Christopher Nolan says Tom Hardy’s performance in The Dark Knight Rises hasn’t been ‘fully appreciated’

‘You see this Brando-esque brow, expressing all kinds of just monstrous things’

Christopher Nolan has claimed that Tom Hardy’s performance in The Dark Knight Rises has not been “fully appreciated”.

The actor played the villain Bane in the third film in Nolan’s acclaimed Batman trilogy.

Reviews of Hardy’s performance at the time of the film’s release were mixed, with many reactions fixating on the strange vocal choices made by the actor.

In the build-up to the film’s release in 2012, Hardy had to re-record all his lines amid concerns that he was too difficult to understand. 

Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Nolan said: “There’s no safety net for any of these guys and Tom, I mean… what he did with that character has yet to be fully appreciated. It’s an extraordinary performance, and truly amazing.

Hardy as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises (Warner Bros)

“The voice, the relationship between just seeing the eyes and the brow. We had all these discussions about the mask and what it would reveal and what it wouldn’t reveal, and one of the things I remember him saying to me, he sort of put his finger up to his temple and his eyebrow and said, ‘Can you give me this to play with? Let people see this.'”

Hardy spends almost the entirety of the film wearing a mask, which obscures the lower half of his face.

Nolan added: “Sure enough, you see there in the film, this kind of Brando-esque brow, expressing all kinds of just monstrous things. It’s really quite a performance.”

The Dark Knight, the second film in the trilogy, was among 25 movies added this year to the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, meaning it will be preserved for future generations.