Tom Hardy is great. We know this, you know this, and apparently Warner Bros. knows this too. The studio has footed the bill for the actor’s three biggest movies: “Inception,” “The Dark Knight Rises” and next week’s much anticipated “Mad Max: Fury Road.” The studio nearly continued that relationship, with Hardy set to appear in David Ayer’s “Suicide Squad” before abruptly dropping out, but Hardy now makes it clear that it wasn’t because the affection wasn’t mutual.
In an interview with Collider, Hardy made it clear how disappointed he is that he’s missing out on the villain team-up film: “Warner Bros. is my home studio and I love them, so I was really bummed out. I wanted to work on that and I know the script is really fucking alley, and I also know what’s gonna happen with The Joker and Harley Quinn in that; I won’t give away too much… Everybody loves The Joker. Will Smith is a dope guy, but everybody loves The Joker and that’s gonna be a very important film for fans.” Why did he leave the project in the first place? Script issues? Nope, it was as all down to scheduling problems (as we speculated at the time) as Hardy explains that Alejandro G. Innarritu’s “The Revenant” has “overshot by three months in Calgary [due to unforeseen weather], so we’ve got to go back out to Patagonia or Alaska to continue shooting.”
Don’t feel too bad for Hardy though, because he also told the site that he’s in the beginning stages of taking another crack at the DC universe: “It contains elements of all kinds of stuff. From ‘Ocean’s Eleven,’ to Batman, you can get all the wrappers out and it would be a big, really cool, technicolor ‘Pulp Fiction.’ It’s a psychological fuckfest, it’s absolutely awesome. It’s as if you would take [the Warren Ellis co-created comic book series] ’Transmetropolitan’ and make it happen, but it’s not that out there [as in a futuristic cyberpunk world]. It’s something which is much more real world. It could be like ‘Heat,’ it could be fucking awesome.” When pressed for more details, Hardy played coy and said the property he was talking about is “not even a movie.”
So what is it? A TV show? “It’s real estate, it’s PRIME real estate which is sitting there right under everybody’s nose that no one’s really thought about yet, and it goes TV and movie, it’s awesome. I know they thought of it but no one has actually blown life into it yet.” Fine then, Hardy, keep your secrets. We’ll just be splitting our money on betting either something weird and out there like an Oculus Rift experience or a “Dark Tower”-like situation with both films and TV shows running together more interconnectedly than what Marvel is doing with their properties.
On a related note, Hardy casually reveals that he wouldn’t mind playing Marvel’s baddest anti-hero, telling Collider “I want The Punisher, or ‘Splinter Cell,’ I want something…I don’t know what I want.”
In the meantime, you can catch Hardy in next week’s fantastic “Mad Max: Fury Road.”