This article contains explicit material and may be NSFW.
OK, Internet, let’s do this.
You think you’ve seen the best Tom Hardy selfies? My friends, you have not seen the half of Tom Hardy’s through-the-years selfie game.
Tom Hardy, January 2006
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Tom Hardy, March 2015
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The Daily Dot’s Tom Hardy beat reporters, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw and myself, attempted to avoid writing about his Myspace photos for as long as possible, while the rest of the post-Mad Max: Fury Road Internet has been salivating over them.
Why? As longtime members of fandom, we freaked out over them post-Inception, in 2010, and have been subsequently watching the Internet’s Summer 2015 Hardy Implosion in varying states of bafflement, affection, and hipster embarrassment.
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But it seems that no media outlet is to escape the Tom Hardy Selfie Phenomenon unscathed, and so here we go. We are going to out-Hardy-selfie all the rest of you, because we have been obsessively bookmarking Tom Hardy candids for the last five years, and now is our moment to shine, dammit.
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You may think you’ve been down the rabbit hole of Tom Hardy’s embarrassing Myspace moments, but have you actually seen the video of him dancing while dressed as a giant rabbit?
You may have seen a few pictures of scantily-clad Tom Hardy. You may have even seen a few pictures of Tom Hardy in swim trunks:
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But, oh, my friends, have you seen Tom Hardy wearing Speedos? Have you seen him take said Speedos off and put them on his friend’s dog?
Speedos on Tom Hardy…
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…Speedos on dog
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The vast majority of these photos come to the modern Internet courtesy of a few die-hard fan websites which have faithfully preserved Hardy’s Myspace legacy—and allowed him to maintain an outlet for his selfie-loving ways. Although he’s notoriously shy when it comes to social media, he frequently shares pictures of himself, including selfies and other candids, with the fan website TomHardy.org, because he’s awesome like that.
Aside from the long-running Tumblr tomhardyparty, the biggest existing archive of Hardy’s Mypace photos is Wolfn8, which also hosts the chronicle of his famous attempt to give a stray cat to Hugh Dancy. He took excellent care of the cat (“i call him CJ after the guy in GTA San Andreas”) and eventually rehomed him—but not before he took a lot of selfies:
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About CJ the cat, Hardy wrote these astute lines:
“he is such a dude, and he is very funny and likes to talk a lot cuddle and sleep, plus he follows me everywhere talking romanian, I’m like I live in london dude I have no idea what you’re on about”
This, by the way, is classic Tom Hardy speech—creative, completely absurd, stream-of-consciousness, and more than a little bit wonderful.
Hardy takes selfies on sets, with family, with friends, with strangers, with dogs, in bed, on the couch, and in the toilet. No, really:
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His most recent selfie excursion involved hilarious Simpsons pajamas, but in the past—the far past, we’re talking pre-Minotaur, here, and if you don’t know what Minotaur is, for the love of god don’t try to find out—Hardy’s selfies frequently got much more risqué.
Which is to say: We’re putting a giant NSFW warning on the rest of this article, because you never know when Tom Hardy in a trucker hat circa 2006 is going to drop trou and grab a cellphone.
But first, let’s all enjoy this video from 2011 of Tom rapping while holding a baby (his son, Louis). The original, slightly less blurry version, is here.
The picture below, it so happens, launched a longstanding meme among Inception fans and Tom Hardy admirers on LiveJournal and Tumblr.
It all started when Hardy showed us pictures of his house—complete with a fern in the background:
Perhaps concerned that we might not understand what we were looking at, Hardy made sure to spell things out for us:
As you can see, Hardy originally captioned it: “This is my place x not my hair x it is a palm xx.” There you have it, folks. That’s not his hair! No confusion here! But that’s not all.
Hardy seems unable to avoid taking selfies with palm trees. We don’t know if this is bizarre coincidence, a deep-seated predilection, or if the same palm tree has been silently stalking him for years, unbeknownst to the general public. But as you can see, it’s a problem:
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Hardy also evidently likes to use his mouth, teeth, and tongue as much as possible. He takes close-up selfies of his lips:
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And he frequently likes to get his tongue in on the action:
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Tom Hardy has an obvious thing for toothpicks. Roughly 50 percent of his entire filmography features him chewing a toothpick. He also chews toothpicks in interviews and, basically, everywhere:
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He also, of course, gnaws on toothpicks while taking selfies with Louis:
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So many selfies with Louis!
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You may have heard of Hardy’s well-documented love of dogs. For many years, Hardy’s dog Max, nicknamed Moose, was his best friend and most frequent selfie companion. Sadly, Max passed away in 2012, but their love will live forever on the Internet.
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Screengrab via wolfn8
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The image below was originally captioned: “x I’m cooking turkey yo xx.”
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Things to be thankful for at Thanksgiving: This dude.
In 2010, this brief video, taken from the set of This Means War, leaked online. It shows Hardy and director McG getting shot with paintballs. The video was immediately taken down, but “immediately” in Hollywood time is time enough for a thousand fangirls to download it. The Internet is forever.
If you’re out looking for Tom Hardy selfies, then you’ve probably already come across the infamous trucker hat pictures, but wherever Hardy goes, the hats are sure to emerge eventually:
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So many hats.
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Lampshade not on head? Bad.
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Lampshade on head with extra hat? Good!
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Even when he’s not even wearing anything on his head, Hardy can still have moments of selfie-destruction:
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But he also has his moments of undeniable charm, too:
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OK, so maybe all Tom Hardy moments are full of undeniable charm—
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…make that most of them.
And let’s face it—even the ones that leave us a little bit bamboozled only make us love him more.
Photo via Imgur
