Prison baroque

Tom Hardy has a knack for extremely colorful comparisons in his rapid-fire, rat-a-tat-tat descriptions. Talking admiringly about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s experimental LAByrinth Theater Company, the 32-year-old British star likens the troupe’s hybrid of acting styles to “Taxi Driver meets Disney World.” A long, dank prison corridor becomes, in his mind, “a submarine decorated with McDonald’s strip lighting.” And the what-did-he-just-say? winner is the compliment Hardy reserves for the subject of his new film, Bronson: “He’s like Rupert Pupkin combined with Santa Claus, Shrek and a fucking angry polar bear—with a very naughty schoolboy lurking inside him.”

Given whom he’s talking about—one Michael Peterson, an English criminal who renamed himself “Charles Bronson” and earned the tabloid-coronated title of “Britain’s most violent prisoner”—the fact that he’s namechecking an enraged beast, St. Nick and Robert De Niro’s sociopath from The King of Comedy actually makes sense, especially once you’ve seen Hardy’s performance as the infamous career convict. Never mind that the slim actor shaved his head, grew a 19th-century pugilist handlebar mustache and put on close to 30 pounds of muscle—twice—over four years to play Bronson. (After initially gaining weight, Hardy shed the extra mass to portray an emaciated heroin addict in another project; he then bulked back up once filming started.) He brings a blend of brute physicality, flickers of humanity and over-the-top theatricality to Nicolas Winding Refn’s expressionistic biopic, which turns this feared public figure into a charismatic, complex walking contradiction.

“Well, that’s what Charlie is like, really,” Hardy says, calling from his temporary residence in L.A. “I mean, I visited Charlie regularly for a year and a half, and would sit there listening to him talk to me—and sometimes at me—for hours on end. He’s an amazing storyteller, much more intellectual and creative than a typical thug. Originally, the producers wanted to do more of an obvious 'hard-man’ gangster movie. After Nicolas and my writing partner, Kelly Marcel, came on board, we started to latch on to the performance-art aspects of what Charlie said and did. Those outlandish scenes where he’s putting on this vaudeville-style act, talking to an audience in a theater and wearing makeup? That’s actually closer to the truth of spending an afternoon with him, if you can believe it.”

Thanks to an ability to indulge in both hyperrealistic emotion and commedia dell’arte broadness, Hardy’s Bronson fits in perfectly with Refn’s formalistic flourishes. Taking aesthetic cues from Kubrick and Kenneth Anger, the director Steadicams his way through a world of hellish red cell blocks and rancid-brown underground fight clubs that complements Hardy’s Droog-cartoonish strutting, mugging and ultraviolent flare-ups. So it’s a shock to hear the Danish filmmaker say that his first impression of the actor was that he was too...melodramatic. “Oh, I didn’t like him at all,” Refn says, laughing. “We met in a wine bar in London, and he was just so garish. The hatred was mutual by the end of the night. So though Tom had been attached, he went off to do something else, and I started looking for other actors—none of whom were right. People kept telling me to meet with him again, and I was being arrogant and childish: 'No, never!’ Finally, I saw Tom six months later, and thought, Oh, wait, you are Charlie Bronson; I should have my head examined. From then on, it became a full collaboration.”

Though Hardy points out that the on-set atmosphere was as collaborative as it was contentious—“There were plenty of things being thrown on the ground and people storming off on all sides, but it got made”—certain burdens were his alone to shoulder when it came to playing such a divisive, publicly damned figure. “Nic had no interest in meeting Charlie whatsoever,” Hardy says. “Whereas I got to know him, his family and his friends very well. I felt a little protective in terms of how he came across. At the same time, you can’t justify the horrific violence; Charlie has never killed anybody, but he has, in his own words, 'not left people the way that he’d found them.’ So you want to treat him like a human being yet not glamorize what he’s done, while never assuming you know his motivations.” Hardy takes a breath from his speed-demon patter before posing two last questions: “Did I do a truthful job? I think so. Did I find out what made him tick? Absolutely not! I mean, I don’t know what makes me tick, mate.”

Bronson opens Fri 9.

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