Tom Hardy continues to score raving reviews for his performance in "Legend," where the actor plays the roles of both famous British gangster in the 1960's, Reggie and Ronnie Kray, which according to Hardy, is the hardest thing he has ever done.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Tom Hardy together with "Legend" director and writer Brian Helgeland and cinematographer Dick Pope talked about out the most challenging part of the film they had to shoot: a fierce physical confrontation between Reggie and Ronnie Kray.
"The two characters, they were pretty easy to slip between. The complicated part was to make an audience believe it wasn't one performer doing both parts," Tom Hardy told EW.
"Tom and I would rehearse in the morning. I would read Ron and he would do Reggie. At which point, once we had the scene down, he would record Ron's end of the dialog. He'd always play Reggie first, and we'd play Ron in an ear-piece, so he could at least act off his own performance, or a kind of 70 percent performance of Ron, since we hadn't filmed him yet. Then he'd go and change into Ron mode," said Helgeland.
Hardy and Helgeland were unanimous in saying that what greatly helped them in shooting "Legend" was Hardy's stunt double, Jacob Tomuri, who also was Hardy's double in "Mad Max: Fury Road."
"I put poor Jacob in the s-t, actually," Hardy said. "I threw him under the bus at the beginning. The question was, 'How do you feel, Jacob, about acting like both of the brothers when I think this is the hardest thing I've ever done?"
"Because the Krays is the hardest thing I've ever done," Hardy added. The actor also laughingly said that he thought his stunt double Jacob did much better than him playing the Krays. "I'm really proud of him," he said.
And when it came down to shooting the Krays' fight scene, Helgeland shared that Hardy came up to him and asked how many takes he plans to do with the scene. When Helgeland asked why he was asking, Hardy said, "Because me and Jacob are really going to hit each other. So, I want to know, so I can pace myself."
"As we got closer to the end of each other's coverage we'd throw in some harder punches and slaps. We had a good old slapfest!" Hardy said. "It was a situation in which I thought, well, either we shy away from it, or we go for it, and we went for it. So, we beat each other up quite badly-for fun. It was fun!" Then he laughed.
A.V. Club, in its review, said that it's hard to imagine how "Legend" would have fared without Tom Hardy on it. Hardy was a "suave operator with impeccable manners" as Reggie and was a "surprisingly eloquent thug" as Ronnie.
