Author: Kyle Kizu / Source: The Hollywood Reporter
In late 2011 when audiences saw the Imax prologue of The Dark Knight Rises ahead of Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, they made a startling discovery: Many of them couldn’t understand Tom Hardy, who played the villainous, mask-wearing Bane with a pronounced accent.
It seemed like a sound-mixing problem, but when The Dark Knight Rises opened seven months later, it sparked a narrative about the actor that persists today: He’s just hard to understand onscreen.That legend continued to build later in 2012 with Lawless, which saw critics have a field day with his Southern accent. “Mr. Hardy mostly grunts, growls and ribbits, occasionally interrupting his angry bullfrog impersonation to deliver down-home bromides that make him sound like Toby Keith choking on a Cheeto,” The New York Times’ A.O. Scott wrote.
That wasn’t the only time one of Hardy’s accents met an animal comparison. In 2015, Hardy would play a Russian in Child 44, and Time Out‘s Tom Huddleston wrote that “he barks and gulps like a demented sea lion.” The rest of that year laid out a pattern for Hardy. “This year alone, the actor has created at least four memorable big screen characterizations in which you can’t really understand everything he says,” The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy wrote in his review of The Revenant in which he played a grizzled frontiersman.
In this week’s Venom, Hardy adopts a New York accent to play journalist Eddie Brock, and while his voice is surely one of the least remarked-upon things about that film that critics are savaging, Hardy’s accents have become nearly as notorious as his many mask-wearing performances.
His accents are not always regionally accurate. They don’t always seem necessary (at first). And they’re not always intelligible.
But does that mean they are bad?To dialect coach Erik Singer, who’s brought significant attention to accents in film and television with his YouTube videos for Wired, Hardy’s intelligibility does occasionally stand out.
“I’m not a fan of that,” Singer tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Both because I think it distracts from the story when you have to try to figure out what someone’s just said, but also because in Hardy’s case, it’s clearly not his only option!”
But while some critics have been harsh over the years, Singer believes that the problem is minor and that Hardy is a strong vocal performer.
“I’m really impressed by the way he plays with intonation — the music of an accent,” Singer says. “I think it’s something he hears really keenly and, I suspect, sinks his teeth into first, whether he’s working from a real-life source or working more from imagination and pastiche.”
Hardy has played a few real-life people, as well as characters from distinct regions. Regarding his accents for notorious British prisoner Charles Bronson (Bronson)…
The post Why Tom Hardy Can Be So Hard to Understand appeared first on FeedBox.