Tom Hardy has brought back one of his most memorable movie performances, unexpectedly resurrecting his distinctive Bane voice from The Dark Knight Rises for a new rap track.
Directed by Christopher Nolan, the 2012 movie brought Christian Bale's Batman trilogy to an epic conclusion, with the Caped Crusader facing his most physically imposing opponent yet. Hardy played Bane, the hulking mercenary who arrives in Gotham City and launches a brutal assault designed to break the Bat and everything he stands for.
The actor underwent a major physical transformation to play the role. However, his unusual, often hard-to-understand voice arguably became the most talked-about, perhaps even controversial, aspect of his performance.
Now, 14 years after The Dark Knight Rises arrived in theaters, Hardy has "reprised" the role in "Grim-Visaged War," a track from his debut album, Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer. The song sees the actor recite a monologue from William Shakespeare's Richard III while using the unmistakable voice he used in Nolan's follow-up to Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.
Bane's voice was notably different from Hardy's natural speaking voice, with the character delivering his dialogue through a heavily stylised vocal performance. However, audiences initially struggled to understand some of his lines due to the film's original sound mix.
Nolan subsequently adjusted the audio mix to make Bane's dialogue more intelligible, but Hardy's odd delivery meant that subtitles were hugely beneficial when the threequel finally arrived on DVD and Blu-ray.
"The choice of the accent is actually a man called Bartley Gorman, who was a bare-knuckle fighter. A Romani gypsy," Hardy previously said of his Bane voice. "I wanted to underpin the Latin, but a Romani Latin opposed to Latino. His particular accent is very specific, which was a gypsy accent. So that’s why it was difficult to understand. But once you tune into it, you get it. I hope."
He continued, "Chris Nolan’s take on [Bane] was intrinsically lateral because he has a way of wanting and desiring to breathe a realism and a lateral thought into that which has already come through the comic book world. I think largely that’s going to upset some people, and there are some people that are going to really hang on to that."
"And I’m one of those people that really enjoys that actually, to be quite honest – carving a new way through something that’s already a set piece on the planet."
Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer was released on August 28 and features 15 tracks. The album is a collaboration between Hardy, performing as Frankie Pulitzer, and Inspectah Deck, 7L, and Esoteric, collectively known as Czarface.
While Hardy's involvement in a rap album might come as a surprise to some fans, this isn't actually his first foray into hip-hop. The actor previously recorded music in the late 1990s under the name Tommy No. 1, long before he became one of Hollywood's most recognisable stars.