According to the director of The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan, he was the inspiration for Tom Hardy’s performance as Bane.
Actors will get their inspiration from wherever they can get it but did Tom Hardy really base Bane in The Dark Knight Rises on director Christopher Nolan?
That’s what Nolan is saying. He was asked by the Happy Sad Confused podcast if there is any truth to the director purposefully creating Nolan-esque characters like Leonardo DiCaprio’s Cobb in Inception and Robert Pattinson’s Neil in Tenet:
“I’ve been teased about it in the past. Funnily enough, I think there are, whether you’re looking at Kyle MacLachlan with David Lynch in Blue Velvet who does his collar up, I think there is a slightly mischievous tendency on the part of actors to see in the filmmakers where as a writer, particularly writer/directors, were able to put a bit of themselves into something and then build on that. Tom Hardy maintains that Bane is somehow based on me, but in Tom’s mind there’s some very complex interweaving of impulses and influences that somehow I have a voice in. I think it’s certainly not conscious on my part, I think Rob with Neil we talked about a lot of different influences on that character, none of which were me.”
While it’s a hard statement to believe that Bane could be based on the director, Nolan did go on to praise Hardy’s performance:
“There’s no safety net for any of these guys and Tom, I mean what he did with that character has yet to be fully appreciated. It’s an extraordinary performance, and truly amazing. The voice, the relationship between just seeing the eyes and the brow. We had all these discussions about the mask and what it would reveal and what it wouldn’t reveal, and one of the things I remember him saying to me, he sort of put his finger up to his temple and his eyebrow and said ‘Can you give me this to play with? Let people see this.’ Sure enough you see there in the film, this kind of Brando-esque brow, expressing all kinds of just monstrous things. It’s really quite a performance.”
Hardy has become known for his ‘eye-acting’ prowess over the years, highlighted once more to a large degree in Nolan’s Dunkirk in a role that hid much of his face once again.
