Venom Trailer #2 Is The Latest Showcase for Tom Hardy’s Bizarre Accents

“The way I see it,” the viscous, sharp-toothed title villain in the newest Venom trailer hisses, “we can do whatever we want.”

It’s a great bad-guy line for a movie, but it also kind of sums up Tom Hardy’s approach to accents on film: honestly, do whatever. Cockney? Welsh? Mumble-Bane? It’s all up to whatever whim Tom Hardy is flying on during that particular shoot. As with many a pop artist’s recognizable quirks — Tom Cruise doing his own stunts or Pink always doing aerials at awards shows — Hardy’s accent work started off puzzling, happened often enough to become a joke, and has now settled in to so much of the actor’s personality that we don’t know what we’d do without it.

The first Venom trailer premiered a few months ago, and while it gave us our first glimpse of the bulbous head and giant Langolier teeth of Venom, the only voice we heard was Eddie Brock’s. Eddie is the mild-mannered alter-ego/symbiotic host of Venom, a newspaper reporter who may sound oddly like Terrence Howard when he speaks (Brits doing “ordinary” American accents take their inspirations from the strangest places), but otherwise is pretty normal. The takes on Hardy’s normal-guy voice have been varied but fun:

After this latest trailer, though, it’s clear that, as fun as Eddie Brock’s voice is, this is the Venom show. And, voiced by Hardy in a thrilling dual role, the Venom monster sounds like a cross between Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors, Hexus from Ferngully, and the hissing Cobra Commander after he’s been turned into a serpent in G.I. Joe: The Movie. It is excellent.

Whatever Hardy’s inspirations, these Venom voices are only the latest in a career that’s been built on vocal weirdness. You know how in Game of Thrones the Faceless Men have that wall of dead-people masks that they can put on whenever they want to play a mean prank like killing a lord’s sons and making him eat them? Hardy is like that, but with voices (and without the killing and eating, one imagines). Consider the Hardy Voices throughout his career:

Bronson: This early film from Nicolas Winding Refn featured Hardy as “Britain’s most violent prisoner,” sporting an accent that sits halfway between cockney and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The Dark Knight Rises: This was the role that really launched the Tom Hardy’s Weird Voices phenomenon. Not only was Bane’s voice often incomprehensible from behind his mask, but when audible, it was a jolly carnival barker’s voice, as bellowed from the bottom of a well.

Locke: After this indie actor’s showcase was released, there were those who said Hardy’s Welsh accent was on point, while others merely observed that on-point Welsh sounds weird as hell.

Mad Max: Fury Road; Legend; Dunkirk: In all three of these movies, Hardy’s accent work — whatever it is — is mostly covered up by impediments throughout, be it a prisoner’s muzzle, a pilot’s mask, or a mouthful of intrusive prop teeth.

The irony of all of this, of course, is that when Hardy had his big mainstream breakthrough in Christopher Nolan’s inception, Hardy’s character possessed a rather lovely, un-strange, deeply appealing voice. Though clearly Tom Hardy looked back at his vocal performance in Inception and thought to himself: “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”