Christopher Nolan: People haven’t “fully appreciated” Tom Hardy’s Bane

The Dark Knight Rises director Christopher Nolan feels fans haven’t “fully appreciated” Tom Hardy’s Bane, although the parodies are a kind of appreciation, no?

Christopher Nolan’s take on the Batman saga will no doubt go down as one of the most iconic versions of the Caped Crusader’s often tragic tale. We have another Batman movie(s) on the way, and we’ll definitely be comparing them against Nolan’s version when it arrives, whether we mean to or not.

Recently, Christopher Nolan stopped by the Happy Sad Confused podcast, hosted by Josh Horowitz, to talk about the final installment of his trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises. While Heath Ledger has gotten plenty of praise over the years for her turn as the Joker, Nolan doesn’t think Tom Hardy has gotten enough accolades for playing the villain Bane.

According to Nolan, he and Hardy had all kinds of conversations about Bane’s mask, with Hardy requesting that his eyebrows and temples remain visible. It was part of his vision for Bane’s look — and as much as his performance became a favorite target of parodists — there was also something alarming and frightening about it all.

“Sure enough, you see there in the film this kind of Brando-esque brow, expressing all kinds of just monstrous things,” Nolan said. “It’s really quite a performance.” The director also praised Hardy’s “voice, the relationship between just seeing the eyes and the brow” and concluded that what he “did with the character has yet to be fully appreciated.”

I’m not sure if Hardy’s performance wasn’t appreciated so much as it wasn’t appreciated in the way Nolan wants. A lot of folks poked fun at his muffled, mumbly voice, with my favorite take possibly being the version of Bane on DC Universe’s Harley Quinn.

Still, as much as I giggled at the voice, Hardy did do an amazing job. His performance will go down in history, for better or worse.

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h/t The A.V. Club