Ahead of the London premiere of Legend tonight down in Leicester Square, Tom Hardy, Emily Browning, Christopher Ecclestone and Director Brian Helgeland attended a press conference to talk about the film.
In case you have been living under a rock recently, Tom Hardy takes on a double role as both Ronnie and Reggie Kray, the legendary East London Gangsters from the 60’s and quite frankly is pure genius in both roles; however we did prefer his portrayal of Ron as a complete psychopath.
Here are a few little facts we learned from attending the press conference today.
- Emily Browning had never actually heard of The Krays before reading the script.
- Both Tom and Christopher Ecclestone first came across the Krays as teenage boys.
- Brian Helgeland felt the close relationship between The Krays twins and their mother had been told so many times before he wanted to stay away from that.
- Tom actually wore Reggie’s watch which he died wearing during filming.
- Tom thought researching his parts was extremely hard as most stories are embellished even with the amount of resource to access.
- Christopher Ecclestone quoted David Bowie and said he threw his homework on the fire; he thought there is a lot of bollocks spoke about research. He relied entirely on the script for his character.
- There was no budget for CGI so had to film Tom’s double part in split screen with him talking to a tennis ball or another actor. To quote Hardy “We had to let the bitch breathe, stop, start and let the bitch breathe again”
- Christopher Ecclestone admitted he was jealous experiencing Hardy acting in both roles as 90% of his scenes where with Tom as Reggie and the one with Tom as Ronnie was completely different.
- It took an hour to change Tom’s make up for each scene between his two characters.
LEGEND is out in UK Cinema on the 9th of September.
