The 10 Best-Ever Tom Hardy Accents

Early this summer, I had the distinct pleasure of seeing The Bikeriders, written and directed by Jeff Nichols of Take Shelter fame. Of course, one of the previews I happened to see before this movie was the upcoming Spider-Man spinoff flick Venom: The Last Dance. Once I got done cheering loudly the first time Venom Horse showed up in the trailer, I had two thoughts: The Last Dance is a truly wild thing to subtitle your third Venom movie, and—more importantly—celebrated English actor Tom Hardy loves doing his little accents.

This second thought became even more pervasive the first time I heard Hardy speak in The Bikeriders as Johnny, the president of Chicago’s resident biker gang, the Vandals. Hardy’s speaking voice in this movie is both completely out of left field and weirdly compelling, and every time he was onscreen, all I could think was, “This guy really loves doing his little accents.”

With Venom: The Last Dance soon to be in theaters, I figured there was no better time to make a survey of Tom Hardy’s wackiest voices throughout the years. Movies were chosen based on two key criteria: sheer audacity of Hardy’s accent, and amount of screen time during which he gets to deploy said accent. Some of these will probably not surprise the savvy connoisseur of Tom Hardy’s checkered filmography, but a few of them may be new recommendations for you. Either way, there’s no shortage of funky accents here, and who knows? You may find a new favorite accent in here if you give them a try.

Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn directs Hardy in this biographical prison drama about Charles Bronson, a bare-knuckle boxer turned one of Britain’s most violent criminals in this surreal, disconnected series of vignettes about Bronson’s life both inside and outside of prison. While Hardy’s performance as Bronson is certainly a lot, I’m putting it at No. 10 here because this is one of Hardy’s more subtle accents, not really differing that much from his regular speaking voice save for a slight lisp. Your mileage may vary depending on how much you like Refn as a director, but I gotta hand it to Hardy, he really wears the hell out of that mustache.

A positively baby-faced and almost completely hairless Tom Hardy plays Shinzon, the half-human, half-Reman leader of an interplanetary rebellion and villain of  the 10th (yes, 10th!) Star Trek motion picture, directed by Stuart Baird. Hardy displays a veteran actor’s talent for chewing scenery despite being only 25 years old at the film’s release. Other than that, what’s most notable about Hardy’s accent in this film is that he doesn’t even attempt to mimic the mannerisms or cadence of Sir Patrick Stewart in any way, shape, or form, despite his character being a clone of Stewart’s character, Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

We’re breaking the seal on “Tom Hardy attempts a Brooklyn accent” early with this Michaël R. Roskam–directed crime drama, which is based on a short story by Dennis Lehane. Hardy plays Saginowski with what is almost unmistakably a Southern-inflected patois, leading me to believe that Hardy knows actors who use dialect coaches and thinks they’re all cowards. However this movie does also feature James Gandolfini in a supporting role as Saginowski’s crooked uncle Marv, so there’s even something for people who are looking for an additional fix of Tony Soprano as well.

No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. Brian Helgeland’s Legend is probably most famous for its sneaky attempt to hide a 2-star review on its movie poster as a 5-star one, but more importantly to the contents of this list, it features not one but two wild Tom Hardy accents as he plays twin London mobsters Ron and Reggie Kray. The good news for fans of gangster movies and Tom Hardy accents is that Hardy makes both twins sound different, with off-the-wall choices for both!

Tom Hardy plays the title character—a construction foreman having the worst night of his life—in this 2013 drama. Hardy’s accent is understated in this one, but it’s more notable because the entire film takes place over the course of Locke’s drive from Birmingham to London, effectively forcing Hardy to act against nobody save for the voices he hears over the telephone, which include greats like Olivia Coleman, Andrew Scott, and Tom Holland.

Hardy teams up with his longtime directorial collaborator Christopher Nolan for a small but mighty role as Farrier, a fighter pilot who plays a pivotal role in the evacuation of Dunkirk during World War 2. Dunkirk may feature one of Hardy’s most understated accents, which is a feat in itself, but hearing Tom Hardy bust out a proper midcentury RAF accent is shocking in and of itself.

Tom Hardy plays Eddie Brock (with a much better pan-Brooklyn accent than he uses in The Drop), an incredibly sweaty and frankly quite inept watchdog tech reporter who finds himself fused to an alien symbiote named Venom (also voiced by Hardy, doing a really deep, throaty, and frankly silly voice) after he runs afoul of the innocuously named but undeniably nefarious bio-engineering company, the Life Foundation run by Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed). This is probably not a great recommendation for people who are sticklers about their comic book movies, but it does also feature a scene where Tom Hardy makes out with a callipygian (look it up) Lady Venom (weirdly still voiced by Hardy) when the symbiote briefly possesses his ex-girlfriend (played by Michelle Williams), making this the only movie on this list where Tom Hardy is actually making out with himself.

Hardy replaced noted reactionary wingnut Mel Gibson for the fourth installment of George Miller’s frenetic and high octane post-apocalypse series, and smartly forwent even attempting to imitate Gibson’s Australian accent for the film, opting instead for moody silences and grave, gravelly prognostications such as “My world is fire. And blood” that allow Miller’s incredible vehicular set pieces to take center stage in what I believe to be one of 2015’s best movies.

Confessedly, I’m not a huge fan of Alejandro Iñárritu’s oeuvre, but I am a fan of Tom Hardy’s frankly outrageous accent as trapper/Leonardo DiCaprio revenge fixation John Fitzgerald. Making the most of his comparatively few scenes, Hardy’s nigh-incomprehensible ravings are certainly a high point of this movie for me. Now in the interest of fairness, I did watch this movie on a plane and was mostly taken in by the fact that on most commercial jetliners they censored the film’s full frontal nudity but not a scene where a man gets shot in the face by about 15 arrows, so my perspective on it may be somewhat suspect. But regardless, Hardy’s unintelligible mumbling performance is absolutely a high point for me.

Other Tom Hardy roles merely adopted having a silly accent; Bane was born in it, molded by it. It was roundly mocked at the time of its release, but I think by this point almost everyone can agree that The Dark Knight Rises (and especially Tom Hardy’s accent as the film’s resident heavy) is actually quite entertaining and hilarious. It’s probably not going to rank as anyone’s favorite film in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, but there’s not a person alive I know who doesn’t grin with delight when you hit them with “That would be very painful—for you!” in your best Bane impression.