Tom Hardy’s ‘Warrior’ Diet Once Made Him so Foul-Tempered That He ‘F****d off’ a Lot of People
Actor Tom Hardy is used to going on particular diets to get into his film roles. But he found his Warrior diet more challenging than most. So much so he felt he upset a lot of people because of it.
Tom Hardy was cast in ‘Warrior’ despite an unconvincing audition
Hardy’s filmography is full of iconic characters in equally iconic movies. One of the actor’s most standout performances was as MMA fighter Tommy Riordan Conlon in Gavin O’ Conner’s Warrior.
The role saw Hardy once again earn much praise for his performance and dedication to the character. But before he was cast in the film, O’ Conner had no idea who Hardy even was. The filmmaker just gave the actor a chance based off someone else’s recommendation.
“You know, I’d never seen anything with Tommy, all I saw was pictures, and then he and I spoke on the phone. But my casting director, Randi Hiller, said he’s a very good actor, and she kept saying, ‘All the qualities you’re describing, this actor has.’ I didn’t know Tom Hardy, and Bronson hadn’t been, hadn’t come to Sundance yet, so it was pre-Bronson,” O’ Conner once told GQ.
Curious about the actor, O’ Conner decided to fly Hardy in personally to his whereabouts to get to know his future star. Upon hearing Hardy’s back story, O’ Conner was convinced that Hardy was his guy despite the actor’s subpar audition.
“He lived in my house for five days, and I got to know him very well, and I got to know his whole story, his life, his upbringing, and I knew he was the guy,” O’ Conner said. “And then we put him on tape, and he still wasn’t remotely close to what he does in the movie, in the audition, he just had a really hard time with the dialect, and the character, you know, he was really struggling with, it was early, you know? But I don’t know what the f*** it was, I just knew he was the guy.”
Tom Hardy’s ‘Warrior’ diet left him so unreasonable and belligerent that he blew off a lot of people
Hardy, who’s known for physically transforming himself physically for roles, went through one of his most intense training regimens for Warrior. To look like the rough yet vulnerable MMA fighter required a strict diet that was mostly chicken and broccoli everyday. This was in combination to his daily disciplined approach to fitness.
“I did two hours boxing a day, two hours muay thai, two hours ju jitsu followed by two hours choreography and two hours of weightlifting seven days a week for three months. So come on! You have to really want to do that, so it was a challenge,” Hardy once told The Guardian.
But his Warrior diet in particular took a huge physical toll on him. The Dark Knight Rises star admitted to Total Film that it made him “foul-tempered, belligerent, and unreasonable.”
“99 per cent of the job is imagining other people’s insecurities, and that went right out the f******* window! I felt on edge all the time because I’m very sensitive and I hate pissing people off – but I f***** a lot of people off on Warrior,” he added.
Tom Hardy once felt he was a different man after he filmed ‘Warrior’
Hardy credited Warrior for teaching him many valuable lessons thanks to working alongside O’ Conner and his co-star Joel Egerton. Apart from those two, there were others in the cast and crew the Mad Max star thanked for the experience.
“There were a lot of skills I picked up. I came back a different man from when I went away to Warrior. I picked up an awful lot,” he once said in an interview with Budomate. “I’m incredibly grateful for what Gavin taught me, Joel Edgerton taught me, and Jace Jeanes my stunt co-ordinator, J.J. Perry the stunt coordinator, Sam Hargrave….. the whole stunt team were incredible, and all the fighters that came in, all the other actors. It was a tremendously, potentially testosterone-fuelled set of men, and it was a potentially testosterone-fuelled environment which turned out not to be that bad at all.”
