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As good as he is as an actor, perhaps the best thing about Tom Hardy is how he will sometimes pop up unannounced and reveal that he is secretly quite good at other non-acting things. In 2022 he surprised the world by rocking up to a Brazilian jiu-jitsu competition held in a Milton Keynes secondary school and wiping the floor with everyone. He loves dogs with such a ferocious intensity that children’s authors are resigned to the fact that he will never read their book on CBeebies Bedtime Stories unless it has a dog in it.
And now he’s a rapper. It has been announced that Tom Hardy’s new rap album Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer is being released in August. And, in true Tom Hardy style, it turns out that he has secretly been quite good at rapping all along.
You would be right to take this information with a pinch of salt, because this article is essentially a white British 45-year-old broadsheet journalist recommending the rapping skills of the white British 48-year-old star of MobLand, which is patently quite silly. Nevertheless, the first single from Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer, Brothers Grimm, has just been released, and his ability is hard to deny.
Czarface consists of Inspectah Deck, 7L and Esoteric. And in Brothers Grimm, Hardy lets them go first. Which is either extremely foolhardy or extremely confident – deciding to announce yourself to the world as a rapper by acting as the headliner to one of the Wu-Tang Clan is a legitimately deranged thing to do – and yet he more or less holds his own. You might argue that the flow is slightly stiffer in his verse, or that the lyrics are slightly more generic, but if that’s the case it’s only by a fraction.
This might be because Tom Hardy has been a rapper all along. Over a quarter of a century ago he rapped under the pseudonym Tommy No 1, putting out an album entitled Falling on Your Arse in 1999. It sounds very much of its time and, although Hardy keeps his voice quite low in the mix, there’s no doubting his skill. One song, the Alan Hawkshaw-sampling Bring the Fucking Noise, is a riot; it sounds like Cypress Hill would if their substance consumption was limited to Monster energy drinks. Longtime fans of his will also be aware of the brief YouTube video from 14 years ago where Hardy raps extremely competently in the middle of the street while his son Louis bobs around in a papoose.
These are risky waters for an actor with an established career. Tom Hardy has spent years building a reputation as an actor of fearsome ability, and nothing will undo that quicker than a dismal, try-hard, vanity project shot at rapping. One wrong move – one oblivious rich-boy couplet, one regrettable photoshoot, one tiny hint of unearned cultural appropriation – and he’s suddenly Chet Hanks. There’s no coming back from that.
But as Frankie Pulitzer, Hardy seems to be pulling it off. And while the name is perhaps a little ostentatious – it would be like me rapping under the name Frankie Viewers Choice Award – there’s no doubting that his heart is in this. Hardy has been rapping with Czarface since at least 2021, when they released their Good Guys, Bad Guys EP together. If you enjoyed Venom: The Last Dance enough to stay through the credits, you will have heard Hardy rap as Pulitzer alongside Method Man in the song Knull & Void.
However, an actor can only abuse his position enough to sneak his songs into credits so many times. This explains the existence of Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer. This is Hardy admitting that he wants to be taken seriously as a rapper. And while the album is unlikely to set the world on fire – judging by the single the whole project is tailored exclusively for middle-aged men who used to read Hip-Hop Connection on the way to their Saturday jobs in the late 1990s – you have to commend the fact that he’s doing it at all.
The only question left is what unexpected talent Hardy will pull off next. We know he can act. We know he can fight. Now we know he can rap. Maybe a few months from now Tom Hardy will demonstrate a newfound capacity for the triple jump, or bronzework, or cross stitch. What an exciting time to be alive.
