10 Real Reasons These Actors Were Cast In Major Movie Roles

Tom Hardy gives an outstanding performance as Marine-turned-fighter Tommy Conlon in Gavin O'Connor's 2011 sports drama Warrior, a movie released on the eve of Hardy's A-list explosion.

But back when O'Connor was preparing Warrior, Hardy didn't yet have the clout to avoid the audition process, and ultimately secured himself the role not through just the audition itself, but by turning the audition into a week-long hangout between himself and the filmmaker. O'Connor said:

"I didn't know Tom Hardy...I asked the studio if they'd fly him in, and he showed up at my door at midnight on a Sunday night, which was unexpected because he was supposed to be going to a hotel and coming up the next day. Because Tommy had said to me that he's terrible at auditioning, so he didn't want to just go into a casting room and just audition.

And what's funny, man, is that he ended up staying for five days. He lived in my house for five days, and I got to know him very well, and I got to know his whole story, his life, his upbringing, and I knew he was the guy. And then we put him on tape, and he still wasn't remotely close to what he does in the movie, in the audition, he just had a really hard time with the dialect, and the character, you know, he was really struggling with, it was early, you know?

But I don't know what the f**k it was, I just knew he was the guy. I just knew he was Tommy. Because you know, Tommy had this...you know, Tom Hardy as a person, has this quality where there could be this very hard exterior, but there's also a very fragile little boy in there...So I knew I needed an actor that can do and say certain things that the character had to do, yet you will always know as an audience, that it's coming from a place of abject pain."

While it's easy to imagine a lot of directors turning away an actor who arrives on their doorstep unexpectedly, in the case of O'Connor it was evidently the perfect strategy.