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There are plenty of actors who’ve pursued a successful career in Hollywood after making a name for themselves as a rapper, but Tom Hardy has quietly flipped the script while secretly pursuing a hip-hop side hustle thanks to his surprisingly strong skills on the mic.
Like many actors, Tom Hardy spent plenty of time grinding before bursting into the mainstream thanks in no small part to Christopher Nolan (who tapped him for Inception before casting him as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises).
He really broke into the entertainment industry when he landed roles in Black Hawk Down and Band of Brothers in 2001, which came a few years after he won a modeling competition on a British morning show.
Modeling wasn’t the only pastime Hardy was pursuing prior to the turn of the new millennium, as he was studying at a drama school in London when he adopted the moniker “Tommy No. 1” for a mixtape he recorded with writer and director Ed Tracy (a.k.a. “Eddie Too Tall”) in 1999.
However, it appears he’s still going strong more than 20 years later.
In 2022, Czarface—a group consisting of Wu-Tang Clan’s Inspectah Deck and the Boston-based duo 7L & Esoteric—dropped Good Guys, Bad Guys, which featured a couple of tracks that could be heard playing in Venom: Let There Be Carnage, the film where Hardy plays the eponymous symbiote who invades the body of Eddie Brock.
The EP contains a couple of tracks featuring an artist officially credited as “Frankie Pulitzer” (who also goes as “Face Puller”), a man with a British accent who smoothly glides over the beats while more than holding his own with the rest of the crew.
Hardy has never officially confirmed his involvement with the project, but the fact that “Face Puller” appears under his name in his Instagram bio is just one of a few clues that have led people to realize he’s the rapper in question.
In an interview, Esoteric said Hardy personally reached out to him about making music for the movie where he plays an investigative journalist (a line of work where a Pulitzer is the ultimate reward), and while the line “whip an Audi like Bruce in a Batmobile” isn’t a dead giveaway, it’s kind of hard to ignore its link an actor who played one of Batman’s foes.
At the end of 2023, Czarface dropped another track featuring Hardy/Pulitzer where he raps in a cadence that’s best described as “a British Action Bronson.”
There’s no telling if the actor plans to take this particular pursuit more seriously at some point in the future, but he certainly shows a ton of potential.