Tom Hardy is a brilliant actor who has inhabited a wide variety of roles, but one thing many of them seem to have in common is an utterly indistinguishable manner of speech masked by a bizarre accent. Born in the Hammersmith district of London, Hardy is Hollywood’s go-to when it comes to casting tough, rough-around-the-edges, or even straight-up unhinged characters that make the most out of his ability to project a bombastic personality. Across even Tom Hardy’s best movies, however, he has a strange habit of giving his characters unique, difficult-to-understand voices.
Tom Hardy’s own accent is something of a collage of his experience at this point, with his normal speaking voice telling the story of his default London drawl being displaced and diluted by years of travel and high-performance acting. While many of Hardy’s roles have taken advantage of his background, setting him up as a tough, cockney roughouser, just as many of his characters are hard-boiled Americans with an ax to grind. The more he cartoonishly stretches and squashes his voice, the more impossible his dialogue can be to follow without any subtitles.
8
Alfie Solomons
Peaky Blinders
Tom Hardy may be best known for his movie career, starting with the mind-bending Inception, he occasionally lends his larger-than-life presence to TV, as well. Enter his character in Peaky Blinders, the Cillian Murphy-led English crime drama series set in the aftermath of World War I. Hardy plays Alfie Solomons, the tough-as-nails leader of a Jewish gang operating out of Camden Town in London.
If Cillian Murphy’s vocal fry as Tommy Shelby is a smoothy crisped spring roll, Hardy’s Aflie Solomons is a double-fried chicken ten piece drowning in grease. Hardy’s vocal register as Alfie is so intimidating that it can be easy to miss his actual words for their intended message, with the occasional syllable drowning in the deep, crunchy tones and East London Cockney accent. It’s a more natural register for Hardy to inhabit considering his background, but the excessive vocal fry can muddy things up a bit. Compared to some other Hardy roles, he may as well be a text-to-speech program.
7
Johnny
The Bikeriders
It’s in his American characters that the absurdity of Tom Hardy’s vocal acting truly gets a chance to shine. Taking place in 1960s Chicago, The Bikeriders posits Hardy as Johnny, the terrifying leader of the Vandals motorcycle gang. In an era in which “greasers” were terrifying criminals rather than adorable musical performers played by John Travolta, Hardy is a fitting choice for the violent tyrant of the motorcycle-riding barbarians. Yet the Chicago accent in the mid 20th century proves to be a difficult assignment for Hardy.
Hardy’s accent for Johnny is all over the place, clearly doing its best to mimic the gangster sound of an old-school Chicagoan. In practice, he sounds more like Marlon Brando in The Godfather trying not to breathe through his nose after smelling something awful. At once nasally and giving the impression that he’s trying to swallow his own throat, Hardy’s hilariously over-the-top voice for Johnny can sound unintelligible even to American ears, though it’s relatively steady compared to Hardy’s weirdest vocal registers.
6
Farrier
Dunkirk
By and large, Dunkirk is a film that relies more on dramatic visuals and action rather than dialogue to tell its story, leaving Tom Hardy to emote with his eyes alone as he pilots his Spitfire. However, in the few lines he does read, Farrier is troubled by Christopher Nolan’s infamous dialogue audio mixing issues, which very well may be at their worst in Dunkirk. It’s a good thing Hardy is so phenomenal at conveying is emotions through mannerisms and body language alone, because for most of Dunkirk, it’s all he has to rely on.
Farrier’s accent is posh to the point of breaking, and his dialogue could be accurately transcribed by replacing every vowel that should have passed through his lips with an apostrophe. Between that, the muffling flight mask, the crackle of the 1940s radio, and Nolan’s inability to make a character speak clearly in his final audio mix, Farrier can be quite difficult to make out. Still, as one of Hardy’s most polite and taciturn characters, he manages somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of readability.
5
Al Capone
Capone
Having already played a wide bevy of notorious gangsters across his career, Tom Hardy elevated his game by taking on one of the most infamous criminals of all time with Capone. Specifically, the film takes place towards the end of Capone’s life, with the former mobster millionaire suffering from a worsening mental state due to neurosyphilis and a stroke. Meanwhile, outside actors, convinced his health decline is a mere hoax, do their best to find a cache of loot Capone has forgotten the hiding place of.
While Hardy’s Chicago accent as Johnny was squeaky and uneven, as an aged Capone struggling with dementia, he’s practically squawking every line. Hardy was certainly the right choice for this outrageous time in Capone’s life, but his words are increasingly impossible to discern as he slides further into madness. Layered by a thick Chicago drawl, age, mental instability, and rage, Hardy’s lines can often come out half-swallowed as he bellows in confusion.
4
Venom/Eddie Brock
The Venom Trilogy
It’s safe to say that Sony’s ill-informed Spider-Man spin-off universe would never have gotten off the ground if it wasn’t for Tom Hardy. Playing a dual role as both the down-on-his-luck journalist Eddie Brock and the alien symbiote Venom, Hardy is boundless fun to watch violently trip over himself as the lethal protector. But his actual words can be quite difficult to discern, thanks largely to his awkward choices for line delivery across all three Venom films.
Tom Hardy’s American accent as Eddie Brock is simply bizarre, feeling like an alien parody of a typical New Yorker rather than an actual person. Ironically, sometimes Eddie’s words are more difficult to make out than Venom’s, despite the deep, gaudy growl he speaks in filtered through layers of digital effects. Eddie’s voice cracks like he’s going through puberty as his uneven register wanders all over the place, clearly fighting Hardy’s native British accent every step of the way. Understanding his ramblings and arguments with the equally absurd-sounding Venom is an arduous task to ask from general audiences.
3
John Fitzgerald
The Revenant
The film that finally gave Leonardo DiCaprio his overdue Academy Award win, Tom Hardy’s involvement in The Revenant is often unfairly overlooked. It’s great to see him play a villain as reprehensible and irredeemable as John Fitzgerald, who leaves Leo’s Hugh Glass for dead. As fun as he is to watch, all nervous blood-fueled twitches looking out for his vengeful pursuer, actually figuring out what he’s saying is another thing entirely.
Not only is Tom Hardy stuck in America for this role, but he’s also a few hundred years in the past, entrenched in a deeply rural frontier. His resulting heavy Appalachian accent seems to be absolutely mired in vocal grit, speaking as though he has a mouthful of mud at any given time. On top of that, his actual dialogue is utterly bizarre, such as his “God is a squirrel” rant, making it next to impossible to guess his words. For the most part, John Fitzgerald feels like he’s speaking a completely different language.
2
Max Rockatansky
Mad Max: Fury Road
Speaking of Hardy’s most feral and animalistic characters, Max Rockatansky easily takes the cake for his most divorced from polite society. The world of the Mad Max movies is a post-apocalyptic hellscape far beyond saving, and to exist in it, even a heroic character has to throw huge chunks of his humanity to the dirt. Taking over the role of Max from Mel Gibson was no easy task, and while Hardy more than lives up to the title, Max’s sparse dialogue more than suffers for it.
Max may be a man of few words, especially in Mad Max: Fury Road, but when he does speak, it’s next to impossible to discern. Hardy’s accent is Max is a nightmarish mishmash of Australia, America, and South Africa, all filtered through a raspy, grunting vocal fry, putting even the most macho-fueled action heroes of yesteryear to shame. Max barks more than he speaks, and Hardy’s strange penchant for stretching “a” sounds into “e”s makes him incredibly difficult to understand. Even when Max says his own name, it sounds like he’s been misheard.
1
Bane
The Dark Knight Rises
The most infamously difficult-to-understand character in Hardy’s long career of playing heavily-accented brutes, Bane of The Dark Knight Rises is easily Hardy’s hardest-to-hear role. A vicious killer and enforcer for the League of Shadows hopelessly devoted to Talia al Ghul, the true mastermind villain of the film, Bane is a terrifying antagonist between his tactical acumen and his titanic strength. But his serious nature is endlessly undercut by the hilarious voice Tom Hardy bequeathed him with.
Hardy allegedly based Bane’s voice on the Welsh-Irish bare-knuckle boxer Bartley Gorman, giving Bane a notoriously difficult combination of accents to speak through. On top of that, his tinny gas mask furthered drowned Hardy’s voice in Nolan’s less-than-perfect final mix for the film, making Bane both funny to listen to and almost impossible to understand. To this day, Tom Hardy‘s voice as Bane is still lovingly mocked, emulated in movies like The LEGO Batman Movie and shows like Harley Quinn.
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