The most explosive actor of his generation has a new TV show, a new baby and a new outlook on life
At some point in the not too distant future, Tom Hardy needs to book himself in for a new tattoo. The 39-year-old British actor has already got quite a few, as the markings protruding from his T-shirt — and the many topless shots that exist of him on the internet — attest. He’s had the London skyline, a Chinese dragon, his wife’s name (and his ex-wife’s initials), a Madonna and child and a Buddha with an AK47. This latest one though, he’s dragging his heels about. “I haven’t got it yet,” he says cheerily, taking a deep lungful from his electronic cigarette, “because it sucks.”
Hardy had a wager with Leonardo DiCaprio, with whom he starred in last year’s The Revenant, a story of betrayal and vengeance among 19th-century fur trappers. DiCaprio predicted that Hardy would get an Oscar nomination for his supporting role as a feral frontiersman who leaves DiCaprio’s character for dead after the latter is mauled by a grizzly bear. Hardy bet a tattoo of the winner’s choosing that he wouldn’t. Hardy lost. Hardy recreates DiCaprio’s design on a Post-it note for me. “He wrote, in this really shitty handwriting: ‘Leo knows everything.’ Ha! I was like, 'OK, I’ll get it done, but you have to write it properly.’”
And he probably will. Hardy’s body art is very much a statement of his commitment: to his lovers, to his family, to himself. Also, to his agent. He has her name, Lindy King, tattooed on the inside of his arm, which he said he would do if she ever got him into Hollywood. Thanks to gigs like The Revenant, in which Hardy brought a magnetic savagery to every scene; or 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, which saw him knock the stuffing back into the moth-eaten action movie franchise; or playing Bane in 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises and thereby creating an instantly iconic super-villain who was as terrifying as he was kinky — she most certainly did.