Tom Hardy is a terrific physical actor. His characters look, act, move and behave as they should. His Mad Max, almost feral, scrabbles in the dirt and communicates through grunts and stares; in Locke, every hand movement, every facial tic, is key to understanding the character, vital for a film that takes place solely in the claustrophobic intimacy of a car on the motorway. Bane is simply intimidating, as is Bronson, but in completely different ways: Bane’s movement is efficient, calculated, and cold; Bronson’s is unhinged, angry and violent. In Legend – a film seemingly sold on the premise that two Tom Hardys is better than one – he manages to create two entirely different characters through movement and appearance. The story is much the same in The Revenant: his antagonist, Fitzgerald, immediately strikes you as a character without morals, his eyes and furrowed brow conveying the barely contained anger lying just beneath the surface.

There’s one criticism often levelled at Hardy, however: that his attempts at accents are often poor, and that his occasionally somewhat garbled delivery can ruin what is otherwise a fantastic performance. Take The Dark Knight Rises, for example, where director Christopher Nolan was forced to alter Bane’s voice after release in order to make him clearer. The voice was ridiculous, said the critics, and distracted from the character, while the words were often lost among the voice modulation. But the results were astounding: Bane’s falsetto tones strike a discordant, unnerving note, and give the character an air of otherworldliness that a more normal, and perhaps more understandable, voice would never have been able to achieve.

The same goes for The Revenant. His character has a garbled American accent, replete with grunts and slurs, the words pushing together and merging in Hardy’s mouth. But the delivery makes sense for the character, and it is the character that is most important. It doesn’t matter if some of the words are lost; what is key is that the gist of the line, the main message, is delivered to the audience. More often than not, that message is about telling the audience who the character is – so what does it matter if the words themselves are lost? No-one expects a frontiersman and trapper in the 1800s to have perfect diction. If he did, the character wouldn’t make any sense.

There’s one scene that illustrates this point well: Hardy’s Fitzgerald is telling a long, convoluted and almost incomprehensible story to fellow trapper Jim (played by the excellent Will Poulter). It’s unclear what Hardy’s character is getting at – something about a big squirrel, and a starving man, and God. But the story isn’t important. You get the key bits of info, and what you learn is that his character sees something almost religious in killing. That’s the real purpose of the story, not the words Hardy is mangling.

Gone are the days of over-enunciated delivery designed to ensure the audience hears every line. Cinema has always been about the visual: about telling a story with the smallest amount of dialogue possible. We understand and appreciate stories better if we experience them, not if they’re described to us. Moving away from perfect dialogue is an inevitable part of this process, and Tom Hardy is doing a lot to push the boundaries of acting. For that, we should praise him.

That still doesn’t excuse his Welsh accent in Locke, though.

Paul Turner

Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox