Thank God I wasn’t standing when I came across this Esquire UK cover, because the sight of Tom Hardy’s bearded, beautiful face made me weak at the knees. Literally. My body had a deeply visceral reaction to this cover. It feels like every so often, a dude comes around and like 90% of the ladies in the world are like “OH YES.” George Clooney was that guy in the 1990s. Then Russell Crowe was that guy for a few years. Then…I don’t know? Brad Pitt was that guy for a while. Clive Owen could have been that guy. And now Tom Hardy is that guy. Tom is starting the promotional work for Child 44 and Mad Max: Fury Road. And he gave a lengthy interview to Esquire UK – you can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

Working with Leo DiCaprio in The Revenant: “He’s a tough kid actually, Leo. Brilliant bloke, really supportive. I shamelessly don’t read scripts. But Leo called me up and said, ‘Dude, you have to check this out, I think it’s a brilliant piece and Alejandro’s a genius – will you read it?’ I was supposed to be doing Splinter Cell, so I was like, ‘I’m going to jump out of helicopters, mate. I want to go and play soldiers!’ and he said, ‘Just read it, you idiot!’ I was like ‘Mmm, all right’.” So he read it at least? “Half of it. Because Leo told me to do it.”

He calls his wife Charlotte Riley “Charlie Monkey:“She’s in London doing Monkey business. F–king right.”

Being encouraged by his teacher to go into drama school: “Yeah, but in this case it’s not like Billy Elliot or anything because I went to a nice school and I was given loads of f–king lifelines. What a f–king arse I must have been to my poor parents. ‘Oh, go on Tom, just take one…’ At the same time as accepting that I had a really good home environment, I went balls-out to f–k that up. I was committed.”

The nightmarish film shoot for Mad Max: “We were in the middle of nowhere, so far away from the studio system that [Warner Bros] can’t really see what’s going on, and just getting things to and from the set was a nightmare. We’d lose half a vehicle in sand and have to dig it out. It was just this unit in the middle of x-million square-kilometres of desert, and then this group of lunatics in leathers, like a really weird S&M party, or a Hell’s Angels convention. It was like Cirque du Soleil meets f–king Slipknot.”

Whether he’s difficult: “I have a reputation for being difficult. And I am. I am actually. But I’m not unreasonable. It used to be that if somebody hurt me I’d lash out a bit, in order to get them to stop. It ultimately comes from fear. If I cause enough of a mess, then people will never ask me again to do something I don’t want to do. But that sort of backfires after a while so you don’t want to do that. You grow up.”

[From Esquire UK]

Tom has nice things to say about most people he works with, but he was given the chance to directly contradict the rumor that he and Charlize Theron didn’t get along, and he didn’t really contradict it. But that’s when he started talking about his “difficult” reputation. And while Mad Max sounds like it’s probably going to be a visually stunning film, it also sounds like they wasted SO MUCH money making it. Oh well – I hope it’s a hit for Tom’s sake.

Photos courtesy of Esquire UK.