“Arch Darth Vader kind of route”: Tom Hardy was Willing to Take a Big Risk in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Trilogy by Experimenting with his Voice
There are a few iconic characters that are too difficult to emulate on the big screen. Portraying such characters from Darth Vader and Ob-Wan Kenobi of the Star Wars universe to villains like Joker and Bane from the DC universe is a huge undertaking as it should satisfy fans and leave them wanting more. And there’s nothing bigger for an actor to play multiple iconic roles in their career. The popular British actor Tom Hardy has played Venom aka Eddie Brock in the Marvel Universe and Bane in the DC Universe, both of which gained him immense praise and critical acclaim.
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How Did Tom Hardy Prepare To Play Bane?
The third Dark Knight movie by Christopher Nolan for the DCU saw Tom Hardy playing one of the best villains in the comics, Bane. The actor researched for the role and the personality to emulate on-screen. During this time, he met someone very interesting who inspired him to adopt a similar voice for his villainous role. In an interview segment by Wired, Hardy revealed,
“That was actually a really cool choice that Chris [Nolan] made. Bane quintessentially is Latinx in origin…and I’m not. So I looked at the concept of Latin and found a man called Bartley Gorman, who’s a Romany gypsy. The king of the gypsies, in inverted commas, is a bare-knuckle fighter and a boxer. And he said [doing Bane-like voice], “When I get into a ring with a man, and we want to wipe you off the face of the Earth, and he wants to kill me.” And I was like this is great.”
Eventually, the decision was Nolan’s since he was deciding the creative aspects of the movies. The duo wanted to set Bane apart from other villains and make him instantly recognizable. Hardy was in conversation with Venom 2’s director Andy Serkis, he added,
“And I showed Chris. I said Chris, we can either go down a sort of arch Darth Vader route, straight just neutral tone villain voice, or we could try this. And this I’ve been thinking of just in case we’ve got to consider the roots and origins of Bane. But we could get laughed out of the part of it, it might be something that we regret, but it’s your choice ultimately. He says, no I think we’ll go with it. And that was that. And we played with it, and made it a bit more fluid, and now people love it [laughs].”
The comparison to Darth Vader is apparent because both characters are masked so apart from their partial expressions, only their voice could stand out and be perceived as threatening for the viewers. Hardy also underwent a significant physical transformation to play Bane well.
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Did People Like Bane’s Voice?
The reason Hardy laughs in the end is because many people found it difficult to understand his dialogue in the movie and kept scratching their heads trying to understand what Bane said. With a modulated voice and the mask worn by Bane, it was close to impossible for viewers to understand the character’s speech. To this extent, a few scenes were dubbed after the initial previews proved people couldn’t understand the dialogue.
Nolan and Hardy were quite successful in making Bane a truly memorable villain nonetheless. The neutral tone and voice helped Bane focus more on his actions to become a feared villain. Everyone knew taking on the baton of a DC villain after Heath Ledger’s Joker would be a humongous task but Hardy came through, depicting the foreignness of the character perfectly.
