll tell you to go away.”

So not too compliant, then.

[Lacuna: in which we may or may not glimpse Venom: Let There Be Carnage through the open window of Tom Hardy’s trailer.]

Dust pink needlecord jacket, £825, by Richard James. Cream Freya Hartas squirrel print wool jumper, £1,050, by Gucci

GREG WILLIAMS

4. The part where we walk around a film set

Perhaps it’s the excitement of what may or may not have just taken place, or maybe it’s the squitty windows, but for whatever reason, Tom Hardy’s trailer has by now taken on the humidity of Colonel Kurtz’s jungle compound. Fresh air seems advisable. Tomuri makes his excuses, and Hardy says he’ll show me around the set of Havoc, the Netflix movie, which is being constructed in the cavernous building just behind the trailer and on which shooting is due to start in a couple of weeks.

Havoc is set in Detroit and, like director Nathan Evans’ breakthrough movie The Raid, which took place in a besieged tower block in Jakarta, seems likely to go light on dialogue and heavy on the ruthlessly choreographed fight sequences, or as Hardy calls it, “good high-end face-kicking”. The hangar-sized studio spaces are filled with large plywood boxes, many of which turn out to be painted on the inside to look like slinky corridors or grotty alleyways or, in one instance, a gloomily seductive nightclub. There are people in masks everywhere, nailing things and wheeling things around, who Hardy greets with an “All right mate?” which they return almost as though he isn’t the star of the film upon which their livelihoods currently depend. Almost.

One huge space is full of props: rows of “don’t walk” signs and phone boxes and other bits and bobs, which Hardy looks at admiringly (“I love brocante!”). Another part of the studio is broken into smaller partitioned areas with signs taped up that say things like “Weapon firing and testing”. Hardy opens one to reveal piles of cardboard boxes and tape-marks on the floor which, the nice man and woman inside explain to me, in a way that makes me feel like Princess Anne on a walkabout, are doubling as cars and walls as they work out stunts. Hardy pulls aside another partition to reveal Tomuri mid-grapple with an unnamed man on a floor mat, both of them in socks. Without loosening his grip, Tomuri tells Hardy that another of their training partners has just done the day’s scheduled workout and had to run out. “Was he being sick?” asks Hardy.

“Put on a funny accent, film a few hours, have a sarnie, go home. Pretty cool, right?”

Hardy seems very excited by the physical requirements of Havoc, for which he is training a lot. He wants to do as much of the on-screen fighting as he can: “Whatever I’m not a liability for.” The current regime involves two to three cross-fit workouts a day, plus an hour or so of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and learning the stunt choreography for the film. After a mishap shooting the first Venom he needed two knee operations — “my knees were fucked” — and was only eight weeks into his recovery when he shot the second. Now, though, he says, he’s fitter than he’s ever been, and I feel compelled to tell him, apologising as I do for sounding creepy, that he looks in very good shape.

“You can’t say that in this day and age! I don’t think that’s appropriate!” he replies. Then, seriously, “Thank you.”

Havoc, then, is an action film that is unabashedly so. “It’s real genre,” as Hardy describes it. “If you’re gonna do martial arts, then Gareth’s your guy.” Evans does indeed have a glowing track record — The Raid and his Sky TV drama series Gangs of London received stellar reviews — yet it seems unlikely that Havoc is the kind of project that will get Hardy any highfalutin attention, like an Oscar nomination, as he received for The Revenant. But it will enable him to get paid to do something he loves, do a shit-ton of exercise, and commute back to London at the weekends to see his kids. For an actor, it’s all suspiciously redolent of an honest day’s work.

“There’s no airs and graces about this,” he says. “Put on a funny accent, film a few hours, have a sarnie, go home. Pretty cool, right?”

Oh, and there was another thing. Signing on for this film was also — for reasons that may be familiar to anyone who has just lived through a catastrophic global pandemic — a way to stop Tom Hardy going stir-crazy.

Dark green leather-shearling jacket, £990, by Isabel Marant. Brown cotton sweatshirt, £120, by Sunspel. Black cotton trousers, £90, by Tentree

GREG WILLIAMS

5. The part where he talks about sourdough and other things that matter

Tom Hardy’s pandemic was probably — or no, hopefully — much like yours. Filming on Venom: Let There Be Carnage was mostly complete by the time England went into the first lockdown, and like the rest of us he was scared. “When everybody was starting to store toilet paper and take things off the shelves it was like, hang on, do we need to arm ourselves? Is this the zombie apocalypse? There was a moment at the beginning where it was like, are people going to riot?”

Hardy did some modest stockpiling for his family — “vitamin D, vitamin K and nappies”— but eventually found himself doing what many of us did over those strange stagnant months while we tried not to go completely insane: “Fifteen-minute workouts in the garden, home-schooling and making sourdough.”

Home-schooling was “very tough”, but the sourdough at least he quite enjoyed. “I still have the leaven! You have to feed that every day. That’s a commitment. I’ve actually managed to back it up so I’ve got two. Just in case someone drops one on the floor or the jar explodes and it’s like, ‘That’s a year-and-a-half’s work!’” He also, like many of us, entertained some lockdown fantasies: “I was thinking I might open up a sourdough café. Coffee and sourdough and jiu-jitsu and AA meetings. You can bring your dog.” (With him, you wouldn’t rule it out.)

We’re back in the trailer now, Hardy sitting next to me on the sofa, elbow resting on the back of the banquette. He’s in a quieter, thoughtful mode. He explains how, being stuck at home, he fell into the rhythms dictated by his children, the youngest of whom are two and five, and found that an early-to-bed, early-to-rise regimen suited him too. “I didn’t pay much attention to structure and discipline as a kid,” he says. “But without it now, being a father, I’m lost.”

“I didn’t pay much attention to structure and discipline as a kid. But without it now, being a father, I’m lost”

Also, as may feel familiar, lockdown gave him an opportunity to think, or, viewed another way, to stare into the abyss. “I had an opportunity to observe the world and my own behaviours and how I lived my life and what’s important and what isn’t.”

So what did he conclude? He pauses.

“I spent a lot of time fighting the concept of ‘grown-up’. I think all the baddies and all those sorts of ‘grrrr’ characters that I’ve played, I’m not that. The whole acting thing has been kind of peacock-ish, counter to what I am. What’s most indelible on my memory are things that are shocking or scary so it’s very easy to mimic them. It’s actually much harder to mimic things that are soft and nice and intimate if you don’t grow up in that way. Now I’m getting older these things are becoming less scary. So it’s not caring so much what people think.”

As I ask if this might affect the kind of roles he takes, he gets up and opens the door of his trailer to usher his dog out, announcing “Blue might need a Richard!” to an unseen party. (“Richard the Third,” he explains, helpfully, as he sits back down.) His answer swerves unexpectedly.

“I think there’s less reason to work, ultimately, because the life-drive is to be with the kids and to be fit and healthy and eat well and stuff. If you’ve got a roof over your head and a bed underneath you and food in the fridge, how much is enough? Because it’s not a dress rehearsal, life, is it? It’s going out live. This is one-time.”

He says this, of course, about cutting down on “grrr” characters, when he’s two weeks away from filming a movie in which he’s going to kick in a lot of heads, and a few months away from the release of a gigantic, all-consuming movie which, if it goes well, will draw him into another. So absolute, in fact, is his commitment to the Venom franchise at the moment that other big projects such as the second series of Taboo, the delightfully strange period drama he co-wrote with his dad, Chips, and the screenwriter Steven Knight, or the various ideas he has in development with his production company, Hardy Son and Baker, including a biopic of war photographer Don McCullin and an adaptation of Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War short stories The Things They Carried, are temporarily on hold.

Likewise, any future instalment of Mad Max. Of 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, in which he took over from Mel Gibson as the much put-upon desert policeman to Charlize Theron’s tough-nut road warrior Imperator Furiosa, he says now: “That was ultimately Furiosa’s movie, which was fantastic. Fury Road. Furiosa. It was in the title.”

It also had Mad Max in the title, I point out.

“Yeah, but it was interesting how that one unpacked. If you look at it now, it was a changeover of hands in a way, from Mad Max to Furiosa. That’s what they’re filming now. Furiosa. [Furiosa’s origin story, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, is scheduled for release in 2023.] It was a very well implemented changing of the guard. [Miller’s] still got Mad Max, but he’s split his feed between two characters, and that’s really, really cool.”

He’s concentrating instead, he says, on the jobs immediately ahead of him. “These are engine-room years,” he says. “The children and death-tax years. While you’ve still got arms and a functioning body then you go, you grind. Till the kids leave home. Then maybe my wages will be significantly lower, but acting will probably still be there for me. And I can still play parts. So who knows? You might see me do some horrendous romcoms. And never see me again. Hee! Because I’ve made my decision, you’ll go: ‘Oh, he made a choice. You ain’t seeing him again. He’s fucking gone. He’s worked out what’s important. And he’s off.’

“I’m not so worried to disappear now,” he goes on. “When I was a youngster you had to be heard, otherwise you’d be invisible. Once you’ve established yourself you can stop making that much noise. Because you’re here now, what are you going to do? And what is enough? What do you need? What do my family need? So that is very relevant. I think everybody needs a little bit of their own thing that they do. I like jiu-jitsu and sourdough. That fulfils me.”

At some point not long afterwards, the atmospheric pressure shifts again, slumps ever so slightly, and it becomes clear that our interview is done. There are more hugs, more well wishes to the family, and then I’m outside Tom Hardy’s trailer once again, with Natalie and Luke readying the car to escort me back past the industrial lots and the roadside horses to the station.

For a moment he is framed in the doorway, looking down at us. Resplendent. He’d planned to do another workout, but he says he’s tired, and suddenly he looks it. Maybe too much training, maybe too much talking. He’s wondering if he should rest instead. Natalie thinks he should. He’ll take a moment, anyway. He closes the door to his trailer and then Tom Hardy, number one male British film star of the 21st century, is gone.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is out on 15 September

Styling by Nicole Schneider

This story is from the Autumn issue of Esquire.

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