Like doing a hard Sudoku: Tom Hardy on playing gangland twins the Krays in new biopic

There are two very different Tom Hardys.

There is the Hardy that movie-goers have got to know onscreen, an actor with a brooding intensity and a flair for playing hard, sometimes vicious men in films like Bronson, Warrior, The Dark Knight Rises and Mad Max: Fury Road . Then there is the offscreen Hardy, a sensitive softie who loves dogs and giving out hugs and who talks excitedly about the imminent prospect of becoming a dad for the second time: “I’m waiting on a baby to land. It could be any minute!”

That more gentle and thoughtful Hardy – Tommy to his friends – is just as frightened as everyone else by the forbidding alpha-male characters he has often played. (“I’m as masculine as an eggplant,” he once told an interviewer.) In a strange way, that fear is exactly what draws him to those roles.

“I think things that frighten me are compelling and I want to understand them,” says Hardy. “Wherever I go around the world, there’s always somebody out there who’s a bit scary and I’ll collect that. Or animals – I’ll learn from animals as well. Although you can’t really talk to an angry orangutan the same way you can talk to a lot of people.”

As it happens, there are also two very different Tom Hardys in the actor’s new film, Legend. The movie stars Hardy in the dual roles of Ronnie and Reggie Kray, the notorious real-life twin gangsters who ran an organised crime empire in the East End of London in the 1950s and ’60s. In what many critics have deemed a tour de force performance, Hardy creates a study in contrasts, with Reggie showing polish and charm, and Ronnie a paranoid schizophrenic prone to unpredictable flashes of violence.

Guess which role Hardy was more excited to play.