“I felt that if I could get somebody as talented as Tom to agree to hide himself in the character I would get something very special. What I really feel with a great actor is every movement, every hand gesture, every step has performance in it. It’s an incredible challenge to remove motion of the face so that you can’t put things across in the usual way, and you just have the eyes and a bit of the scalp and the arms and the legs. What I knew is that from Tom I would get something where you get a total character and everything has incredible thought applied to it. And a lot of what he’s doing is very counterintuitive. He has this incredible disjunct between the expressiveness of the voice and the stillness of the movement of his body. He’s found a way to play a character who is enormous and powerful with a sort of calm to it, but also is able to be incredibly fast at times. Unpredictable. He just has a raw threat to him that’s extraordinary. It’s a very powerful thing when you see it come together, beyond what I had ever imagined. That’s what you get from working with great actors.”
— Chris Nolan on Tom Hardy as Bane
Jaena Rae 