Free Tom Hardy by James Haydock Page A

a karaoke night.’
    Whatever his best intentions were with offshoot projects like Shotgun, with his career now taking off in ways he probably never imagined possible, it seems unlikely that Tom will havethe time to revisit his theatre company. Perhaps there lies a project for when the credits have rolled on his last movie.
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    At the same time as charging around trying to pull together his first ‘shotgun’ production, Tom had been busy fulfilling professional commitments. His schedule dictated that work on Roger and Vanessa had to be fitted in around filming for the television drama Colditz , in which he had a principal role.
    The two-part ITV drama took its inspiration from Henry Chancellor’s book of the same name. The source material for the book was interviews with allied soldiers who had been held in the German high-security prison during the Second World War. The television adaptation centres on the fates of three fictional characters who initially escape from a prisoner of war camp during the war. Two of them are captured and taken to Colditz (Jack Rose, played by Tom, and Tom Willis, played by Laurence Fox) while the third (Nick McGrade, played by Damian Lewis) makes it back to England where he falls in love with Lizzie (Sophia Myles), who happens to be the sweetheart of Jack. The adaptation also boasted a sprinkle of Hollywood stardust in the form of Jason Priestley (star of teen drama Beverly Hills 90210 ) who played Canadian soldier Rhett Barker, also an inmate of the prison. Shooting took place over the summer of 2004, in London and on location in the Czech Republic. ‘Colditz’ was in fact a medieval monastery in Kutna Hora, a town located about 70km east of Prague.
    The character of Jack Rose is essentially the hero of the piece: dependable, honest and brave, he stands in stark contrast to deceitful, selfish Nick McGrade who wants to keep Rose’s love Lizzie for himself by any means possible. Tomdescribed Rose as ‘an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances’ and this was a change from the kind of role the actor was accustomed to taking. ‘I’ve never played a straight lead before,’ he mused. ‘I normally get tortured characters and villains and angry young men.’ Fortunately for Tom, he did get the chance to delve back into his tough-guy store cupboard, for a scene in which he comes to physical blows with Willis.
    Tom recognised that, as in Band of Brothers , a delicate touch was required when bringing Jack Rose to life. Although the characters were fictional, he was all too aware that they were representations of people who had experienced incarceration in Colditz. ‘People have died in these uniforms. It’s important that this drama pays tribute to what those guys did,’ he told the Independent in 2005.
    Colditz saw Tom reunited with his Band of Brothers co-star , Damian Lewis. While Lewis was complimentary about Tom and predicted great things for him in the future, he also joked about how, in both productions, Tom’s character had been the one who’d had all the luck with women. ‘I always resented Tom for turning up on Band of Brothers and getting the girl – in fact, the only girl in a cast of hundreds of smelly men! I, on the other hand, spent eight months with my face squashed up against someone else’s backside in one sodden trench after another. And it looks as if Tom might have got the girl again, damn his eyes,’ Lewis joked to the Sunday Mercury . Tom was eager to return the praise, expressing how pleased he was to be working with Lewis again, who had coincidentally also recently appeared in a production at the Almeida. ‘I’ve been on his heels for a bit so it was good to work with him – he’s a character,’ said Tom.
    It’s interesting to note that when he spoke about appearing in the drama, Tom made reference to the brief spell of time that actors have to explore their