One of actor Tom Hardy‘s best-known roles is playing the enigmatic Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, and the Oscar-nominated actor has returned to the world of superhero comic books by starring in Venom, an adaptation of the Spider-Man anti-hero/villain — a reporter infected with a destructive alien virus that he battles for control of his body with. In an interview with Esquire, Hardy speaks about what excites him about playing the character(s) and what he has channeled for the voices for each character.
What Hardy finds most interesting about playing Eddie Brock/Venom is the duality of the character. He explains, “To me it’s exciting, because it’s a double act. The character has an ethical framework, the alien by virtue of coming from another planet doesn’t have the same ethical framework, and they have to work out how to be together so they click. He now has a beast who lives rent-free in him. It could be like somebody who’s contracted a tropical disease and gone mad. It’s like acting out mental illness in some aspects, of which I have a fair understanding, having had a certain amount of mental health problems of my own, which are relevant, being an addict. So I might as well fucking use it.”
This gave Hardy the opportunity to use different influences for the voices of each character. He reveals that Eddie’s voice is “a mixture of Woody Allen and Conor McGregor: tortured neurosis but also bravado,” and that the voice for Venom is “one of those rappers from the Nineties, big voices: Redman or Method Man.”
