The Interview: Tom Hardy

“Before 25, I don’t remember anything. I used to be a drinker. A proper one”

I wanted to like Tom Hardy. Who wouldn’t? He is a proper British megastar, on the cusp of nailing Hollywood, with the box-office draw and versatility to be our DiCaprio, Cruise or Travolta. He is magnetic on screen, with a rare ability to combine masculinity with vulnerability. He is Derek Jacobi in Jason Statham’s body. As a result, he makes cartoonish characters such as Mad Max and the super-villain Bane in The Dark Knight Rises compelling and lends heinous men such as Charles Bronson and the Kray twins humanity. It is a credit to his ability to shape-shift that he is soon to star in an array of biopics, playing the war photographer Don McCullin, the explorer Ernest Shackleton and Elton John. It’s hard to think of another actor who could manage all three. So, I admire him as an artist. My boyfriend is in love with him. And everyone I know fancies him.

I did wonder if, in real life, Hardy might be … difficult. One interviewer suggested that “interviewing Tom Hardy is not an entirely comfortable experience … One cannot help being slightly wary about what he might say or do next.” Another journalist claimed in a Twitter rant — after missing out on an interview — that he had “seen Tom Hardy make publicists cry”. There was an incredibly awkward interview on Jonathan Ross, when Ross screened footage of a 20-year-old Hardy winning a Big Breakfast modelling competition, and Hardy seemed so irritated that afterwards Ross anxiously told the audience: “He is genuinely pissed off with me.” Hardy later said he was just winding Ross up.

Apparently George Miller, wanting to cast him for Mad Max: Fury Road, was so worried that Hardy would be combative on set that he asked other directors for reassurance. And then there was that fight he had while filming Lawless with his co-star Shia LaBeouf. Besides all of which, Hardy himself has admitted: “I have a reputation for being difficult. And I am. I am, actually.” Fair enough. Perhaps the qualities that make someone a great actor — an ability to dig deep into their guts and wrench out their soul on screen — are the same qualities that, in person, might make someone prickly.

When Hardy arrives, however, he is lovely. We meet in Richmond, at a posh boutique hotel on the banks of the Thames. He tells me they do a fantastic afternoon tea. Perhaps, at 39, he has relaxed. He lives nearby, as does his dad, Edward “Chips” Hardy, a writer, and his mum, Anne, an artist — they raised him just two miles away in East Sheen. I’m meeting both Tom and Chips today, because together they have created a drama, Taboo, the first episode of which aired on BBC1 last night.

Taboo took nine years from conception to completion. The Hardys are enamoured of it — as if it were a child they have brought into the world. And they should be proud: it’s wonderful. Set in 1813 London, Taboo tells the story of James Delaney, an adventurer and outsider who returns from Africa to build an empire after his father’s death. Chips wrote the treatment for it, the Peaky Blinders writer Steven Knight did the script, Sir Ridley Scott produced it and Tom stars in it. The sets are as rich as you’d expect from a BBC costume drama, but it’s not stuffy. Instead, it plays on explosive themes: death, the occult, incest and revolution. Scott has claimed that Hardy’s character, Delaney, “will become iconic”.

Family business: Tom and his dad, Edward “Chips” Hardy, co-created the BBC1 drama Taboo

Chips arrives first. He looks like AC Grayling in Steve Jobs’s wardrobe: tall and wiry with long grey hair and silver glasses, wearing all black. He looks like what he is: a Cambridge-educated comedy writer, straight enough to have worked as an advertising executive, but hip enough to tell me he spent the 1960s smoking weed. He’s not the kind of dad I’d assumed Hardy would have, but I like him immediately. He folds himself into a chair, orders coffee and starts chatting about Zac Goldsmith, who has just become his former MP after losing the Richmond Park by-election — something Chips doesn’t seem particularly sad about.

By contrast Tom arrives late, in a red puffer jacket, looking like a lumbersexual. He’s bearded and scruffy in cargo pants and a black T-shirt, showing off tattooed guns. I can report that he is even better looking in real life than on screen. And has the same laddish, cocky-but-fun demeanour he had in those MySpace pictures that emerged of him posing in his underpants a decade ago. “I’m starving!” he announces, straddling a pouf. “I’ll get the turkey and chestnuts — let’s have a proper Christmas lunch … We’ve got to have the hats — we need hats!” Chips orders a vegetarian risotto.

Superficially, father and son seem to be opposites. One wiry professor; the other tattooed jock. The way they speak is different, too — Chips’s eloquent tones at odds with Tom’s confused accent: part posh west London, part Danny Dyer. They are aware of how they come across. “I paint with my fingers, like potatoes,” Tom says. “And I read Modiano,” Chips jokes.

Tom has described his background as “painfully middle class”, although it wasn’t quite so straightforward. Despite a privileged education of prep schools, boarding schools and Kensington crammers, Tom veered off track in his teens into alcoholism and drug addiction, which spiralled out of control in his twenties. He has reportedly said of that time: “I would have sold my mother for a rock of crack.” He made his big-screen debut in Ridley Scott’s 2001 war thriller Black Hawk Down. His nadir came in 2003, when a drugs binge in Soho culminated in him waking up in a pool of blood and vomit on Old Compton Street. “That was a lesson to me.”

After that, he gave up drugs and alcohol and his career took off. He picked up a Bafta nomination as the lead in Stuart: A Life Backwards (2007), playing alongside Benedict Cumberbatch. But it was his turn as Bronson in 2009 that made Hollywood take notice. He won the Bafta rising star award for his role in Inception (2010), alongside Leonardo DiCaprio. Before long, he’d bagged key roles in The Dark Knight Rises and Mad Max: Fury Road. He played Alfie Solomons, a Jewish gangster, in the BBC2 series Peaky Blinders and proved his versatility in 2015, playing both Kray twins in Legend and supporting DiCaprio again in The Revenant, which earned him an Oscar nomination. Now he’s back with the BBC.

Oh Dear  -  A younger Tom posing in his pants for his MySpace page

Taboo started as a conversation Tom and Chips had in the kitchen nine years ago. Central to it was Tom’s idea of taking someone unreliable, ethically dubious and on society’s fringes and making them a hero — “An almost contradictory character,” Chips explains. “I understood his ambitions and fascinations with that because I’ve seen elements of it, and echoes of it, in everything he’s done. I went back to Anne and said, ‘Tom’s had an idea. I think I’m going to put my novel down and ’ave a go.’” Chips grins. “Tom had the character and I went and fleshed out a story, and a principle.”

They’re thrilled Taboo is on the BBC. They like classical drama. “Brideshead, Pennies from Heaven,” Chips says. “Upstairs Downstairs,” Tom adds. “We just want to join that pantheon, really,” Chips says.

For Tom, too, “to place it in a traditional context as a period drama was an essential element for me. As a point of principle — having been thrown out of every establishment I’ve been in — I’m not anti-establishment. I really wanted to do well, but I struggled to achieve it within the preordained template of one-size-fits-all academia…”

At times it is difficult to quote Hardy. He talks in streams of consciousness that veer off on tangents. He may not be concise, but perhaps it’s because his talent is mostly “force of nature stuff”, as Chips puts it. “He has an extraordinary capacity for watching stuff, observing stuff, registering it to the minutest detail and making incredible associations.”

Central to Taboo is a difficult and complex father-son relationship. One critic suggested it was “spun from Hardy’s own relationship with his father”. True? “No!” Chips shoots back. OK, maybe it’s not true, I backtrack. But Tom retorts: “Maybe it is.” Chips admits that if you write about the human condition, you inevitably draw on family. Tom adds: “The story is fuck-all to do with us.”

Warrior mode: Hardy plays an adventurer in Taboo — a character its producer Ridley Scott has said “will become iconic”

Tom has spoken before about how his relationship with Chips changed when he became a dad. Tom has two children by his ex-girlfriend Rachael Speed, an assistant director, and his wife the actress Charlotte Riley, whom he met on the set of Wuthering Heights back in 2008. “All of that stuff with your father falls by the wayside as you realise how inept you can be as a father yourself … I used to have a lot of hang-ups — legitimate hang-ups — about my parents … A lot of stuff I had to forgive.”

What was their relationship like when Tom was growing up? “Grown-up,” Tom says. “Dad had a very full-time job when I was a kid. He was in the world of advertising. Long hours. And I guess I always wanted to be out there with him, as any boy wants with their dad. And so I forged a way to be with him, and I’ve earned my place.” Previously, he has said he went into acting to make his dad proud.

What was it like raising Tom? “Uh … interesting,” Chips says.

“Steady!” Tom interrupts. He has previously described himself as being “flagrantly disobedient” as a child. “Who isn’t?” he says today. But his rebellion was pronounced: his drinking and drug-taking began at 13. Aged 15, he and a friend were caught by the police joyriding in a stolen Mercedes and carrying a gun. Later, Hardy claimed they only avoided prison because his companion was a British diplomat’s son. He got expelled from his Surrey boarding school for stealing sports kit, and by 16 was taking crack cocaine.

When I ask him about that time now, he says: “Before 25, for me, I don’t remember anything. I genuinely used to be a drinker. A proper one. I wasn’t playing around. I enjoyed it and was very good and became so good that I no longer do it … that means I black out a lot of stuff, so I’m sure I was an irascible pain in the ass as a kid growing up … and my mum did the lion’s share of making sure that everything was held together.”

Chips agrees that Anne bore the brunt: “Tom’s mum — she’s been very strong and very nurturing. She, probably more than me, was instrumental in maintaining a kind of stability.” He says Tom’s childhood was “interesting, it was vibrant, it was active. I don’t think either of us would probably want to do it again.”

One writer called him “Hollywood’s go-to man for psychopaths”. Where does all that broiling masculinity come from? With all due respect to Chips, he doesn’t seem very blokey. “In a nutshell, it’s trying to faux recreate something I didn’t have as a child,” Tom says. “It’s probably trying to articulate something I don’t really understand.”

Hardy believes his addictions were fuelled by “fear” — and that giving them up allowed him to redirect that fear into his acting, improving his performances “110%”. “My relationship to [fear] has completely changed,” he says. “Fear is a primary colour in my palette for work, so anything that stimulates that is going to play to my strengths. It’s a strong suit for me — ‘OK, I’ve identified that’s a fear issue, brilliant. So I will dive into it now.’ Whereas, before, I didn’t know what it was. I was growing up — you don’t get a guidebook. Drinking: I don’t fear anything, I can talk to girls — until I’ve had so much to drink, I can no longer talk to girls because I’m horizontal on the floor at the party, or wherever … I’ve always gone a bit too far with my relationship to fear, so in work I probably go a bit too far there, too.”

He says the characters he plays may seem hyper-masculine, but it is their hidden insecurity that draws him to them. Often, people who appear tough are “deeply insecure or putting on an act”. But don’t confuse those characters with the guy playing them. “I’m as masculine as an eggplant,” he has said previously.

He finds modern film heroes, “the homogenised sort of eight-pack, tanned, straight-teeth, physicalised, action-hero leading male … boring” to play. “It’s the difference between Indiana Jones when Harrison Ford played him in the 1980s and Thor,” he says. “One was allowed to express personal characteristics … Now you’ve got to look like you’ve just come off a vegan diet, gone to the gym, part Navy Seal, really clean-valued, clean-living, moralistic — and then you go out and save the world from an impending danger that isn’t really dangerous at all. And it becomes not committed to any sense of the gubbins of reality: I don’t recognise this man.”

We’re getting on so well that when a waiter comes with the bill and asks if we’re happy, Tom chimes, “Very happy, thank you!” and, generously, pays. He is interesting, funny and garrulous, so although I’m supposed to be meeting him for 90 minutes, we spend almost 2½ hours chatting. Then something changes.

I ask him about an incident last year at a press conference for Legend (in which Hardy played both Kray twins, including Ronnie, who was gay), when a journalist had asked him about his sexuality. Hardy shut him down so abruptly that a clip of the exchange went viral. It was striking, because in 2008 (before he became mega-famous) Hardy had freely discussed his sexuality in an interview with the gay magazine Attitude. Asked if he’d ever had sexual relations with men, he had said: “As a boy? Of course I have. I’m an actor, for f***’s sake. I’ve played with everything and everyone. But I’m not into men sexually … now I’m into my thirties and it doesn’t do anything for me and I’m done experimenting.” I wonder what annoyed him at the Legend press conference? Being asked about his sexuality? Or having his work so simplified?

“You’re trying to ask that question now,” Tom replies.

“No, I’m asking why you were so annoyed,” I reply.

“It’s none of his business and it was in a room full of people,” he begins, but as he continues his irritation grows. “Sometimes, instinctively, I know when someone’s crossed the line and we’ve now left the professional scenario, that we are in a very different place now,” he says. “It’s always just better to shut it down, because it’s got nothing to do with the price of cabbages.”

I start another question, but Tom stands up. “You know when people are wasting your time,” he says. “You know when things have run their natural course and it’s time to move on.” He turns to Chips. “Shall we go?” Chips shuffles awkwardly to his feet. And they go. Leaving me in the beautiful restaurant by myself.

On the scale of tantrums I’d expected from Hardy, this mini flounce feels almost disappointing. His PR, however, seems concerned. Almost immediately, the phone rings and emails to my editor begin, asking us not to publish any answer Hardy may have given to the sexuality question. Eventually, she dangles a carrot: “Usually when Tom does an interview with a journalist, he requests to keep using that same person for all his future interviews as well,” she says. How wonderful! I rather liked Tom Hardy. I wonder if I’ll see him again.

Taboo is on BBC1, Saturdays, at 9.15pm

Believed to be long dead, James Keziah Delaney returns home from the ends of the earth.