Ranking Tom Hardy’s 10 Best Performances (By How Much You Can Understand Him)

9. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Hardy was great in this film, but nobody who saw that sneak preview before Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol will forget just how borderline impossible it was to understand even a single word he said, during that absolutely mind boggling opening sequence. Having a mask over his mouth may have looked really cool, but it didn€™t really help audiences either. Human brains read lips when listening to people, and this critical cognitive function was thus blocked out, rendering his dialogue even less comprehensible to the majority of audiences. The film makers may have taken the feedback into consideration and then cleaned things up in post production, but the voice has always been a point of discussion since the flick was released. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRCM0jWEQjQ This is a divisive topic that can make fans extraordinarily defensive. And to be fair they should get defensive €“ because overall Hardy was outstanding. He was menacing, brutal, and the fights he had with Batman were amongst the best seen in any action film. Sadly, though, the fact remains that even if your individual experience was perfectly fine, plenty of casual viewers struggled with understanding Hardy. And the fact that his voice troubles spurred so much discussion in the wake of the film€™s release (which is not his fault of course) will kind of always tarnish what was otherwise a pretty great end to a wonderful trilogy, while arguably overshadowing the excellence of his physical performance.