Hardy has been circling fame for several years now. His professional stage debut brought him an Evening Standard Award (for In Arabia, We’d All Be Kings, at London’s Hampstead theatre, in 2003), and he is no less charismatic on television, as can be seen from his sterling supporting turn as Robert Dudley, love interest to Anne-Marie Duff’s wild-eyed Elizabeth I, in the forthcoming BBC series The Virgin Queen.
Yet here, as elsewhere, Hardy takes a self-deprecating view of his part in the whole. “It’s called The Virgin Queen, so Dudley plays the role of companion and lover and friend.” He goes on: “Dudley is used to serve as a private ear to the queen in a sensitive manner.” Did he do research? “I dug holes around the neighbourhood of the time” — not least when preparing to play Christopher Marlowe for a film that was scuppered at the last minute. “The areas that interested me were more around that period than specifically Robert Dudley’s family tree. He’s a fairly stock character in the thing. If it had been Robert Dudley: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer, that would have been a different type of discovery, a different type of research.”
At the time of our meeting, Hardy hadn’t seen the competing stage Dudley of Guy Henry in the similarly themed Mary Stuart, which finished yesterday in the West End. Yet his television portrait of the man who, at various times, kept both Elizabeth and Mary happy more than fulfilled the view of the character held by the writer of The Virgin Queen, Paula Milne. “I was tenacious about holding on to Dudley’s ambivalence, and Tom really did get that,” Milne says. “Often, an actor will need to know the neat solution to a character: is he good or bad? But Tom was happy to take on that more mercurial moral ambivalence.” It helps, too, as Milne notes, that “Tom has great screen presence”.
If the four-hour programme shows off Hardy to fine advantage, it’s not alone. In the recent TV Sweeney Todd, he was the police officer who rumbled Ray Winstone, while he plays Bill Nighy’s business partner (“a really lovely character role”) in the Stephen Poliakoff-scripted Gideon’s Daughter, on BBC1 next month. In the low-budget film Scenes of a Sexual Nature, shot on and around Hampstead Heath, and due for release later this year, Hardy partners Sophie Okonedo in a series of duologues about love and lust on a single day in northwest London. The movie, he says, is “very funny, very wry”.
So, for that matter, is Hardy, who speaks with disarming candour about the difficulties of breaking out in a business that might politely be called crowded. “Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising,” he tells me, in one of several meetings — first, over a burger at London’s Soho House, then, when he’s caked in make-up, on the set of The Virgin Queen last summer at Shepperton Studios.
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After a brief stint as a model — “I was Mr July in Just 17” — Hardy did a foundation course in drama in Richmond, near where he grew up, and went on to study at the Drama Centre, where, he laughs, he was “thrown out at the end of both years”. He soon found himself in the ensemble of the epic mini-series Band of Brothers, which was followed by big-screen parts in The Reckoning, with Willem Dafoe and Paul Bettany, and as one of the elite American soldiers in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down. But it was his 2002 appearance in Star Trek: Nemesis, as the villainous Shinzon, that brought with it a fan base. “To be 23 or 24, and have that kind of money on my shoulders ...” he says of a film whose budget he pegs somewhere near the $85m mark. “I thought, if you f*** this up, Hardy — pardon my French. But to be aware you’re holding that kind of weight — it was a huge deal for me.”
Did his career seem guaranteed? Hardy gives the wry, seasoned grin of someone well attuned to a business where, in a sense, you are forever starting over. “That’s the question: how do I measure success? Sometimes I wonder, why now? Where is mine? And you think, Tom, you ungrateful so-and-so, your cup is half full, and I’m like, my cup is half empty, because I’m spoilt, sensitive, insecure, greedy, envious, bitter, lustful, needy, insecure.” (The last one is a favourite word.) He laughs, as if to annul his own outburst. “Oh my God, oh my God, if I think my cup is half empty, I’m insecure. And I refill, because my time is right now, more than beyond my wildest dreams.”
It may simply be that Hardy is unusually honest about the perils of the actor’s life, an existence that (as many stars will tell you) can get more onerous with recognition, not less. As a child, he says, he “always liked to play, and I love stories, and I’m quite bossy as well. I always had a fertile imagination”. In the run-up to Black Hawk Down, for instance, he recalls “not enjoying the moment until they said, ‘It’s your part’, and I went, ‘Ah, the euphoria of working again’”. It’s no surprise to learn that Hardy also writes (“My mind is busy”), given his penchant for metaphor in speech. The vicissitudes of acting are “like rock-climbing”, he says. “You get a handhold here and a wrist there, and think, that will do, I’ll busk that. But I’m not built to climb rocks: I’m not that. I’m a fish that has to learn to walk through the desert, and I’m not used to it. I want to be in the water, but, unfortunately, I’ve been chosen to walk across the desert.”
Rapid-fire and terrifically warm in conversation, Hardy nonetheless talks about his work being fuelled by anger: “I’m just an angry little boy, really, a frightened boy. I have an unnecessary fear level.” That comes, he says, from feeling that he’s not good enough. “I’m just not, and that comes back again at night. No matter how much I dock it during the day and work on it, it grows again at night. It’s no coincidence that I’m playing those people, is it?” he asks, with reference to some of the more volatile theatre parts of recent years.
Besides the aptly named Skank from In Arabia, We’d All Be Kings, he was the hapless son in the Royal Court’s Scandinavian slice of Oedipus, Blood, opposite Francesca Annis, and caused a stir as Jonny Lee Miller’s fearsome brother, Michael, in another Scandinavian family blood bath, the Almeida premiere of Festen. “I do feel alive when I play these characters, like I owe them something. There’s no such thing as a coincidence.”
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Now divorced (“I got in early and got out early”), Hardy has also come clean, he says, following time spent on “debauchery, destruction, violence, mayhem, drugs, rock’n’roll”. It has been, he says, two years and counting since he last smoked or drank. “I’m a pipe-and-slippers man,” he smiles. “New and improved.”
What’s ahead? He plays the Conte de Rohan, opposite Kirsten Dunst, in the new Sofia Coppola film, Marie-Antoinette, and has shot a new movie version of Theseus and the minotaur that is set, he says, “during the Ice Age — or was it the Bronze? Oh, God, I don’t know anything”. There he goes again.
Along with the director Robert Delamere, Hardy has also started an underground theatre company known as Shotgun, which boasts “40 members and growing”, and is working with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s LAByrinth theatre company, from New York, on a one-man show that he plans to do in London.
Whereas once, he says, he lived “like a bullet — I had to get another job and another one and another one”, Hardy now finds himself living more in the moment as he moves toward 30. As regards stage roles, he says he is excited about playing the older men — “The Iagos, Richard IIIs, Ivanovs. I’m looking forward to playing everything, everything, from classics to contemporary. The theatre has been a magical place for me, and I want to be in it, always.”
Small wonder that the role that most appeals to him is Hamlet — but in time. “The ripples of Ben Whishaw’s genius (the 23-year-old who got rave reviews in Trevor Nunn’s Old Vic staging in 2004) are going on, so I’ve got to wait a while until I come along with my slightly older, more bow-legged version.” If there were ever a marriage of play and player waiting to happen, this one is it. For Tom Hardy, more than most, the readiness is all.
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The Virgin Queen starts on BBC1 next Sunday; Gideon’s Daughter is on BBC1 in February