Middle class boy with a dark side

10 April 2012

Recently, Tom Hardy lost two stone in five weeks. The 28-year-old, London-born actor slimmed down drastically to ten-andahalf stone to play the title role - a heroin addict with muscular dystrophy - in the forthcoming film Stuart: A Life Backwards.

Over the next two months, he must put on four-and-a-half stone to play heavyweight boxer Glenn McCrory in Aisling Walsh's movie Carrying David.

To govern the weight fluctuations required by his film career, Hardy has the help of nutritionist Lisa Jeans, who runs the Complete Retreat spa resort in Spain and who helped Renée Zellweger put on the pounds for the Bridget Jones films.

For Stuart, Lisa Jeans put him on an exercise programme of running five to seven miles every day, and a diet that revolved around blueberries, boiled eggs, apples, salad and tuna.

He wasn't allowed caffeine or salt, took vitamin B supplements and Omega-3 oils, and was supposed to drink smoothies of cucumber and celery to combat water retention. "I ended up just eating them, because I don't have a juicer," he laughs. "But Lisa was brilliant, and I need all the help I can get."

He's not joking. As well as being an actor of remarkable talent, who won the Evening Standard's Most Promising Newcomer Award on his 2003 stage debut in Steven Adly Guirgis's In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings, Tom Hardy is a recovering addict whose self-destructive urges almost killed him.

"The problem for me is psychological," he says. "So I have to be careful about obsessing about anything. Food could be as dangerous for me as drink or drugs. I could either binge or starve. On a film set, I might have breakfast at 5am and just keep eating all day. Right now, I'm rehearsing a play, and I could easily go without meals for two days.

"And I could just as easily become a gym-junkie, too. Recently I went through a period where I was lifting a lot of weights, and I had to stop that, not just because I had to slim down to play Stuart, but because it was becoming addictive."

I meet Hardy at his girlfriend's mother's house in East Molesey, where he is rehearsing a play called Blue on Blue with his own new theatre company, Shotgun. The piece has been written by Tom's dad, Chips, who is also here.

Father and son are lovingly demonstrative with one another, and it's hard to believe that the polite, friendly young man before me was, while enjoying a hugely successful film career, also locked into a downward spiral that alienated his family, ruined his early marriage and nearly killed him. Tom Hardy assures me it is true.

"I come from a very nice middle-class family in East Sheen," he says. "I went to prep school and boarding school, then Kensington crammers - all the signs of a middle-class upbringing where every opportunity was provided for me to do well. You know, things were fine."

But for him, he says, "fine" was an acronym for "f***ed-up, insecure, neurotic and emotional. From a very young age I was flagrantly disobedient. I got involved in anything that was naughty. I wanted to explore all the dark corners of the world, partly to see if I could control it".

In his teens he sampled every form of bad behaviour "from tattoos through to drug abuse, drinking, violent behaviour, robbery, carrying guns - all symptoms of selfhatred".

He was arrested at 15, picked up joyriding with a friend and a gun in a stolen Mercedes. He started fights. Remarkably, he was never charged with an offence, and although he eased off on the violent behaviour in his teens, his predeliction for substance abuse stayed with him.

From the outside, his life looked charmed. He won The Big Breakfast's Find Me a Supermodel competition at 19 (and with it a brief contract with Models One) and the following year got a place at drama school to study the only thing that had ever appealed or mattered to him, acting.

In his second year he got married. "I met my wife, Sarah - who was a production assistant and is now a producer - on the street in Covent Garden, and three weeks later we were married," he says. "It was pretty crazy but very exciting at the same time, really intoxicating."

And although he was kicked out of drama school ("twice - for being a little s***, basically"), that year he was offered a part in Steven Spielberg's epic Second World War series, Band of Brothers.

"Everything was happening fast and it felt wonderful," says Hardy. Frightening, too. "I had never acted for the camera. It's a huge set, it's Tom Hanks, it's Steven Spielberg, and no expense spared. I felt very exposed, isolated and vulnerable. I had to do my first sex scenes, which were terrifying. But at the time I thought I should never ask for help, and I kept thinking: 'If I cock up, I'll never work again.'"

Hardy's obsessive personality made him a workaholic, so he took every job he was offered, and had 10 films (including Black Hawk Down and Star Trek: Nemesis) under his belt before he was 25. He also had a serious drink problem.

"I come from heavy-drinking stock," he says. "It's something I always felt comfortable around, and I began to drink heavily. Very heavily." He was also using drugs. Was it heroin? Cocaine? "It was everything. Everything. You name it. I wasn't fussy. But you can't sustain that, especially with work, and I was working all the time. You end up losing the people you love, and you become someone you're not."

In 2002, after completing filming on the Star Trek movie, he had a complete physical and mental breakdown. He collapsed one night in Soho and it was then that his rehabilitation-began. "Some people find themselves in India," he says with sour self-disgust. "I found myself in Old Compton Street, on a [crack] pipe, covered in blood and vomit."

It cost him his marriage. "It's not about blame," he insists. "I loved Sarah and I still do, and we married for all the right reasons. I feel she saved my life on numerous occasions. But in hindsight, we didn't have the best reasons to stay married, for the health of everyone involved."

So bad was his physical burnout he was briefly hospitalised, then moved back to his parents' house in Sheen and went into a recovery programme where anonymity and confidentiality are sacrosanct (he is doubly careful of talking about this, in case he backslides and prevents someone else from "getting well").

Part of the process involved "making restitution" to his parents and his ex-wife for everything he put them through, and realising he must now watch his every step. "I live with something that will kill me if I don't manage it," he says. "There's a huge gorilla in underpants running around the centre of my being wanting to smash things up to the detriment of my health. I can't deny that he's there, but I have come to terms with living with him."

He's got Lisa Jeans to steer him away from eating disorders, and has purposely cut himself off from the druggy milieu, as he did from the criminal fraternity in his teens. These days, he's more likely to be found back in East Sheen, where, "after years of trying to get away, I've bought a flat", than in Soho.

"If you hang around a barbershop for long enough you're going to get a haircut, so I don't go to bars," he says. "I know that I like a drink, but if I had hayfever I wouldn't go walking through a field full of hay."

The acting profession, especially films, though, is fuelled by alcohol. Surely wrap parties and boozy functions are hard to avoid? "Well, functions are for business, so I go along and do my business and then I leave," he says. "And I love the crews I work with, so I will always go to wrap parties, but by the time the real boozing has started and everyone's turning into vampires, I'll be at home with my girlfriend, watching telly."

Hardy says he has learned to appreciate simple pleasures - going for walks with his girlfriend Rachael Speed, an assistant director he met on the set of The Virgin Queen, or going running with his dog in the glorious parks around Sheen, Richmond and Hampton Court. Running, he says, is so much better without a hangover. The form of rehab he went through means "there is always someone I can talk to, day or night, and if I need to I do it".

He tries to watch what he eats without being obsessive, but castigates himself in front of me for drinking tea with sugar, and smoking. Twice a day, in the morning and the evening, he sets aside time for meditation - not so much a spiritual exercise as a method he's evolved for maintaining his equilibrium.

"It's all about balance. In the evening I just think about what went wrong that day, what went badly, and I concentrate on the things I can change and not the ones I can't," he says. "And in the mornings, it's just about getting my head straight and being thankful I'm still alive."

It strikes me that workaholism may be the addiction that saved Tom Hardy - that and the love he rediscovered with his family and his girlfriend. Aside from his myriad forthcoming film and television projects, not to mention a starring role in Man of Mode at the National Theatre in January, he's fizzing with enthusiasm about Shotgun.

Initially designed as a place where resting actors could continue to train and initiate "passion projects", it has already grown to embrace outreach work for inner-city schoolkids and inmates at HMP Send (where Tom's past experiences will give him a bit of insight) and its first professional production.

Chips Hardy tells me there's quite a lot of him and Tom in Blue on Blue, the tale of a wounded father and a driven, damaged son. "We've had our ups and downs over the years," he says, "but Tom wouldn't be such a good actor if he didn't have those things in him."

I ask Tom if he agrees with this, if he feels he's now able to channel his obsessiveness into his craft. "I don't know about that," he says. "I just know now that nothing is more important than peace of mind, and family and love and security. And work."

Blue on Blue is at Theatre 503 above the Latchmere pub, 503 Latchmere Road, SW11, 7-11 November (020 7978 7040). Scenes of a Sexual Nature and Marie Antoinette are on general release.

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