Tom Hardy Addresses His Sexuality: ‘That’s Nobody’s Business But My Own’

Tom Hardy is finally opening up about his sexuality, though it may not be the answer one reporter was hoping to hear.

The British actor was famously put on the spot during a Toronto International Film Festival press panel last week, when a reporter from an LGBT publication asked about his “ambiguous” sexuality.

Hardy took offense to the question.

“What on earth are you on about?” Hardy replied. “I don’t find it difficult for celebrities to talk about their sexuality. Are you asking about my sexuality?… Why?”

But now, a week later, Tom Hardy is indeed addressing his sexuality, though still not answering the controversial question. In an interview with The Daily Beast he said he has no problem talking about his sexuality, but that interview wasn’t the time or place for it.

ET Online shared the interview.

“There should be elegant ways to approach any topic, and there’s a time and place to approach anything and have a good, common sense conversation about anything,” he tells. “… If you knew me as a friend, then sure, we’d talk about anything. But that was a public forum, and for someone to inelegantly ask a question that seemed designed entirely to provoke a reaction, and start a topic of debate… It’s important destigmatizing sexuality and gender inequality in the workplace, but to put a man on the spot in a room full of people designed purely for a salacious reaction?

“To be quite frank, it’s rude,” he stresses. “If he’d have said that to me in the street, I’d have said the same thing back: ‘I’m sorry, who the —- are you?'”

Hardy added that he believes it is an important issue to talk about, but stressed that he is not a role model and “entitled to the right to privacy.”

He appears to have been more open in the past. In a 2008 interview, Hardy admitted to some same-sex encounters in his past, but offered few other details of when or what it entailed.

“I’m under no obligation to share anything to do with my family, my children, my sexuality — that’s nobody’s business but my own. And I don’t see how that can have anything to do with what I do as an actor, and it’s my own business.”

Tom Hardy has no problem playing gay characters on the big screen, and is in line to play Elton John in an upcoming biopic.

[Picture by Clemens Bilan/Getty Images]