He’s already played the fearsome Charles Bronson and now Tom Hardy looks set to bring not just one, but two famed London criminals to life on the big screen.
The British actor says that he would ‘absolutely love’ to play both Reggie and Ronnie Kray, and looks set to star in the film version of their criminal lives. ‘All the plans are on the table,’ Tom exclusively told MailOnline. ‘there’s a lot of crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s, and there’s a lot of shift and geography to work out.’
From a screenplay penned by LA Confidential writer, Brian Helgeland, the story will focus on the Kray twins’ wheelings and illegal dealings during the fifties and sixties, with Hardy playing both brothers.
‘It would be difficult,’ Tom said about the mechanics of playing two characters sharing a lot of the same screen time. ‘It’s quite technical and I’m a bit of an anorak.’ He added: ‘There’s a physical transfer; we’d have to shoot one bit, go away come back and shoot it all again with another part. I’ve never dreamt of playing two people on the screen!’
The working title of the film is Legend, and is currently in development with the expectation to begin production in the UK later this year. And though the Krays might look identical, their characters are far different which will no doubt be a challenge for the actor, as he portrays the struggle of the elder brother Reggie to keep in check the unstable actions of his younger twin, rumoured to have been a paranoid schizophrenic. As heads of the notorious criminal gang The Firm, the Krays were behind numerous armed robberies, murders, arson attacks and protection rackets up until their arrest on 9th May 1968.
Their story was previously told on film in the 1990s, with real life brothers Martin and Gary Kemp playing the title roles. The Oscar-winning screenwriter’s script doesn’t just concern the criminals that the brothers dealt with, but also the likes of Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and other celebrities, who frequented their former Knightsbridge nightclub Esmeralda’s Barn, which is now the site of the Berkeley Hotel. It is also said to look at Ronnie’s alleged sexual relationship with two British politicians; Lord Boothby, a UK Conservative Party politician, and, Labour MP Tom Driberg.
Of course, playing a violent former boxer-turned-criminal won’t be too tough a feat for Hardy, who proved his worth as the title character in Nicolas Winding Refn’s biopic Bronson. And he continues down the gangster path with an upcoming role in BBC period crime drama Peaky Blinders, opposite his Inception co-star Cillian Murphy. Both actors starred in Christopher Nolan’s Inception, and played villains in the director’s The Dark Knight trilogy, though they didn’t share scenes together.
And with the announcement last year that Ben Affleck will be filling the very big bat boots of Christian Bale in the upcoming Batman vs. Superman movie, Tom had nothing but good words to say. ‘I think it’s awesome,’ Hardy enthused. ‘You got to understand, Ben Affleck is one of the finest directors we’ve got who can act and direct and be in films like The Town and Argo. It’s fantastic.’
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Hardy looks set to bring the British gangster twins to life
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