When director Christopher Nolan was building The Dark Knight Rises cast, he nearly cast a voice actor for Bane, similar to how Darth Vader was portrayed.
Luckily for us, he decided Tom Hardy was more than equipped to handle the job of doing everything that was needed to create a brutal villain such as Bane.
Director Christopher Nolan discussed the film with Access Hollywood:
“When we chose Bane as the antagonist and I thought about asking a great actor to cover his face up for the whole [movie] — you could just see his eyes and just hear his voice — I knew immediately that Tom would be up for that,” the director told Access Hollywood at the press junket for The Dark Knight Rises.”
Nolan goes on to talk about how unique Tom Hardy is as an actor:
”[He’s] something you’ve never seen before. It’s a little bit of Darth Vader, a little bit of this, little bit of that… It’s very unique and that’s what you get with great actors like Tom Hardy, he’s not just going to go through the motions, he’s going to try and craft a character that really makes sense for him. He has really gone in through the roots of the character and approached the evil,” the director explained.
Nolan speaks about the difficulties that Hardy and Bale had fighting with their restrictive costumes:
“He had to make himself huge for the role. He learned how to do all of this fighting with Christian Bale, both of them wearing these crazy outfits where they could barely breathe. In Tom’s case, with this mask over his face, very tough to breathe, very hot, working in some very challenging environments,” Nolan told Access. “There was a lot of preparation that went into it, and it really shows on screen.”
The Dark Knight Rises hits theaters July 20.