Whenever a movie gets transferred from the script to the screen, there’s bound to be some changes. But when fans heard Tom Hardy’s unique accent for villain Bane (one that was not previously associated with the character) in The Dark Knight Rises, many were curious about its creation. Now, almost ten years since the film was originally released, Tom Hardy has revealed his inspiration for the distinctive performance.
To promote their new film Venom: Let There Be Carnage, star Tom Hardy and director Andy Serkis sat down for the famous WIRED auto-complete interview. One of the Internet’s most asked questions for Tom Hardy was how the British actor came up with Bane’s accent for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. While the accent received mixed reviews from fans and critics, there was actually quite a bit of thought put into its creation. Hardy explained:
That was actually a really cool choice that Chris [Nolan] made. Bane quintessentially is Latinx in origin and I’m not. So I looked at the concept of Latin and found a man called Bartley Gorman, who’s a Romani gypsy. The king of the gypsies, in inverted commas, is a bare-knuckle fighter and a boxer. And he said [doing Bane-like voice], ‘When I get into a ring with a man, and we want to wipe you off the face of the Earth, and he wants to kill me.’ And I was like this is great. And I showed Chris. I said Chris, we can either go down a sort of arch Darth Vader route, straight just neutral tone villain voice, or we could try this. And this I’ve been thinking of just in case we’ve got to consider the roots and origins of Bane. But we could get laughed out of the part of it, it might be something that we regret, but it’s your choice ultimately. He says, no I think we’ll go with it. And that was that. And we played with it, and made it a bit more fluid, and now people love it.
That last part is a bit of a joke, in case you were wondering. At least he’s self-aware. While fans continue to be divided on Tom Hardy’s Bane, there’s no doubt that he’s an extremely committed actor who clearly put a lot of effort into his role as the DC villain. And now he’s playing a villain (of sorts) and experimenting with vocals in the Venom film series, so he has even more opportunities to show off his acting range.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage is set to hit theaters on October 1. In addition to Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock/Venom, the film also stars returning cast members Michelle Williams as Eddie’s ex-fiancee Anne Weying and Reid Scott as her new paramour. Woody Harrelson will play antagonist Cletus Kasady/Carnage, with Naomie Harris stepping in as Frances Barrison/Shriek.
