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The first ever glimpse of Tom Hardy on screen is one that still brings delight to his legions of female fans should they choose to seek it out on YouTube or pause it on their DVD player. His first appearance in Band of Brothers is in a rather unexpected bedroom scene in which his character, Private John Janovec, gets to know a member of the local female population in Sturzelberg, Germany during the final months of World War II. Blink and you might miss it, but eagle-eyed devotees of the Hardy physique are even treated to a brief glimpse of the actor’s backside.

Tom’s role in the ensemble drama was not a major one and he only appeared in the final two episodes of the 10-part series. However great or small a part, it was the most amazing start for an actor who hadn’t even completed his training. To be cast in a Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks television production is a dream come true for any actor – and for one just starting out, it was the luckiest of breaks.

Band of Brothers is one of the most revered and respected television miniseries ever broadcast. Based on the best-selling book by World War II historian Stephen E. Ambrose, it follows the journey of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, and charts their experiences from the start of their training in Georgia, parachuting into Normandy on D-Day, taking part in Operation Market Garden, the Battle of the Bulge, the discovery of one of the concentration camps at Dachau, through to the capture of Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest and the end of the war.

At the time it was made, the series broke the record for the most expensive television production, costing $120 million to put together. Hanks and Spielberg, fresh from the success of the movie Saving Private Ryan (which Spielberg had directed and in which Hanks had starred), were originally intending to make separate World War II dramas but eventually decided to collaborate rather than compete and began work on Hanks’ project of the adaptation of Band of Brothers. They had drawn on Stephen E Ambrose’s wealth of knowledge of the period for Saving Private Ryan and, as well as providing the original material for Band of Brothers, he was also enlisted as Executive Producer on the show.

Hanks and Spielberg were actively involved in the casting of the actors who would make up the 50 soldiers whose stories would be followed through the series. It was critical for them to find exactly the right actors to play each man for two reasons: firstly, the men needed to bond as a unit, and secondly, each actor needed to be able to do justice to the experience of the real veteran they were portraying.

One key aspect of casting was the desire to use little-known actors to fill the roles of the men of Easy Company, a decision which helped to give the show the all-important feeling of an ensemble piece. It also meant that audiences wouldn’t have preconceived opinions of the actors playing the men of Easy Company. One notable exception to this was the casting of Friends star David Schwimmer as Captain Sobel.

It is well documented that, during casting, Spielberg was in charge behind the camera and Tom Hanks staged the acting, keeping his eye on actors who seemed to bond and who appeared appropriate for particular roles. Apparently, though, when casting the leading roles of Major Dick Winters and Captain Lewis Nixon, they knew they had found their men almost as soon as they entered the room. Tom Hanks had met and spent time with Dick Winters and knew he needed a certain kind of actor to do justice to such an outstanding soldier and leader: the role went to up-and-coming English actor, Damian Lewis. The part of Lewis Nixon went to American actor Ron Livingston. As it turned out, the series proved to be a springboard for a number of lesser-known young British actors who have since gone on to become stars in their own right: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Simon Pegg, Marc Warren and, of course, Tom Hardy, to name just a few.

All of the actors, including Tom, appreciated that they were portraying real people and that they had a duty to the men and their families to make sure they gave the best and most accurate performances they possibly could. Speaking to IGN Movies, Tom reflected on his approach to the part: ‘I was in two episodes and had 12 lines. That was the sum total of the work I had to do. But nonetheless, I would work just as hard trying to portray someone whose relatives are still around. Obviously, nobody wants to go out there and say, “This is my big moment”. And I’m playing John Janovec, who is dead. He died for freedom. So, yes, you have to approach that.’

The bond between the men who fought side by side in Easy Company was an extraordinary and unique one and it was vital that the relationships between them were understood and felt by the actors in the ensemble. To achieve the feeling of unity, the final group of 50 actors who constituted the men of the company were sent on an intensive 10-day bootcamp under the command of Captain Dale Dye, who was also the military adviser on the series. They endured 18-hour days and military drills and what had started as a group of actors transformed into something else – it gradually became a functioning unit.

The plethora of young Brits cast in the American drama might have had something to do with the location for filming. The series was made at the Hatfield Aerodrome in Hertfordshire in the South East of England. Now no longer in existence, the lot was then over 1,000 acres in size and housed disused hangars that proved ideal spaces for building sets. The producers were already familiar with the aerodrome, as parts of Saving Private Ryan had been filmed there. At the time, Tom Hanks said: ‘England is a wonderful place to make films, and as the experience of making Saving Private Ryan made clear to us all, it is an ideal place to make this ambitious miniseries.’

Shooting took place in 2000 and lasted eight months. Each episode of the series had a different director at its helm, with Hanks himself directing Episode Three, Crossroads. Despite the array of directors, great care was taken to ensure that there was continuity in character and style for the duration of the ten episodes.

For Tom Hardy, to be plucked from drama school and plunged right into the middle of such an epic production was at once breathtakingly exciting and incredibly daunting. As well as this being his debut on screen, Tom had the added pressure of knowing that he had to film his first bedroom scene – a nerve-wracking experience even for a seasoned actor, let alone a rookie. ‘Everything was happening fast and it felt wonderful,’ he said to the Evening Standard in 2006. ‘I had never acted for the camera. It’s a huge set, it’s Tom Hanks, it’s Steven Spielberg, and no expense spared. I felt very exposed, isolated and vulnerable. I had to do my first sex scenes, which were terrifying. But at the time I thought I should never ask for help, and I kept thinking, “If I cock up, I’ll never work again”.’

Speaking about the awkwardness around his opening scenes, Tom revealed to Esquire magazine: ‘I was terrified! It wasn’t half as closed a set as I thought it was gonna be. They kept saying they could see my pants, so I wound up with a flesh-coloured pouch gaffer-taped over me balls! Took a load of hair out when I ripped it of after. Band of Brazilians, more like!’

The soldier whom Tom was portraying, Private John Janovec first appears in Episode Nine, Why We Fight. There are so many intensely emotional moments in Band of Brothers, but this particular episode contains one of the most poignant scenes of the series. Easy Company by this time (1945) is in Germany during the last days of the war. The statement that forms the title of this episode is one pondered amongst the soldiers who begin to ask themselves if the sacrifices they have made have been worth it. The question is answered for them when they discover a concentration camp that formed part of the Dachau complex and come face to face with the atrocities committed by the Nazis.

Episode 10, Points, the final episode of the series, centres around Easy Company entering Berchtesgaden to take Hitler’s Bavarian mountaintop retreat, the Eagle’s Nest. By this time, the war was all but over and the men were left with time on their hands and were anxious to get home. Before his turn comes to return to the USA, Private Janovec is involved in a road accident, suffers a fractured skull and subsequently dies. His conversation with a fellow soldier, Webster, just before the accident is of how many ‘points’ he has accrued on his service record and how soon he might be able to go home. It was a significant scene to include in the drama and one which demonstrates another heartbreaking injustice of war: in this instance that, even when the men were no longer in combat, there were still casualties.

The miniseries was first aired in the United States in September 2001, shortly before the attacks on the World Trade Center. Its debut in the UK followed in October. While audiences and critics, particularly in the UK, marvelled at the expense that had gone into making the show, most agreed that it was a remarkable achievement. Of course, there was the inevitable criticism from British audiences that the show was another example of Americans giving a biased depiction of events during World War II – but to offer this up as criticism is to rather miss the point of what was at the heart of the series. It succeeded in what it set out to do, which was to offer a faithful and compelling portrayal of what this particular group of men experienced when they went to war. Those men who had fought with Easy Company and were still alive when the series premiered confirmed that the show was an authentic representation of what they had been through.

With his first small-screen outing under his belt, Tom was hungry for more work. Luckily for him, the next job in his diary was a part in a Ridley Scott movie – the young actor really was on a roll. Once again, Tom would be playing an American soldier, but this time he would be recreating a more modern chapter of US military history.

Although set almost 50 years and thousands of miles apart, there are common threads running through Band of Brothers and Black Hawk Down. The subject matter of both is drawn from actual historical events and uses the recollections of the people who participated in those events. They also share similar themes such as comradeship, loss, a sense of belonging and a desire to be the very best at what you do.

Black Hawk Down tells the true story of a battle between US forces and Somali militia. In 1993, Somalia was a country torn apart by warring factions. Relief was not getting through to starving civilians, with much of it being hijacked by warlords. General Mohammed Ali Farrah Aidid was widely considered to be the worst of the warlords and challenged the presence of the UN and US troops in Somalia, even specifically targeting American troops. A previous attempt by US forces to capture Aidid in a safe house in Mogadishu had failed and, in October 1993, a task force was deployed to capture some of Aidid’s key men. The mission went catastrophically wrong and, during its course, two Black Hawk helicopters were brought down by Somali RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) and went crashing into enemy territory. Elite US Ranger and Delta regiments were then engaged in a 15-hour effort to rescue their own men. During the course of the mission, 18 US soldiers lost their lives. Black Hawk Down recalls the events of the disastrous mission and the men who were involved.

The film was a major production, boasting big names and a big budget to match: it was produced by Hollywood big-shot Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Ridley Scott. An accomplished director held in high regard, Scott was clear on what he wanted the film’s focus to be – it was to cover the insertion of the troops into Mogadishu, their exit and what they felt afterwards. The narrative was kept simple: no back stories were given for the soldiers, nor did they talk about their personal lives. It was a film that dealt purely with the horror of the events that took place and the actions of the men who were involved.

Just as authenticity had been paramount for Band of Brothers, so it was for Black Hawk Down. Just as the Band of Brothers actors had attended bootcamp, so the actors who were to play the soldiers in Black Hawk Down were required to attend ‘Ranger Orientation’ in order to experience the kind of training that real soldiers have to undertake. They also needed to understand the ethos of the Rangers: the respect they have for authority and the bond they have with their fellow soldiers. As Eric Bana’s character Hoot puts it in the film: ‘It’s about the men next to you. That’s it. That’s all it is.’

The actors weren’t spared at all when they turned up for bootcamp: the first thing they had to endure was having their hair shaved off. Once they had been made to look like soldiers, they then underwent days of gruelling combat and movement training, as well as gun skills so that they gave the impression of being real soldiers on screen.

Just as he had been when making Band of Brothers, Tom was acutely aware that he was representing a real soldier, Lance Twombly, and that he had a responsibility to that man when it came to portraying him in the movie. ‘Lance Twombly, who is still alive, he still lives with the demons. There are these people who have fought and will fight and will die. It’s a responsibility if you’re going to go in there and play a character like that, and the pressure is enormous.’

A desire for realism fell not only to the actors but also to the director. He was all too aware that he was dealing with relatively recent events and that he couldn’t take liberties with accuracy. ‘When it’s so recent and vivid, you can’t diddle around with it, you can’t romanticise it,’ Scott expressed to the Guardian in 2002. His desire to adhere to the truth also manifested itself in his attention to detail. He was determined to use real Black Hawk helicopters in his film, as to have anything else would have compromised authenticity. Only the US government have Black Hawks and in order to gain permission to borrow their ‘birds’, protracted negotiations about how the military were represented in the film had to be undertaken with the Pentagon. It was only at the eleventh hour that Scott found out he had permission to use the helicopters (and in fact had to rearrange the shooting schedule to accommodate this delay).

Ridley Scott is a director who always has a clear idea of what he wants to achieve when he’s shooting and, according to one of Black Hawk Down’s stars, Ewan McGregor, he shoots as he wants to edit the film. He wanted the combat and the reactions of the soldiers in the film to look as realistic as possible. This was partly achieved by the actors not being aware of when or where exactly there would be explosions and gunfire while filming was taking place. Therefore many of the reactions you see on screen are ones of genuine shock and surprise. And even with the explosions and gunfire and other background noise, they were all expected just to get on with delivering their lines and filming the scenes. ‘It’s massive,’ commented Tom during the filming of the movie, ‘a huge barrage of orchestrated violence.’

During the film, Tom’s character, Lance Twombly, and his friend, Nelson, played by Ewen Bremner, become separated from the troops they are with when some of the Rangers leave their position in order to secure the helicopter crash site. For quite some time the two characters are left on their own and the light-hearted dialogue between them provides some relief from the incessant gunfire and explosions occurring throughout other scenes in the film. At one point, Twombly accidentally deafens Nelson when he fires his rifle too close to his head.

The realism of the combat in Black Hawk Down was something critics picked up on when the film hit cinemas at the start of 2002. While they noted the film avoided venturing into the territory of political comment or international relations, they acknowledged that, technically, Scott had achieved something remarkable. In fact, the grit and relentlessness of the combat was compared to the realism of some of the fighting recreated in Band of Brothers. Philip French of the Observer went so far as to say that Black Hawk Down was ‘one of the most convincing, realistic combat movies I’ve ever seen, a film presenting a confused event with clarity and involving us as if we were there in the thick of the fray.’

Tom shared his director’s desire for realism and embraced the reality of his role wholeheartedly. In one scene, just as Twombly is reunited with his fellow rangers and is running across open space to rejoin them, he is fired upon by the enemy and catches fire. Ordinarily, this action sequence would have been undertaken by a stunt man but Hardy was desperate to do it himself and, in the end, Ridley Scott agreed. Since his teens, Tom had thrived on risk-taking behaviour, from alcohol to drug-taking to criminal activities, and now that he was acting for a living, he still seemed to crave the thrill of living dangerously. ‘I begged them to blow me up and they blew me up and I feel great – I feel born again. I want more, though, I want it to be bigger,’ he commented while working on the film. Speaking to the Observer in 2007, he was philosophical about his motivation for carrying out this dangerous stunt himself – ‘…it’s about feeling alive – and maybe that’s only possible in the presence of death.’

Some years prior to landing his first acting jobs, Tom had expressed to his mother a desire to go and join the French Foreign Legion. She persuaded him not to enlist, on the basis that he wouldn’t last five minutes. In 2001, Tom found himself cast once again as a soldier in an adaptation based on true events – and, ironically, he was to play a Legionnaire.

The filming of Black Hawk Down had taken place on location in Morocco and Tom found himself back there enduring the scorching heat of the desert for this next role in Simon: An English Legionnaire (also called Deserter). While the film gave the young actor a much bigger role and the opportunity to flex his acting muscles a bit more, as a production it garnered much less attention than either Band of Brothers or Black Hawk Down.

The film is based on the memoirs of Simon Murray’s time spent in the French Foreign Legion in Algeria at the time of the Algerian War of Independence (1954 to 1962). Murray enlists in the Foreign Legion after being rejected by his girlfriend, Jennifer and arrives in Algeria to find that life as a Legionnaire is far more brutal than he had imagined. Nevertheless, he befriends some of his fellow soldiers, including the Frenchman Pascal Dupont, played by Tom (this time losing the American accent and gaining a Gallic one).

Although the opening of the film did not attract vast swathes of media attention, by contrast, the nature of the film’s inception did. It was reported that Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, had read the book and passed it on to her friend, director Martin Huberty, urging him to bring it to the big screen. At the time of the film’s release, she commented: ‘I recommended the book to Martin, and am delighted to have played a small part in the film’s coming to life.’

Though beautifully filmed and effectively recounted, the film proved to be a tough sell and although Tom’s role was a supporting one, his reviews were more positive than those for Paul Fox who had taken the title role of Simon. ‘As played by Fox, Simon is disconcertingly passive, especially when compared with the angry and more driven Dupont,’ was the comment offered by Variety.

While Tom was dramatising the events that had changed the path of Algeria’s history, the international landscape as it was in 2001 was about to change beyond recognition. The 11 September terrorist attacks sent shockwaves around the globe as people struggled to comprehend what had taken place in the USA and how it would affect the world in months and years to come. Events of these proportions remain seared on the consciousness for a very long time and most people can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they learned of news of this magnitude, and Tom was no exception, particularly given his location at the time.

‘We’d just done Black Hawk Down and they shelved that immediately,’ he recalled when speaking to The Wrap. ‘There were a lot of war films that year being made. A lot of work was being done in North Africa. Everyone had started panicking. And I was executing holy men in a scene three days later in a mosque in Morocco. It was a thing called Simon, French Foreign Legion Deserter. So it was a very odd situation to be in because there I was playing a soldier in North Africa. We had a plane on standby to get us out if anything kicked off.’

Tom went on to reflect on the effect the attacks had on him on a more personal level, too. ‘Immediately, it was a life-changing event. I have friends who serve, I have a lot of friends in special forces, I have very, very close friends who deal in very serious operations all over the Middle East that were affected post-9/11. I’m still really thrown by the loss and the amount of people on that day, and that whole situation, to be honest. I’m a bit thrown. I’ve got friends who were in the building, in the twin towers. I have friends who are servicemen, what can you say?’

Years later, in 2007, Tom found himself coming a bit too close to a genuine soldier’s life for comfort. He had auditioned unsuccessfully for an American series called Generation Kill – the part he wanted was that of a Marine during the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. By this time, Tom had a bulkier and more toned physique and was training regularly. Plus, he was being recognised for his tough guy characters, so it would be fair to assume that he would be a dead cert for the role. Sadly, it was not to be, but something about the rejection made Tom determined to prove to himself that he was made of the right stuff to be a solider. In a decidedly impulsive move, he took himself off to an induction with the Parachute Regiment in the Territorial Army. Fortunately for all concerned, when Tom realised the scale of the commitment – and that he may well be sent into active combat – both he and the military recruiters realised it was not really an option for him. ‘I started to ask questions, so they soon got me out. That finished all that macho bollocks for me. But I sucked up the environment, I absorbed a few more characters,’ he explained to the Observer.

Tom’s part in Simon, An English Legionnaire had rather gone under the radar, along with the film itself. Just around the corner, though, lay a part that would draw more attention to him than he could possibly have imagined. He was about to embark on a starring role in one of the biggest television and movie franchises in the world. How would the up-and-coming actor cope with the scrutiny of die-hard fans? And how would he cope with the responsibility of a major Hollywood role?