35 Facts Almost Nobody Knows About Tom Hardy.

He might be even tougher in real life.

Tom Hardy loves a challenge, and he's played some of the most daunting roles in Hollywood. From Max Rockatansky to Bane he's an actor with seriously impressive range.

Here are some things not everyone knows about the buff Brit. Check out the sources at the bottom for more!

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Enjoys watching reality TV shows to get ideas for characters. He said: “It’s great people-watching. I’ll steal characters from Come Dine with Me. Because they’re real people. I take something from everybody. I’ll steal you at some point…”.

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“Every tattoo I have means something to me. Each one is something that I’ve been through in my life or I’ve done or I’ve been,” he told the Global Mail. At 15, he got his first one, a leprechaun, which pays homage to his mother’s Irish ancestry. He also got a dragon for his now ex-wife Sarah Ward, since she was born in the year of the dragon. That’s what you call a mistake tattoo.

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He had a dog named Max that was given to him when he was a teenager, he passed away in 2011. The dog’s name was an honor to Mad Max (1979). Years later, Hardy played the title character in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

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He wore three inch heels for his role as Bane in Christopher Nolan’s Batman series.

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The little finger on his right hand is permanently bent – he stabbed a knife into a chopping board and severed a tendon in his finger. This took three operations to be able to close his finger to make a fist, but it cannot straighten.

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He is the only actor to play a villain in a Star Trek film and a Batman film.

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He trained under Sir Anthony Hopkins’ former mentor at the London Drama Centre.

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He joined Drama Centre London in September 1998 and was taken out early to work on Band of Brothers (2001). One of his classmates at drama school was Michael Fassbender, both appeared in Band of Brothers and Hardy stated that Fassbender was the best actor in the school.

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The British indie rock band Trampolene named a song after him. The song was released on February 26, 2016.

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He loves to drink coffee, Coke, fizzy water, fruit drinks, Red Bull and tea.

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He battled alcoholism and a crack cocaine addiction in his early-to-mid twenties, but has been sober since 2003.

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Speaks French fluently. As a child, he grew up going to the South of France with his parents.

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His father, Chips Hardy, was the first firefighter in the family to attend a university.

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Hardy has a tattoo with his agent’s name on his left arm.

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He won “The Big Breakfast’s Find Me a Supermodel” competition at age 21 in 1998 (and with it a brief contract with Models One).

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He has written two television series with Kelly Marcel, both of which have sold to production companies.

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He auditioned for the role of Mr. Darcy in Joe Wright’s adaptation of Pride & Prejudice (2005) and nearly won the role but inevitably lost to Matthew Macfadyen.

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He assumed that Christopher Nolan cast him as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises (2012) because of his performance in Bronson (2008). He later found out that Nolan thought he would be a good fit based of his performance in RocknRolla (2008) and had not even seen Bronson

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He is good friends with Benedict Cumberbatch. They starred together in Stuart: A Life Backwards (2007) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011).

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He loves the martial arts of Jiu Jitsu and Capoeira.

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Tom knows what’s important in his life, and takes those things very seriously, he told Marie Claire: “There are two things that are great in my life. One is my family and the other is my work, and I will protect them both to the death.”

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Leonardo DiCaprio convinced him to read the script of The Revenant and take the role of John Fitzgerald. They became friends after starring together in Inception.

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He’s been replaced by actors named Joel twice in the last few years, once by Joel Kinnaman in Suicide Squad, and Joel Edgerton in Black Mass, both of whom he’d previously worked with, Kinnaman in Child 44, and Edgerton in Warrior.

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He was awarded the 2003 London Evening Standard Theatre Award for Outstanding Newcomer for his performances in both In Arabia Wed All be Kings and for his role as Luca in Blood.

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In 2010, Hardy became an ambassador for the Prince’s Trust, a leading UK youth charity which provides training, personal development, business start up support, mentoring and advice.

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According to IMDB, Gary Oldman is one of Hardy’s idols. That’s lucky for Hardy, because he has acted alongside Oldman in four different movies:The Dark Knight Rises, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Lawless, and Child 44.

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He once said, “I love to do things I haven’t done before.” This mentality is probably why his career has been so interesting for us to watch as audiences. It’s also nice to know he’s going to keep going!

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Despite many critically acclaimed performances, Tom has never himself won an Academy Award.

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Tom Hardy gets his inspiration for how to portray roles from some unusual sources. For instance, in his role of Forrest Bondurant in Lawless, he used the granny from Tweety and Sylvester as inspiration.

“I based my character on the grandmother of Tweety and Sylvester. The mother of the Bondurant boys was swept away by the Spanish flu and it is my character Forrest, the eldest brother, who replaced her. To a man, it’s complicated to put on a maternal image. Observing the grandmother in Tweety and Sylvester helped me imagine what it would be like to be the mother of another.”

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In 2009, director Nicolas Winding Refn (whom he worked with on Bronson) announced that Hardy would portray polemic and controversial English occultist, Aleister Crowley, in a biopic but as of 2016, the project has not been developed.

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His performance in Bronson (2008) Steven Ogg’s main inspiration for Trevor Phillips in Grand Theft Auto V (2013). Ogg revealed his inspirations at the New York Comic-Con in October 2013.