Tom Hardy explains how he put on seven pounds a week for Bronson role
Tom Hardy is arguably one of the biggest actors from the UK, appearing in the likes of Venom, The Dark Knights Rises and Mad Max: Fury Road.
One thing you may not know about Hardy is the amount of dedication he puts in when he secures a role to make sure he is as authentic to that character as he can be.
The Venom actor has gone through a range of extreme body transformations since he made his debut in film with Black Hawk Down in 2001.
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One film that saw a huge body transformation for Hardy was for his role as Charles Bronson in the film Bronson.
The 2008 film based on a true story, followed Michael Peterson, aka Charles Bronson, who is regarded as Britain's most violent criminal.
In the film, Charles is often placed in a solitary confinement so that he cannot cause any harm to other inmates or guards.
Not only was it hard for Hardy's character in the film, the actor put on seven pounds a week for the role.
In an interview with askmen about the film, Hardy revealed how he did it: "It was a race against the clock: We didn’t have any time to waste, so I started eating and my arse very quickly got very fat.
"For Bronson, I put on about 7lbs a week—with no steroids. In the end I’d put on about two and a half stone by eating chicken and rice, which was my staple diet throughout the day. Then I’d have a pizza, Häagen-Dazs, and Coca-Cola: So not good stuff, but I had to put weight on.
"I needed to put a layer of fat on my body, because Bronson when he was younger was a big guy, a brawler. My diet was lenient as we weren’t going for the Bruce Lee look, and we weren’t looking for the cut."
Alongside the intense diet, Hardy revealed in the same interview how he needed to gain a lot of weight in certain areas to look like Charles.
"My approach was to do a lot of repetitions in order to send messages to my muscles," he said.
"This helps them start to grow in a way that you can’t make them in the gym. To achieve dense muscle, you need a specific kind of training.
"To become Charlie Bronson, I had to quickly put a lot of weight quickly on my forearms, chest, and neck. By the time I’d finished, my legs looked like those of a stork in comparison to the top half of my body."
Topics: Tom Hardy, TV and Film
Callum Jones