So everyone is writing about this interview Tom Hardy did with British “Esquire” and his quote concerning his upcoming role in Mad Max: Fury Road and how he has “between four and 20 lines” of dialogue, how he’s seen it and says it’s “fucking unbelievable,” how he’s “never been more excited and out of my comfort zone” and how he’s under contract for three more Mad Max films should Fury Road pop financially. That’s all well and good, but that’s nowhere near the most interesting bit in the interview. The most interesting bit in the interview concerns his movie later this year, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s The Revenant and how Leonardo DiCaprio talked him into reading the script.
Here’s that bit:
Now he’s back in Calgary to shoot The Revenant, the new film from the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu. Based on the semi-fictional book of the same name by Michael Punke, it tells the story of Hugh Glass, a 19th-century fur trapper who is savagely mauled by a grizzly bear, and then robbed and left for dead by the two men, John Fitzgerald and Jim Bridger, who are assigned to look after him. Glass survives against the odds, and sets out for revenge. Hardy plays the dastardly Fitzgerald, fellow British actor Will Poulter plays the impressionable Bridger and Leonardo DiCaprio plays Glass.
Hardy thinks it was probably DiCaprio who gave him the nod for The Revenant. The two worked together on Inception and became friends. “He’s a tough kid actually, Leo,” Hardy says. “Brilliant bloke, really supportive.” That tends to be how he chooses what to do these days: a conversation with a friend, an email here and there.
This time it was a phone call. “I shamelessly don’t read scripts,” he says. “But Leo called me up and said, ‘Dude, you have to check this out, I think it’s a brilliant piece and Alejandro’s a genius – will you read it?‘ I was supposed to be doing Splinter Cell [the film adaptation of Tom Clancy’s hugely successful black ops novels/video games], so I was like, ‘I’m going to jump out of helicopters, mate. I want to go and play soldiers!’ and he said, ‘Just read it, you idiot!’ I was like ‘Mmm, all right’.”
So he read it at least?
“Half of it. Because Leo told me to do it. ‘All right then, we’ll meet this genius and we’ll see,’ I said. ‘But until then I’ll be sitting watching Come Dine with Me with the dog.’ When I met Alejandro, it turned out he’s fucking funny. Really lovely. Inspiring. Potty.”
Sure, the story about three more movies that might get made will get more clicks from online readers, but that Revenant story is yet another window into the nature of Hardy and one thousand times more entertaining.
