Why So Many Tom Hardy Characters Are Difficult To Understand
Throughout his acting career, many of Tom Hardy’s characters have proved to be difficult for audiences to understand. Ironically, his first major role as Twombly in the war film Black Hawk Down was easy to understand since he spent much of the movie having to shout his lines at another soldier. Since then though, a recent poll revealed that Americans voted Tom Hardy as the most difficult actor to understand. Researchers conducted the poll to study Americans’ use of subtitles, finding that many viewers used subtitles to ensure they understood characters’ dialogue, especially characters performed by Hardy.
The main reason many viewers struggle to understand Tom Hardy seems to be his characters’ accents. Hardy has played a variety of fictional characters and real people with distinct accents, such as Southern bootlegger Forrest Bondurant in Lawless and frontiersman John Fitzgerald in The Revenant, who mixed Southern and Philadelphian accents. Hardy has also used heavier versions of his own British accent by portraying characters like both of the Kray twins in Legend and prisoner Charles Bronson in Bronson. However, his most notorious accented role was Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, which combined a strong accent with a mask to make Bane incredibly difficult for some viewers to understand.
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According to the subtitle poll, however, viewers even tended to struggle with Tom Hardy’s normal British accent. Since the poll focused on American audiences, all five of the shows most commonly watched with subtitles were based in the UK, including Hardy’s Peaky Blinders. Americans also often struggled to understand other actors from the UK, such as Benedict Cumberpatch, Sean
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