Turns out, Tom Hardy isn’t afraid to talk about his sexuality. Rather, he’s more sensitive and in touch than we might have guessed.
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The Mad Max actor became snippy during a press conference at the Toronto International Film Festival last weekend when a journalist roundaboutly tried to ask him about his sexuality by asking him if it was, “hard for celebrities to talk to the media about their sexuality.”
Hardy quickly shut the Daily Xtra reporter down.
But, in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Hardy revealed that it wasn’t because he was upset about the question.
“I found it very humiliating for somebody to decide that on his dime and his time, to openly and inelegantly pursue a line of questioning which I could only sense at the moment — which was quite awkward — that it was zeroing in on a reaction from me that would become a topic of discussion that had nothing really to do with what was there.”
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Hardy infamously revealed in a 2008 interview with Attitude magazine that he’d had sexual relations with men as a boy. “I’m an actor for f***’s sake,” he reportedly said. “I’m an artist. I’ve played with everything and everyone. But I’m not into men sexually.”
Following that interview in 2010, Hardy confirmed that he is straight. Regardless, the 2008 quotes from Attitude magazine continue to haunt Hardy, who made it clear that TIFF was not the time or the place to rehash his LGBT statements.
“That really, really annoyed me,” he said to Entertainment Weekly. “It was just the inelegance of being asked in a room full of people… Now I’m happy to have a conversation, a discussion, at a reasonable time about anything. I’m confident in my own sexuality, and I’m also confident in my own being and talking about any issue you want to talk about. But there is a time and a place for that.”
He also added that he didn’t think the journalist who asked the question meant any harm.
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“I’m quite sensitive, and I feel like I’ve let people down for something that I actually didn’t ask for, for something that’s important to a lot of people. Should I come out of the closet when I’m not in one? I ought to maybe come out of the closet, even though that’s a lie, to do the right thing. Or, if I say no, then I’m homophobic? Bless him. He’s young. But at the same time, it left me feeling like I have to do something about that. And it’s like why? Whose business is it anyway and isn’t that the point?”
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