Warner Bros.
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Given that Tom Hardy has spent much of the last six years playing Venom — his only non-Venom role between 2018 and 2024 was 2020’s Capone — it’s slightly fallen under the radar that the Academy Award-nominee is one of the best actors alive (if you saw The Bikeriders this summer, hopefully, that served as a reminder).
The appreciation for Hardy’s acting genius was recently revitalized during the press tour for his new film Venom: The Last Dance, as the former Christopher Nolan stalwart recounted, in great detail, how he came up with the voice for Bane.
While Bane’s voice in The Dark Knight Rises has long been a subject of loving mocking — it’s widely considered silly but people still adore Hardy’s performance as Bane — it came from a place of deep care and research, as Hardy recently explained.
The way Tom Hardy breaks down the difference between finding the voice for Venom (dragon situation) versus the voice for Bane is profoundly beautiful. I’m in awe of how he’s meticulously considered the subtleties of the character. 💯 pic.twitter.com/I8nFX1SHLR
— Ariel 𐂂 (@arieljxn) October 22, 2024
“One of [the challenges] was the introduction of a new villain after the Joker had played so profoundly, to the fan lore, as well, that being accepted as the new villain was going to have to take an element of risk, which was non-negotiable anyway,” Hardy explains during an interview with Fox’s Jake Hamilton.
“Christopher Nolan is such a mastermind, he had a really specific idea. And it laid down the pipe to go, ‘Okay, do I do a generic baddie voice?’ I can calculate and create something that’s cold and dark and sinister with no light, no color, no fun. Or, Bane is Latinx, technically, so I had to look at that option and think, ‘How can I justify this?'” he explained.
“And I looked at Romani Gipsy, in Latin origins, and I found Bartley Gorman, the King of the Gypsies, a bare-knuckle fighter. And he has a mellifluous accent, which is all over the place of him being a traveler. There are lots of different sounds,” he continued. “And I played that hymn for Chris, and I said, ‘Listen, we could get really laughed at here. This could be ridiculous. But it’s an interesting sound silhouette and it might work because physically, he’s like a gorilla, he’s primal, he’s dangerous and scary, but he’s very florid when he speaks. He likes his own voice, so perhaps we should add some color to it.”
In addition to his Bane voice, Hardy also hilariously detailed how the Venom voice is a combination of him pretending to be his dog and Busta Rhymes.
Follow-up, here’s the beginning of the clip if you’re interested in how Tom Hardy found his Venom voice pic.twitter.com/SwFotL77AU
— Ariel 𐂂 (@arieljxn) October 22, 2024
With Venom: The Last Dance apparently being the final film in the Venom trilogy, hopefully, that means will get back into playing the sorts of parts that made him one of Hollywood’s leading A-list men. At this time, however, Hardy’s only upcoming completed project is the Gareth Evans (The Raid) film Havoc, which wrapped filming back in 2021.
It was also reported this year that he will star in Guy Ritchie’s The Associate, Blood On Snow alongside Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and the crime-thriller 77 Blackout alongside Mahershala Ali.
Venom: The Last Dance, which also stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Peggy Lu, Alanna Ubach, and Stephen Graham, hits movie theaters in the United States on Friday, October 25.