Tom Hardy Talks About the Origin of the Voice of Bane in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES
One of Tom Hardy’s most iconic roles is Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, directed by Christopher Nolan. It was the final film in the trilogy that was the beginning of comic book films being adapted into such big-budget blockbusters. While we never see Bane’s full face in the film, his distinct voice has stuck with fans over the last nine years, so much so that most of us have to do our own best impressions when prompted. Just me? Fine.
Anyway, the origin of the voice has finally been revealed in a recent sit down interview between Hardy and his Venom: Let There Be Carnage director Andy Serkis on the Wired auto-complete YouTube show. When asked, “How did Tom Hardy do the Bane voice?” Hardy said:
“That was actually a really cool choice that Chris [Nolan] made. Bane quintessentially is Latinx in origin and I’m not. So I looked at the concept of Latin and found a man called Bartley Gorman, who’s a Romani gypsy. The king of the gypsies, in inverted commas, is a bare-knuckle fighter and a boxer. And he said [doing Bane-like voice], ‘When I get into a ring with a man, and we want to wipe you off the face of the Earth, and he wants to kill me.’ And I was like this is great. And I showed Chris. I said ‘Chris, we can either go down a sort of arch Darth Vader route, straight just neutral tone villain voice, or we could try this. And this I’ve been thinking of just in case we’ve got to consider the roots and origins of Bane. But we could get laughed out of the part of it, it might be something that we regret, but it’s your choice ultimately.’ He says, ‘No I think we’ll go with it.’ And that was that. And we played with it, and made it a bit more fluid, and now people love it.”
He said that last bit with a laugh, as it seems that there were a fair amount of viewers who were also critics of the choice. I love that origin story, and I love the voice of Bane. I think it was great for the character, and I will never not enjoy saying Bane in that voice.
What do you think? Do you enjoy the character Bane’s voice? Or are you wrong? Just kidding, calm down.