Taron Egerton kissed Tom Hardy on the set of Legend. Nobody wrote that scene, and audiences never saw it. Taron Egerton grabbed Tom Hardy’s face mid-scene and went for it. The kiss never made the movie.
An actor decided mid-scene to try something nobody had written into the script, then immediately braced for his co-star’s reaction. Audiences never got to see the result.
Taron Egerton kissed Tom Hardy in an unscripted post-murder car scene
Taron Egerton improvised a kiss with Tom Hardy while filming, though nobody who watched the Legend movie would know it. That take never reached the finished film.
He revisited the moment on Monday’s episode of the Armchair Expert podcast. Looking back, he had felt “so pleased with himself” for trying it.
“There was a scene where he murders someone and gets back in the car and I was in the back of the car waiting for him,” Egerton, 36, recalled. “I grabbed his face, and I snogged him. And it wasn’t in the script.”
Nerves arrived right afterward. He remembered “backing off” afraid of his co-star’s reaction. In hindsight, though, he thinks Hardy, 48, “loved it.” As he framed it, “At that time, I think he quite liked my chutzpah.” Dax Shepard‘s co-host, Monica Padman, judged the move “ballsy.”
Why did the unscripted kiss make sense for Egerton’s character?
Context helps here. The 2015 crime drama cast him as Teddy Smith, the “lover” of one of the two Kray twins Hardy played, Ronald and Reggie. The moment therefore remained entirely off screen.
“We were depicting a bunch of guys in a hypermasculine world playing gangsters, but I was playing his lover so my job was kind of to subvert it all,” the “Kingsman” star explained.
Director Brian Helgeland welcomed that kind of risk. Egerton described him as “very open to [them] improvising and trying things out.” Noting that “Tom loved this,” Egerton added, “I kind of grabbed that bull by both horns as well. I have all my insecurities and all my fears, but one thing I’m not worried about is I believe myself as an actor.”
Hardy struck him as an “intimidating” colleague. Mostly, though, excitement won out around the “unpredictable” Hollywood “heavyweight.” Speaking on set in 2015, he called Helgeland an Oscar winner who welcomed improvisation without suggesting things beforehand, and he described Hardy as “warm-hearted” and a “very generous man.”
Page Six sought comment from Hardy’s rep, who did not immediately respond.
Tom Hardy currently plays a fixer on MobLand. His latest role is Harry Da Souza, who solves problems for a London crime family. Reports earlier this year said producers had fired him after he clashed with fellow cast members, yet he reportedly remains “in the fold.” Helen Mirren keeps defending her co-star and his “different [acting] process.”
“As long as what’s on the screen is fantastic, I’m totally chilled with however someone gets there,” she told Variety in June. A third season has yet to be greenlit.
WAS THE UNSCRIPTED KISS A BOLD MOVE OR TOO FAR? TELL US IN THE COMMENTS!
