Tom Hardy has revealed how he came up with the inspiration for the voice of Bane in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises.
The film was Hardy's first foray into the superhero genre, and now that he's returning once again as Eddie Brock in Venom: Let There Be Carnage, it seems only fair to revisit his reasoning behind the famous voice.
You see, when the third film in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight trilogy came out, Hardy's choice of characterisation for the masked villain caused a bit of a stir.
He spoke with a muffled and strangely intoned voice, and - at times - it was so unintelligible that he had to redub parts of it after audiences couldn't understand it during a preview scene.
Speaking to Wired alongside Andy Serkis - the Venom 2 director - Hardy addressed the point whilst answering some of the world's most searched questions about him.
His answer took in the method by which he and Nolan came to the decision, as well as how he tried to overcome potential objections to a white British man playing a Latinx character.
Hardy explained: "That [the voice] was actually a really cool choice that Chris [Nolan] made.
"Bane quintessentially is Latinx in origin...and I'm not.
"So I looked at the concept of Latin and found a man called Bartley Gorman, who's a Romany gypsy.
"The king of the gypsies, in inverted commas, is a bare-knuckle fighter and a boxer. And he said [doing Bane-like voice], 'When I get into a ring with a man, and we want to wipe you off the face of the Earth, and he wants to kill me.'"
"And I was like 'this is great' and [I] showed Chris.
"I said 'Chris, we can either go down a sort of arch Darth Vader route, straight just neutral tone villain voice, or we could try this,' and this I've been thinking of just in case we've got to consider the roots and origins of Bane.
"But we could get laughed out of the part of it, it might be something that we regret, but it's your choice ultimately.
"He says, no I think we'll go with it, and that was that
"We played with it, and made it a bit more fluid, and now people love it."
Bartley Gorman V was a bare-knuckle boxer who declared himself the 'King of the Gypsies' and was a legendary figure within his community until his death in 2002.
He's out there on YouTube, and - whilst he's clearly a great piece of inspiration - it's hard to tie his voice and Bane together.
Bane did have his face covered with a mask, of course.
Either way, the process is fascinating as it shows how in-depth the pair went into preparing for the role, whether you ultimately think they were successful or not.
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Venom 2 hits UK cinemas on October 15.
Featured Image Credit: Warner Bros.Topics: Celebrity, Interesting, UK Entertainment, US Entertainment, tom hardy, Weird