Tom Hardy Goes Shirtless For 'Esquire UK', Talks Losing Oscar Bet to Leonardo DiCaprio!

Tom Hardy flashes a big smile and strips off his shirt for Esquire UK magazine’s January 2017 issue, available on newsstands today (December 6)!

Here’s what the 39-year-old Mad Max star had to share with the mag:

On why he’s lured to the darker side of the human experience in his roles: “I enjoy the nuttery in my work. So that’s probably why when somebody goes, ‘Do you want to plan another loony?’ I go, ‘Yeah, I would actually, yeah.’ There’s a part of me that wants to do different stuff, but there’s a part of me that goes: do you know what? I want to carry on playing gangsters because every time you go a little bit deeper in that study. Why switch it up and be rice-paper thin? ‘Oh, he’s good because he’s doing a musical now!’ You know what I mean? It’s like, ‘Look at me! I’m trying to please people!’”

On being nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role in The Revenant: “I don’t think I ever expected to be welcomed to one of those events. I always felt like a bit of a naughty boy, and I always thought part of me would be like, ‘Nah’. And then actually I was like, ‘Oh yeah! I’ll have a sniff of that.’”

On whether he got his tattoo after losing a bet to Leonardo DiCaprio about whether he would be nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Hardy bet a tattoo of the winner’s choosing that he wouldn’t receive a nomination and subsequently lost): “I haven’t got it yet, because it sucks… He wrote, in this really sh*tty handwriting: ‘Leo knows everything.’ Ha! I was like, ‘OK, I’ll get it done, but you have to write it properly.’”

Tom‘s full interview appears in the January 2017 issue of Esquire, for more visit esquire.co.uk!