Tom Hardy has brought back his Batman villain Bane for a new rap album. The Welsh actor, known for tough-guy roles in Mad Max and MobLand, has returned to his adopted music persona Frankie Pulitzer to join forces with Czarface, a collective featuring hip hop artists including Method Man, EL-P and Busta Rhymes.
15-track album with Czarface
Hardy has been compared to Eminem on the 15-track opus Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer, where he drops verses about Shakespeare, Marvel films and his fondness for horror writer Stephen King's work.
Fans of his Bane voice - the much-derided posh baritone he used in Christopher Nolan's Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises - will hear the gruff tone return on the track Grim-Visaged War. On it, he recites the famous "Winter of our discontent" monologue from Richard III using his contentious DC Comics villainous voice, which sounds almost Shakespearean.
Hollywood shout-outs and horror references
Other movie stars get mentions on the record, with bars about Willem Dafoe and Martin Scorsese on Raw Forever. In Gnawing At My Rhyme Like a Poisonous Rat, the actor expresses his love for the arts, referencing the Titanic quote "draw me like one of your French girls," as he raps: "You act amused like DiCaprio scratching his pencils to capture your figure."
Stephen King gets a shout-out in the video Mad Technology, where Hardy performs in a mask rapping about Misery actress Kathy Bates and other horror characters: "You s***-for-brain no-name lame, that bites like Cujo. And you know that Misery, it loves company."
Not his first musical adventure
This is not Hardy's or Frankie Pulitzer's first musical outing, as he has featured on other Czarface albums and in 1999 released a record under the name Tommy No1 called Falling on Your A**e. On screen, Hardy expressed his love of hip hop when he played a rapper in the 1999 short film Get A Grip, while the end credits for his 2024 Marvel film Venom: The Last Dance feature his voice on the track Knull & Void.
Whether fans will get to experience Frankie Pulitzer live remains to be seen, but for now he is still focusing on acting and will be seen in the second series of MobLand, which returns to Paramount+ on September 18.
