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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 thereenduring 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