Here’s a game I sometimes play. It’s called How Welsh Is Tom Hardy Supposed To Be Here? The rules are very simple: you watch a Tom Hardy project, listen to his voice and work out if he’s definitely supposed to be Welsh, not supposed to be Welsh but just sounds like he’s Welsh, or not Welsh at all. It’s a good game, because no actor working today swings for the fences quite as much as Tom Hardy, who is English. His accent choices are often idiosyncratic, but always magnetic. To prove it, here’s a quick best-to-worst run-through of some of Tom Hardy’s most notorious onscreen accents.

Ivan Locke, Locke, 2013

To date, this easily ranks as the most convincing accent Tom Hardy has attempted on film. As a put-upon construction foreman grinding through a number of intense emotions on a long solo drive from Birmingham to London, Hardy grabs you and holds you until the credits roll. This is possibly because he’s playing a Welsh man, and he always sounds a bit Welsh when he talks. It’s such a flawless accent that, if you knew nothing of Tom Hardy other than this film, and then you met Tom Hardy, and Tom Hardy spoke in his normal voice, you’d think: “Wait a minute, I thought Tom Hardy was Welsh.” This is high praise indeed.



Ronald and Reggie Kray, Legend, 2015

The best way for an actor to display range is to play multiple roles in the same project. This is exactly what Tom Hardy did in the Kray twins biopic Legend, and he absolutely nailed it. Despite being played by a single person, Reggie and Ronnie Kray were distinct people with distinct voices – Reggie pinched, high-pitched and slightly urbane; Ronnie guttural and more prone to vocal fry – and Hardy got them both absolutely right. His doubled-up accuracy is such a masterclass, in fact, that it detracts from the film itself. Especially since neither character sounds very Welsh.



Alfie Solomons, Peaky Blinders, 2014

Now we start to wobble. In Peaky Blinders, Tom Hardy plays a glowering lurch of a man, the brawn to Cillian Murphy’s brain. As such, he isn’t particularly eloquent. And this is reflected in Hardy’s accent, which sounds a bit like he got drunk, broke his jaw and stuffed marshmallows into his mouth to numb the pain. He’s almost certainly a cockney, but perhaps he’s got a Welsh grandparent or something. It’s hard to tell. Let’s assume he has.



Bane, The Dark Knight Rises, 2012

Most notoriously, Hardy chose to play the humongous evil polyglot mastermind Bane – half-British, half-Caribbean, raised for most of his life in an underground prison in Rajasthan – as unintelligibly as he could. Although his mask reduced all his lines to a series of muffled groans, Hardy claimed that the voice was largely based on Bartley Gorman, a bare-knuckle fighter known as “King of the Gypsies”. However, he has also admitted that there’s a little Richard Burton in there, which at least maintains his record for unexplained Welshness. At least, it might do. The truth is that there’s no way of knowing what Hardy’s accent is like, because for the most part he sounds like he’s been crushed by a toppling vending machine.



John Fitzgerald, The Revenant, 2015

Visually, The Revenant is impossibly striking. And this is handy because, if it relied completely on dialogue, it would be the worst film ever made. Here Tom Hardy plays his character like a man who’s knocked all his teeth out with a hammer and then tried to tape them back into his mouth one by one. Apparently inspired by Tom Berenger’s accent in Platoon, Hardy’s redneck villain talks in a series of impenetrable mumbles, yells and slightly unnecessary open-mouthed chewing noises. For all anyone knows, this is a spot-on approximation of a fur trapper in 19th-century Montana. But to the modern ear, it’s nightmarish.



James Delaney, Taboo, 2017

Tom Hardy helped create Taboo. He says his character is the culmination of a long-burning desire to play a cross between Bill Sykes, Jack the Ripper and Marlow from Heart of Darkness. None of these characters, as far as anyone knows, are Welsh. But that doesn’t stop Delaney from lapsing into a broad Welsh accent from time to time. He’s not Welsh either – he’s a 19th-century Londoner returning from a decade and a half spent in Africa – but whenever his hackles rise, the songs of the valleys creep towards his throat. This probably isn’t intentional at all, but it is quite distracting.

