Throughout his acting career, many of Tom Hardy’s characters have proved to be difficult for audiences to understand. Ironically, his first major role as Twombly in the war film Black Hawk Down was easy to understand since he spent much of the movie having to shout his lines at another soldier. Since then though, a recent poll revealed that Americans voted Tom Hardy as the most difficult actor to understand. Researchers conducted the poll to study Americans’ use of subtitles, finding that many viewers used subtitles to ensure they understood characters’ dialogue, especially characters performed by Hardy.
The main reason many viewers struggle to understand Tom Hardy seems to be his characters’ accents. Hardy has played a variety of fictional characters and real people with distinct accents, such as Southern bootlegger Forrest Bondurant in Lawless and frontiersman John Fitzgerald in The Revenant, who mixed Southern and Philadelphian accents. Hardy has also used heavier versions of his own British accent by portraying characters like both of the Kray twins in Legend and prisoner Charles Bronson in Bronson. However, his most notorious accented role was Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, which combined a strong accent with a mask to make Bane incredibly difficult for some viewers to understand.
According to the subtitle poll, however, viewers even tended to struggle with Tom Hardy’s normal British accent. Since the poll focused on American audiences, all five of the shows most commonly watched with subtitles were based in the UK, including Hardy’s Peaky Blinders. Americans also often struggled to understand other actors from the UK, such as Benedict Cumberpatch, Sean Connery, and James McAvoy. Based on this study then, Hardy’s characters tend to be hard to understand due to both his natural and invented accents. However, Tom Hardy’s strong performances and popularity suggest that difficulties in understanding him have not created difficulties in his career.
Is Tom Hardy Being Hard To Understand A Major Problem?
Despite his accents often being difficult to understand, or even inaccurate, Tom Hardy has received praise for his voice performances. In one article (via The Hollywood Reporter), dialect coach Erik Singer explained that although Hardy’s accents occasionally distracted from the story, they also helped bring his characters to life. Through his intonation and dedication to his roles, Hardy was able to make his characters seem believable. For example, Singer applauded Hardy’s The Revenant performance as Fitzgerald, whose accent had a vague regional origin but served “as a reflection of [his character’s] twisted soul.” In this way, Hardy’s accents strengthened his performances because they showed the thought he put into his characters’ unique speech patterns, even if this sometimes made them harder to understand.
In addition, issues with understanding Tom Hardy’s accent have not slowed his growth in popularity. Since his debut in Black Hawk Down, Hardy has performed increasingly bigger roles. Frequently appearing in action films, Hardy portrayed major characters in Inception and Mad Max: Fury Road. He also starred as Eddie Brock in both Venom and its sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage. Fans have even argued that Hardy should become a James Bond actor in the future. This shows that while his accents can be hard to understand, Tom Hardy’s talent and commitment to his characters have made watching his performances worth the effort to many viewers.