Tom Hardy’s Son Told Him What He Was Doing Wrong With Venom

Ruben Fleisher may be the director of the upcoming Venom movie, but when it came to getting feedback and advice on his starring role, Tom Hardy had another influence — his 10-year-old son.

Hardy told Entertainment Tonight at the Los Angeles premiere of Venom that it was Louis that he turned to to tell him what he was doing right as well as what he was doing wrong with the character.

“He was pretty much in the driving seat for a lot of it, and I did use him as my anthology and my mythology wizard,” Hardy said. “He told me what I was doing wrong, and I was doing more things wrong than I was doing right because children are deeply honest. He was my little spirit guide in that aspect.”

Guiding his father in how to play Venom isn’t the only influence Louis has had over the actor. Hardy told Variety earlier this year that his son was a big part of why he took on the role to begin with.

“First and foremost I’m a dad,” Hardy said. “One of the things you come across as a father is a massive influx of stories brought to you after Fireman Sam by Spider-Mans and Venoms and Captain Americas. So, my son came to me with a specific character that he absolutely fell in love with.

“I started to take a look at it,” he continued, “and then, as if by magic, a script appeared on the horizon. Having had done Dark Knight with Chris [Nolan], I’d kind of done my superhero bit, but when I was presented with the opportunity to play Venom — and that correlated with my son’s love of Venom and how cool he was — I got really, really excited and decided I wanted to do it.”

That excitement apparently translated to Hardy putting in a lot of time just playing around as Venom. The actor previously made comments about how there were scenes shot in the making of the film that didn’t make it to the final cut, but when he clarified on Monday night, he explained that the scenes that didn’t make it to the film were primarily those of him simply having fun improvising as the character.

“What I’m saying is that I had a lot of time improvising and a lot of time playing with Venom so in honesty there’s probably about seven hours or more of the footage with me playing as Venom and enjoying myself,” Hardy said. “I took him right out there and played with it and had a lot of fun because there’s a lot of fun you can have with a project and with this character and I’ve done that. And me, and the other executive producers know full well that has nothing to do with the story, but nevertheless would I like to watch a seven hour version of Venom? Yep, but that’s just me as an actor but the truth of it is everything that we wanted is in the story Everything I want is in the story and more and the film is awesome and I’m excited and I just want to shoot a sequel.”

Venom will arrive in theaters on October 5th.