A lot of men think Tom Hardy is a good looking fellow. If you have your hand raised, you are not alone. Women seem to dig him as well and when this happens, you are Hollywood’s favorite, shiny, fuckboy to pass around. Oh, I mean, to cast in their films. Hardy himself seems to have faced the struggles where good looking-ness has been a good raught for his career. To overcome this, I speculate Hardy gets his hands (and everything else) dirty in the actors’ sandbox so he’s not mistaken as a actor who could model, but as an actor who can act. I’m unsure if any of the American handsome actors of recent days would be willing to rough themselves up or dress themselves down as enthusiastically as their foreign competition.

Same as with me, the world “discovered” Tom Hardy in his role as Eames in Christopher Nolan’s Inception. He was the forger in a crew of dream invaders led by the very Nolanesque appearing Leonardo DiCaprio. Two years previous to this, there was a weird, art vibe, prison film by the one-and-only madman director Nicolas Winding Refn. It’s a hallucinatory bio-pic of one Michael Peterson who renamed himself Charles Bronson. The UK press coined him “Britain’s most notorious prisoner.” The source material is fucking out there and the movie goes even beyond that. Hardy was fully let off his chain. I watched this thing late at night after smoking a joint and when it was over, I smoked another one and played it again. The Bronson of real life was a legend in prison lore and Hardy does him justice. Later in his career, he went on to inhabit the twin gangsters the Krays in Legend and does a mindboggling version of Al Capone in Capone. All watchable. Stock up on your cannabis for those sittings.

I could go on, but I’m not going to. Hardy goes big when he needs to and he’s certainly made many of the franchise characters he’s portrayed (Bain of Batman, Eddie Brock of Venom, Max Rockatansky of Mad Max) a little bit bigger, badder and more real.

Tommy, I’d kiss you on the lips, my man, but you might sock me in the teeth. But I’d smile at you with my bloody, broken bridgework and pay full price to see your next on screen endeavor, whatever it is.