Christopher Nolan says Tom Hardy’s ‘extraordinary, amazing’ performance as Bane hasn’t been fully appreciated

Filmmaker Christopher Nolan has said that Tom Hardy’s performance as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises is underrated, and hasn’t been fully appreciated.

Filmmaker Christopher Nolan has said that audiences didn’t appreciate Tom Hardy’s performance as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. Hardy played the primary antagonist in the Batman film, four years after Heath Ledger won an Oscar for playing Joker in Nolan’s The Dark Knight.

Tom Hardy as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.

In an appearance on the HappySadConfused podcast, Nolan said, “What Hardy did with that character has yet to be fully appreciated. It’s an extraordinary performance, and truly amazing.”

He added, “The voice, the relationship between just seeing the eyes and the brow. We had all these discussions about the mask and what it would reveal and what it wouldn’t reveal, and one of the things I remember him saying to me, he sort of put his finger up to his temple and his eyebrow and said, ‘Can you give me this to play with? Let people see this’... Sure enough, you see there in the film, this kind of Brando-esque brow, expressing all kinds of just monstrous things. It’s really quite a performance.”

In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, Nolan accused WB of ‘dismantling’ the work of some of the ‘industry’s biggest filmmakers’ and said that the studio’s decision didn’t make financial sense. He said, “Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service.”

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