As you can imagine, some actors find really creative ways to use their vocal chords and do interesting things with the character they are portraying. Sometimes the wrinkles added in an actor's voice rounds out the character, and sometimes it can be distracting. Sometimes it's really cool and sometimes it's weird as fuck. But it's almost always interesting and that's actually important. Take Young Thug, for example. As a performing artist he is dynamic and odd and a million other things. But for me, what really makes him stand out is how he uses his voice in such unique ways to make strange sounds and yelps and turn his vocal chords into an entire new instrument. I like this shit with actors too. But not all actors do this. If we're excluding using regional accents then most actors speak in their regular voice. Think of an actor. Any actor. Did you think of Tom Hanks? Well if you didn't, tough shit. I did. Excluding the roles where he has to pick up an accent (like Forrest Gump) he doesn't do much with his voice. It's always the same Tom Hanks voice, which is fine. I think his voice is cool, he just doesn't play with it that much.
Ryan Gosling dabbled in using a weird voice. Do you remember the 2013 smash hit Gangster Squad? It's fine if you don't. Most people don't. I wouldn't be surprised if Gosling didn't. But I remember, because I actually paid money at an AMC to watch it in theaters. Basically it was kind of like The Untouchables in which a group of lawmen, led by Josh Brolin, in 1920's(?) Los Angeles try to catch this mob boss played by Sean Penn. And they don't play by the rules. (For such a forgettable movie it had a really good cast.) The reason I can't forget the movie has nothing to do with any of the action scenes or femme fatale scenes or anything that might have happened in this movie. I don't remember anything at all, except for Gosling's voice. My God, what a voice! It was so weird! It was at least a whole octave higher than his normal speaking voice and at a quarter of the volume. I never understood why Gosling used that voice for that role. Nobody else in that movie did. Nobody! I don't even think it was a historical thing. I just think Gosling decided he would do something different and he just went for it. It didn't work, but I was mesmerized. I thought this was a start of something new for Gosling: a series of roles where he would play characters with super distinct voices. Alas, that never came to be. Ryan uses his regular ass voice in every movie. It was disappointing for sure.
But out of the ashes of my despair, an unlikely champion arose whose career (and more importantly, voice) I've been tracking for years. I'm talking of course about Tom Hardy, who has given us so many incredible voices to listen to over his illustrious career. The most recent example is his performance in Venom where he plays Eddie Brock as well as the symbiote Venom. Ignore the Rotten Tomatoes score for a second and hear me when I say that Venom was one of the most enjoyable movie watching experiences I've had all year. And you can bet Tom Hardy's voice performance had a whole lot to do with that. I'm going to get into that performance in greater detail later on, but before I do I just want to take a few moments to just appreciate all the gifts he's given us over the years through his movies. Because Hardy is no one-trick pony. In baseball there's a term thrown around sometimes for the ideal player who can do everything right on the field. If there's a player who can bat for average and power, can run bases, throw the ball and field it as well you got yourself a five-tool player. If there was an equivalent of a five-tool player, but for actors who use their voice as the ball, bat and glove then Tom Hardy would be that.
Normal Voice
Every actor who is going to make it in Hollywood has to have a solid normal voice. It has to be a voice you can stand to listen to for up to two hours at a time. (The lone exception here is probably Seth Rogen.) Tom Hardy has an amazing normal speaking voice. Have you ever heard him speak in an interview? It's heavenly! To start he's British, so he's naturally got a British accent. But not an annoying one like Hugh Grant's. It's powerful, yet it comes off easy going and suave. It's a voice you respect and and look up to, but will down a few brews with you. The best example of Hardy using his normal voice in a movie is in Inception. Hardy runs his voice through the gauntlet and quite possibly elevates the whole movie because of it. When he's expounding we don't mind because we get to hear Eames speak. His American voice is still solid. If you listen to him in something like Warrior you don't think much of his voice. It's not distracting and you don't even think of it as being an accent. (I've always been amazed at how British actors pull off American accents.)
Period Piece Voice
I imagine actors get particularly excited when they get to do a period piece. They get to wear cool costumes, walk on these amazing sets and most of all they get to try out these weird voices that are unique to the period in which their movie is set. (I liken the feeling to how I feel when I get to wear jeans to work on Friday.) That's got to be the only reason Gosling signed up for Gangster Squad, right? Hardy has also dabbled in some period piece movies, and thus tested out some voices from an old era. The most prominent example I can think of is in The Revenant. In The Revenant, Hardy plays Fitzgerald, an American fur trader from the 1820's who kills Leo DiCaprio's son and then leaves Leo for dead. You could tell from his voice that Fitzgerald is a frontiersman. I've never met a frontiersman so I actually have no way of telling if that's actually what they sound like. Leo sounds like Leo. But not Tom; no, Tom changes the pitch of his voice and brings it down a notch, he slows the tempo, and the accent pulls everything together. The voice he uses actually makes his character sound more menacing when he's pulling off some of the darker scenes in the movie. Leo won an Oscar for his role in The Revenant and it was well deserved. Tom Hardy was also nominated for his role as a supporting actor but he lost to Mark Rylance from Bridge of Spies. That was ridiculous, mostly because Sly Stallone should have won for Creed but also because Tom Hardy's voice had put together one of the best performances of the year and Tom Hardy was good too.
Off Kilter Voice
One of my favorite things an actor can do to his voice is to make it sound familiar, yet completely off. And the best actors can do that without making it just a distracting voice. They make it as much as part of the character as its personality or personal history. The voice itself has its own idiosyncrasies. One of my favorite Tom Hardy performances is a fantastic example of it. In The Drop Hardy plays Bob who is a bartender at a watering hole where the local gangsters sometimes make drops of cash. It's this whole elaborate scheme where the gangsters have different drop points that rotate. James Gandolfini plays Marv, Bob's cousin, who tries to orchestrate the robbery of a drop off. The plot isn't important to this post, really, but it's a good movie and it was Gondolfini's last before he passed. (Gandolfini and Hardy were so fucking good in this movie.) What is important is Tom Hardy's character and what his voice tells us about him. There is something seriously off about Bob and you can't put your finger on it. There's something in the way he speaks, the way his words slightly slur and quiver, the way he broods that tells you this guy has done something irredeemable in his past. But the whole movie, as he's trying to court Nadia and as he's taking care of the injured pit-bull you put your guard down. Because even though you know that this guy is bad news, he's really got a good heart. At least that's the way I saw it.
Masked Voice
Who doesn't like masks? Tom Hardy loves them. In fact, the only thing he likes more than playing with his voice is wearing a mask. Probably because the mask helps distort his voice. (The Ringer wrote an amazing piece about Tom Hardy's propensity for covering his face in films.) Wearing a mask is the most practical reason for an actor not sounding like himself. Three films come to mind. Most recently is Dunkirk where Hardy plays a pilot so his voice is distorted through the jet's radio. Child's play for Tom. He also kind of wears a mask in Mad Max: Fury Road. It's more of a muzzle, really. I don't think the muzzle actually affects his voice, but Max grunts a lot. I don't think all those grunts were in the script. It's definitely an acting choice. But when Max finally speaks we get to hear his glorious deep voice that would have been Hardy's best masked voice performance if not for the the obvious choice.
What I'm most interested in here is Hardy's turn as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. That voice has been mimicked, parodied, and imitated as much as any in the last decade or so. Is it a weird voice? Kind of. Is it necessary to the character? Not really. But it's so iconic in its oddness. First, the mask filters the voice and we're left with this contorted sound. But Hardy doesn't stop there. There's this really unfamiliar accent he's using. To me, it always sounded like Sean Connery talking through a walkie-talkie, but in immense pain. I think Hardy's voice here is a bit of a Rorschach; you hear whatever you want to hear. Apparently Tom was actually going for a few things here: on the Blu-Ray special features for The Dark Knight Rises Hardy talks about his process in getting Bane's voice down and there are two main inspirations. One is a boxer named Bartley Gorman. "He's the king of the gypsies, and he's a boxer, a bare-knuckle boxer, an Irish traveler, a gypsy," says Hardy. The second voice is actor Richard Burton. "Bane is someone who's in tremendous pain all the time. So he had an older voice. Which is sort of Richard Burton, I suppose, you know. Slightly florid, camp English villain... in many ways, but just off-center." I guess. I actually had no idea what Gorman and Burton sounded like before this post, but after some research I can hear. Hardy also claims he was going for a little bit of a Latin sounding accent because of Bane's origins. Didn't catch that, but who am I to argue with an actor with such prestige.
Going For It Voice
The best thing I can say about Hardy's voice in Venom is that I don't really know what he's going for, but he's really getting after it. There's no rhyme or reason for why Hardy chooses to speak in such a peculiar way. It's quite spectacular. If you haven't seen Venom yet, understand this: Hardy went balls to the walls as Eddie Brock. While most actors would have phoned in their performance and walked out with the paycheck, Tom commits to the role with the same ferocity that DiCaprio committed to his role in The Revenant. It's a really physical performance where Hardy eats frozen tater-tots, sweats profusely and jumps inside of a lobster tank. Again, it's quite spectacular. The sheer amount of physical effort exerted in this role is clear and it almost makes you forget that Eddie Brock sounds like no human I've ever heard in my life. Forget the fact that Hardy is also voicing the titular Venom like a monster with strep throat. I understand the choice there. (According to Hardy he was going for a mix of Redman, Busta Rhymes and James Brown... okay.) But nothing makes sense about Eddie's voice. It sounds like what someone who has never heard a New Yorker speak thinks a New York accent sounds like. It's almost as if he was going for the same voice he did in The Drop but just forgot how to do it. And instead of the voice adding depth to the character it just made me wonder if Hardy gets paid extra for every movie he uses a silly voice in. The voice made no sense in the context of the film. And that's what made his performance in Venom great. It was quite spectacular, actually.
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