Why the bad times are over

fabuloustomhardy:

Tom Hardy is sitting opposite me in a Los Angeles hotel suite, which is a minor miracle considering what he has to go through to be allowed into the United States.

In order to obtain a visa to work in Hollywood, the talented British actor, whom critics are comparing to a young Marlon Brando, has to present himself to the US Embassy in London to assure the authorities he regrets his past behaviour and is now reformed.

“If you look at the reasons why they won’t let me into the country you’ll see how far I’ve come,” he says. “Between the ages of 12 and 19 I was a naughty boy, so the bottom line is I have to go and apologise and fill a certain quota of boxes to get my visa, be allowed into America, work and pay my taxes.”

“Naughty boy” is something of an understatement. Expelled from boarding school for stealing, he developed an alcohol and drug abuse problem as a teenager, periodically spent nights in jail for disorderly conduct and was once arrested for stealing a car and gun possession. He avoided prison, he says, only because his companion and co-conspirator was the son of a British diplomat. He finally checked himself into rehab and cleaned himself up in 2003 after, he says, he collapsed on Soho’s Old Compton Street.

Now 34 and a highly regarded actor after roles in RocknRolla; Inception; Warrior; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy; and in the third outing of the rebooted Batman film series, The Dark Knight Rises, as the ferocious, chemically enhanced muscleman Bane, he talks openly and unabashedly about his chequered past.

“I was a lot naughty,” he says. “I hit a brick wall of behaviour. There were the options of institution, death, prison or insanity, and I could tick the boxes on three of those so I was very lucky that I had a moment of clarity. Something happened and I did something so heinous that I saw myself and I didn’t want to be that person. So from that moment on I ceased to be that person and started to grow towards the person I wanted to be. I never want to go back to that again. It’s craziness.”

His romantic life, too, was wild and unpredictable.

“I was a serial boyfriend,” he says. “I’ve never been on my own. I’m an only child and I can’t live without company, but going out with me and being my partner is a struggle because I demand a lot of attention and I’m quite needy.”

Hardy is an unusually intense and complex character who refuses to dodge embarrassing issues and talks with sometimes devastating honesty - and in occasionally convoluted sentences - about subjects most actors would avoid. He thinks deeply about spiritual issues, is a devotee of homeopathy and holistic medicine, and acknowledges that he attends regular therapy and counselling sessions, something few stars would admit.

“I continue to go through group counselling, therapy and anything necessary to keep my feet on the ground and be in a quality relationship and to right-size myself as a boy turning into a man and in a relationship with a woman,”

says Hardy, who lives in London with his fiancée, the actress Charlotte Riley, and has a 3-year-old son, Louis, with a former girlfriend.

“I’ll do anything I have to do to clean up my act and be a better father and a better husband and boyfriend. That sounds really worthy, doesn’t it?” he says with a sudden laugh. “But I have to do it.

“I’ve been to all kinds of different rooms in my life, so the fight that I have on a constant basis is just to try and better myself and not regress and to find a new way forward in a healthier manner. My dark places are very specific; people live in violence, abject poverty and crime and I have no idea of the depths of their despair and suffering; my suffering on a scale of one to 10 is probably one, but it’s my pain and coming from where I come from. I don’t pretend to know anything about great suffering. I’ve had a bit of a rough life but it wasn’t that bad and I’m very lucky.”

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(Source: thenational.ae)