Movie Review: Tom Hardy on road to stardom in ‘Locke

MAINE SUNDAY TELEGRAM
SUNDAY, MAY 25, 2014
By Christopher Kompanek
Special to the Washington Post



NEW YORK — “It will be over quickly,” Steven Knight told Tom Hardy. The writer-director remembers saying that to his prospective star as a way of convincing him to take part in his experimental project, “Locke,” a film that takes place in real time as the title character makes a fateful 85-minute drive. “You’ll only feel a tiny prick,” Hardy chimes in playfully.

Knight and Hardy met for the first time in November 2012 to discuss another film, but by February of the following year, they were filming “Locke.” “Tom loves theater and challenges and mad ideas, so I went and wrote it with Tom in mind,” Knight says.

The “mad idea” was making a film consisting solely of a man fielding phone calls while driving. Save for some exterior shots, the camera would remain focused on Hardy’s face. “There’s something about phone calls where people are saying one thing but their faces are saying something else, which is such a gift,” Knight enthuses. “It makes you look clever. Just trying to imitate the surreal way that people talk and the way that they jumble everything up and then just one line of poetry and then jumble everything up again and say the opposite of what they mean.”

Hardy first caught Knight’s (and most of the country’s) attention as Eames, the quick-witted forger with a biting sense of humor in the 2010 sci-fi thriller “Inception,” which starred Leonardo DiCaprio. “I was terrified because it was Leo. You can’t battle against somebody like that for screen time,” Hardy recalls. “I thought, I’m just going to give him whatever he needs, and it took a lot of a load off.” He learned that the more an actor gives of himself to other actors and the audience, the better he looks. He extrapolates that thought to life itself. “The more generous a person is in any environment, the more there is to be received.”

Hardy puffs an e-cigarette as he speaks, while sporting a T-shirt that exposes his several tattoos. He also regularly flashes a boyish grin, and he draws on this duality of hard and soft to craft characters that are difficult to ignore. “There’s no particular formula or process for me. I do like to mix some ‘Taxi Driver’ with Disney World,” the 36-year-old English actor says of his process. He has particular disdain for the word “thespian,” and the idea of method acting bores him, though he is known to deeply inhabit some of his roles.

READ MORE HERE: http://www.pressherald.com/life/audience/Tom_Hardy_on_road_to_stardom_in__Locke__.html

Tom Hardy Drives a Car For 85 Minutes, And It's Mesmerizing

VANITY FAIR
BY JULIE MILLER
JANUARY 17, 2014 2:49 PM

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There are worse places to spend 85 minutes than inside a car with Tom Hardy, even he ignores you the entire time to make calls on speakerphone. This lesson comes courtesy of Steven Knight’s experimental Sundance entry Locke, during which Hardy does just that in real time without ever exiting his vehicle or speaking to another person face-to-face.

And despite those somewhat extreme constraints, the drama is compelling, genuinely moving, and suspenseful. It's a singular achievement for Knight, who also wrote the drama’s measured script, and Hardy, who manages to propel the story forward even though his butt is planted in the same position for an hour and a half.

The film opens on Hardy, a construction manager named Ivan Locke, as he steps into his BMW S.U.V. and leaves a work site. During each phone call Locke makes, the audience slowly discovers more about Hardy and his late-night excursion via trickles of exposition. Knight carefully unfurls more stakes about why Hardy’s car ride is so urgent, why his family is so disappointed in him, and why the timing of his trip is so damning for his construction company.

As the pressure on Hardy’s character mounts, the actor never resorts to showing his stress by going Nic Cage on us—raising his voice, banging on a steering wheel, or flipping off speeding passersby. Instead, he speaks in a Welsh accent so lilting and soothing that we would personally request it for our iOS if we lived in a future Her-type universe that allowed us to make these kinds of decisions. Even though he maintains composure (for the most part), and his position at the wheel for the entirety of the movie, Hardy, with Knight's direction, is able to summon legitimate suspense thanks to the script’s snaking personal revelations, which are masterfully laid out.


READ MORE HERE: http://www.vanityfair.com/vf-hollywood/tom-hardy-locke-sundance