Tom Hardy Based His ‘Venom’ Role on Woody Allen, Conor McGregor, and Redman

Tom Hardy is the latest actor to bring Marvel antihero Venom to life — and it sounds like he’s doing so in a very particular way.

During a recent interview with Esquire, Hardy spoke about the creative process that he underwent for Venom, and how it compared to his previous film roles. As Hardy revealed, he likes to use real or fictional people as a sort of guide for how he plays his part, and he used a pretty interesting trio for his role as Eddie Brock.

“Woody Allen’s tortured neurosis and all the humor that can come from that.” Hardy explained. “Conor McGregor—the überviolence but not all the talking. And [rapper] Redman, out of control, living rent-free in his head.”

As Hardy went on to explain, that unique thought process isn’t necessarily something he shared with Sony Pictures and co, arguing that “you don’t say sh*t like that to the studio.”

Even with Hardy having such a unique frame of reference for Venom, it looks like the end result will be something genuinely terrifying, while being heavily rooted in the Marvel Comics world.

“I’m a huge fan of comic book movies so I just tried to pick a lane that was true to the character,” director Ruben Fleischer explained to ComicBook.com. “I think inherent to the character, he’s just darker, and we talked about more violent. It’s just tonally different from everything else, especially when you’re focusing on just Venom. He’s not a sunshine kind of guy. So, it takes place at night. It’s darker. More menacing. I think that within the spectrum of all these movies, there’s the DC super dark, Zack Snyder type version and then there’s the Marvel movies and I like to think that we’re in our own zone apart from that.”

“There’s a symbiote and then there’s Eddie Brock,” Fleischer added. “There’s a relationship. That’s what Tom did so amazingly well, was to play these two characters simultaneously. That was, as a director, just exhilarating to watch someone with the capability that he has managed the two characters that he has in his head.”

What do you think of Hardy’s creative process for Venom? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Venom is set to be released on October 5th.