This English actor and producer is highly praised for his dedication to his work, taking on project after project both on television and in film. In one of his movies, he had a pretty convincing double, so it’s natural to wonder if Tom Hardy has a twin.
Tom Hardy is not a twin. Hardy is the only child of his parents, Chip and Ann Hardy. Hardy plays the English gangster twins Ronnie and Reggie Kray by himself in the movie Legend with the use of editing software.
Read more below to find out about Hardy’s early life, and how he played a set of twins.
Hardy’s Background
Tom Hardy grew up an only child in East Sheen, London, with his mother Elizabeth Ann Hardy, an artist and painter, and his father, Edward John “Chips” Hardy, a novelist, comedy writer, and creative director.
As an adult, he set his mind on acting and studied at both the Richmond Drama School and the Drama Centre London, where other famous actors like Colin Firth, Emilia Clarke, and Michael Fassbender studied. Hardy spoke about his time at the Drama Centre in an interview with IGN.
“[The Centre] is probably written as notorious and infamous because it’s about terror. And the terror is actually about honesty — terror, that is, in the term not to do with terrorism, but in the term to do with: why do you want to be an actor? There are millions of people out there who want to be an actor… How hard are you prepared to work?”
Hardy has certainly put in the work to become a great actor. “I think it’s a grittiness,” he described. “It’s just about honesty… [Y]ou have to use every part of yourself. And that means you have to face up to things in yourself which are incredibly ugly.”
“But then, the stage is not somewhere where we come to eat. It is where we come to be eaten. And as soon as you realize that you’re already dead, and then any bit of life breathed into you is a bonus.”
This acting philosophy has served him well throughout his career, praised by Twitter users in posts like this one or this one, which talk about him being an underrated actor and always giving his all in his performances. It’s this great acting that led people to believe that he must have a twin, as he gave extraordinarily different performances for each twin he played in the same movie.
Legend
Even the writer and director of the movie Legend, Brian Helgeland, was less than excited at the prospect of one actor playing the twins. As he explained, “I was a little leery of it at first. There’s a tradition of casting one actor to play twins in movies, but usually in those movies, I just can’t get into it. I keep looking at it and not thinking about the movie.”
After seeing Hardy in action, though, Helgeland was reassured. Hardy used such different characterizations through his manner of speaking, physical presence, and more, making it very believable that two separate actors were playing the roles of Ronald “Ronnie” Kray and Reginald “Reggie” Kray.
Hardy’s stunt double and stand-in for filming was Jacob Tomuri, who was also his stuntman in Mad Max: Fury Road, The Revenant, and Venom. “I would record both the brothers’ dialogue in the morning, so that we could have a guideline for Jacob to mime while I spoke as the other brother,” Hardy said.
Tomuri and Hardy decided to actually hit each other in one of the fight scenes between the brothers, proving their dedication. “It helped sell the fight enormously… my fear was that Tom was going to get a broken nose or something. He did get a black eye,” Helgeland said.
Check out the YouTube video below to watch the trailer for Legend.