
Welcome to our collection of quotes by Tom Hardy. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Tom Hardy
Edward Thomas Hardy (born 15 September 1977) is an English actor, producer and former model. After studying acting at the Drama Centre London, he made his film debut in Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down (2001). He has since been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, two Critics' Choice Movie Awards and two British Academy Film Awards, receiving the 2011 BAFTA Rising Star Award.
Hardy has also appeared in such films as Star Trek: Nemesis (2002), RocknRolla (2008), Bronson (2008), Warrior (2011), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), Lawless (2012), This Means War (2012), Locke (2013), The Drop (2014), and The Revenant (2015), for which he received a nomination for an Academy Award. In 2015, he portrayed "Mad" Max Rockatansky in Mad Max: Fury Road and both Kray twins in Legend. He has appeared in three Christopher Nolan films: Inception (2010), The Dark Knight Rises (2012) as Bane, and Dunkirk (2017) as an RAF fighter-pilot. He starred as both Eddie Brock and Venom in the 2018 anti-hero film Venom and its sequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021).
Hardy's television roles include the HBO war drama mini-series Band of Brothers (2001), the BBC historical drama mini-series The Virgin Queen (2005), Bill Sikes in the BBC's mini-series Oliver Twist (2007), ITV's Wuthering Heights (2009), the Sky 1 drama series The Take (2009), and as Alfie Solomons in the BBC historical crime drama series Peaky Blinders (2014–present). He created, co-produced, and took the lead in the eight-part historical fiction series Taboo (2017) on BBC One and FX. In 2020, he also contributed narration work to the Amazon docuseries All or Nothing: Tottenham Hotspur.
Hardy has performed on both British and American stages. He was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for Most Promising Newcomer for his role as Skank in the production of In Arabia We'd All Be Kings (2003), and was awarded the 2003 Evening Standard Theatre Award for Outstanding Newcomer for his performances in both In Arabia We'd All Be Kings and Blood, in which he played Luca. He starred in the production of The Man of Mode (2007) and received positive reviews for his role in the play The Long Red Road (2010). He is active in charity work and is an ambassador for the Prince's Trust. He was appointed a CBE in the 2018 Birthday Honours for services to drama.
There's something that's very human about 'Warriorv that brings you out. You're watching the movie and, yeah, there's fighting -- there's a tournament at the end of the movie -- but it takes a long time to get to know these people.
I'm incredibly grateful to be playing the villain in a world which, if I really thought to hard about what I was doing, I would get very nervous about the size and the magnitude of the importance and responsibility of being a villain in the world of 'Batman.'
I guess if I had fifty million dollars I could spend more time at home.
I get hired more then I get seen more. I get seen more then maybe celebrity and fame happens but at the end of the day there's no difference between my five dollar performance and my fifty million dollar performance. It's not going to make me a better father.
I think it's important that you always transform if you can. That's what I was trained to do. You try and hide yourself as much as you can -- that's the key to longevity.
I don't know anything about god except that it's not me. So, somewhere between that acceptance and doing my homework and being competitive and having ambition and loving my job and observing and reflecting my society, that's where I find the purpose. Because man needs purpose.
I'm here to challenge myself and to see whether I can shape-shift in an environment that's actually quite daunting, but which I think would be nice to shine a light into. The destination of any interesting drama is that you shine a light into a place that not many people know about.
I'm an armchair psychologist, I suppose, and I like to kind of sit around and guess and pretend I know what's going on.
The only thing I can do is wipe my arse, brush my teeth, turn up and do the best work I can.
I had no immediate knowledge of the world of Batman at all. I'm quite incubated. I just keep myself to myself and my dog.
And I like people. I like to know what you're really up to. I'm a bit of a nosey busy body. Why do they do the things they do? Why are they prepared to do the things they do to get what they want? When? Where? Who?
The problem with prime beef is that there are so many people out there selling offal. So you don't know when you're going eat a shitty gangster movie. Because everybody knows there's good stuff to be involved in.
T's much less daunting once you've put your foot on the road to it. I'm a notorious couch potato and I don't like exercise. Half an hour of physical exercise, like jogging or fast walking a day is a start.
I think I had only been working nine months when I got Star Trek, and it was huge. It was very overwhelming. So that opened my eyes a bit at an early age, kind of how not be frightened when walking into a responsibility of something like villain in Batman, or a Hobbit, or whatever it is.
We're all flawed human beings and we all have a cauldron of psychosis which we have to unravel as we grow older and find the way we fit in to live our lives as best as possible.
If you're lucky like me, your relationship with your brother has resolved itself on the peaceful side of the fence and has stayed there. But if you're someone who's got a family that's all fractured and finding it hard to relate, that's a very sad place to be.
Then there's your diet. You cut out sugars, fat, soy sauces... anything that's nice. Tea and coffee is replaced by boiling water with lemon. It's amazing how quickly you get into it. There's also herbal tea and a lot of water, obviously... about two litres a day.
I think online dating is a way of procuring people. Like Facebook and Myspace, it's the way that people connect now and procure small children and sometimes dodgy relationships. I don't think it's very healthy.
I think I had only been working nine months when I got 'Star Trek,' and it was huge. It was very overwhelming. So that opened my eyes a bit at an early age, kind of how not be frightened when walking into a responsibility of something like that.
As actors, we have the opportunity to work with many directors. Directors only work with themselves and other actors. They never know what it is like to work with another director. So that relationship that one has with a director is entirely always the king.
I set myself that decision, otherwise I'm driving an opinion at you, and I think that would be treating you like you're an idiot. I don't want to force-feed you my opinion.
Vanity is normal in performers. Does it bother other people? All the time. But nine times out of 10, that says more about them than you.
I'm going to fail to hit the mark I've put up before me because it's not possible to hit it. I want to be the best at what I do so I've got to get over myself already because that's never going to happen. I ain't ever going to be God.
I had a huge imagination. My granddad says I was a bit of a Walter Mitty character.
Online dating is cool but I think Myspace and Facebook is a little bit off key.
I'm a nice middle class public schoolboy who underachieved and wasn't going anywhere fast. I didn't get any GCSEs or A-levels. But everyone was like: Please, will you do something? And I was thinking: Well, I kind of like the idea of joining the French Foreign Legion.
My job is to show and tell. If I get better at showing and telling then presumably I get hired more.
Whatever character you play, remember they are always doing something they are not just talking.
Love is doing something you don't want to do for someone you don't particularly like at that moment.
David Mamet we all know is a great screenplay writer and playwright and a great director. If you like him, you like him. If you hate him, you really hate him. He's someone who's into controversy, you know what I mean? That's David Mamet.
I'm into parlor dramas. I'm into theatre. I'm trained for the stage. I trained to do Chekhov and Shakespeare, I was trained for the stage.
If you look round Hollywood there's no end of white smiles and six packs. Long lines of beautiful people lining up to be incredible on film.
I'm just getting settled as a responsible man -- but if you split the elephant into little mouthfuls it will be fine.
Nobody paid any attention career-wise to me in America until 'Bronson.' It gave me a calling card and passage into America, where I've always wanted to work.
I'm from a nice, suburban, middle-class family, but my tattoos remind me where I've been.
Fame and stuff like that is all very cool, but at the end of the day, we're all human beings. Although what I do is incredibly surreal and fun and amazing and I'm really grateful for it, I don't believe my own press release, do you know what I mean?
It's about the characters, it's about the film, it's about the process of making stunning visuals and a huge, epic movie. It doesn't matter if my head was covered in a black plastic bag and I was bouncing around in a space hopper: That's the villain of Chris Nolan's 'Batman!'
If I am duly compared to Marlon Brando at all, well, I can only think of The Teahouse of the 'Shanghai Noon,' that they're comparing me to that!
Style, I think, is panache. Who are you? What did you do today? And what are you worth to me? What do you have to offer the world? How did you spend your time today on this planet? How are you spending your time every second? What are you doing now? Are you alive, or are you somnambulant?
Being an only child, I didn't have any other family but my mom and dad really, since the rest of my family lived quite far away from London.
I'm very sensitive. Because my mum was my primary emotional caregiver growing up, I found myself being pinned into dresses, darting her dresses, choosing her high heels for the evening or what to wear. I'm very much a mommy's boy.
I have to make my bones with Hollywood to get in. And when I do maybe I'll metamorphose from Mr. Muscles or whatever it is I am now and become an irascible tosser.
Ju jitsu is very Buddhist. All that we fear we hold close to ourselves to survive. So if you're drowning and you see a corpse floating by, hang on to it because it will rescue you.
My father came from an intellectual and studious avenue as opposed to a brawler's avenue. So I had to go further afield and I brought all kinds of unscrupulous oiks back home -- earless, toothless vagabonds -- to teach me the arts of the old bagarre.
I like to be other people, not me. And when you're on the red carpet, it's like, 'Here's Tom Hardy.' I don't want to be me. That's why I play other people.
The characters I've played have been mostly violent, and I'm so far from being violent or aggressive. I spend a lot of time watching 'Fireman Sam' with my three-year-old son Louis.
I wanted my dad to be proud of me, and I fell into acting because there wasn't anything else I could do, and in it I found a discipline that I wanted to keep coming back to, that I love and I learn about every day.
I'm not a big guy anyway. I'm only, what, 150 pounds? I was 190 for 'Batman,' 179 for 'Warrior.' Films make you look big.
I play Xbox. I have a little boy to look after. I have dogs. You know, I have things to do. I would love to be able to sit down and watch something like a movie. I watch my own movies because I have to.
Maybe it's a little ambitious of me to presume that no matter how big the film is, that I can always go down to the shop to buy a pint of milk.
There's an abundance of exposure when you start working in American films. Inevitably you become a brand and that has to be controlled.
I have a very busy head. I have inside voices that I have learned to contain.
A lot of people say I seem masculine, but I don't feel it. I feel intrinsically feminine. I'd love to be one of the boys but I always felt a bit on the outside. Maybe my masculine qualities come from overcompensating because I'm not one of the boys.