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Tom Hardy: 8 Crazy Facts About The Enigmatic Actor

By Stacey Cole
Published on: 01:23 PST, Feb 2, 2016

Tom Hardy has only grown in fame over the past five years as he has become increasingly more popular. Now, with his Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Revenant, Hardy has reached critical acclaim.

But there are some amazing facts about Tom Hardy that fans of the actor need to know.

1. ListLand reports that Tom Hardy is a highly accomplished stage actor. He has acted in London’s prestigious West End in the play In Arabia We’d All Be Kings, for which he earned a nomination for the Laurence Olivier Most Promising Newcomer Award, as well as in Blood and The Man of Mode.

2. He may have been married twice, but Tom Hardy had flings with men in his younger years. The Daily Mail reported in 2010 that he responded that it was part of being an actor.

“As a boy? Of course I have. I’m an actor for f***’s sake. I’ve played with everything and everyone. I love the form and the physicality, but now that I’m in my thirties, it doesn’t do it for me. I’m done experimenting but there’s plenty of stuff in a relationship with another man, especially gay men, that I need in my life.”

3. Fans might not see them in movies, when he has makeup covering them, but the Fuss reports that Tom Hardy has loads of tattoos, and every one of them is meaningful to him, representing something significant in his life.

He got his first tattoo when he was 15-years-old.

“Every tattoo I have means something to me. Each one is something that I’ve been through in my life or I’ve done or I’ve been.”

4. Tom Hardy was once a model. In fact, when he was 21, he won a modelling competition on The Big Breakfast on Channel 4, and he was given a professional contract. In the end, he felt more comfortable with acting.

5. Tom Hardy has struggled with drug and alcohol addiction throughout his life, seeking treatment after filming Star Trek: Nemesis in 2002.

“I went entirely off the rails and I’m lucky I didn’t have some terrible accident or end up in prison or dead, because that’s where I was going. Now I know my beast and I know how to manage it. It’s like living with a 400lb orangutan that wants to kill me. It’s much more powerful than me, doesn’t speak the same language and it runs around the darkness of my soul.”

6. Tom Hardy really hates the celebrity culture of today and people’s obsession with it. His preference is to connect with people through his work.

“I want to dispel that it’s all about celebrity-ism, I’m f***ing bored of people looking at whose shoes are interesting and what hat is interesting.”

7. Tom Hardy gets his inspiration for how to portray roles from some unusual sources. For instance, in his role of Forrest Bondurant in Lawless, he used the granny from Tweety and Sylvester as inspiration.

“I based my character on the grandmother of Tweety and Sylvester. The mother of the Bondurant boys was swept away by the Spanish flu and it is my character Forrest, the eldest brother, who replaced her. To a man, it’s complicated to put on a maternal image. Observing the grandmother in Tweety and Sylvester helped me imagine what it would be like to be the mother of another.”

8. Tom Hardy is very involved with charity, particularly with FLACK (a homeless charity based in Cambridge), Breakthrough Breast Cancer, and The Prince’s Trust.

[Photo by John Phillips/Getty Images]

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