In 2022, Tom Hardy entered BJJ competitions in Wolverhampton and Milton Keynes under his own weight category, competing against strangers and winning gold at both.
Hardy explained what pulled him toward competing in the first place, describing an earlier discomfort with performative toughness:
I did the posturing bit of boxing and hitting mitts, and trying to be a bloke… But ultimately I was sort of scared of blokes, because there’s so many of them, and there’s always one stronger than you.
You know, somehow you’re supposed to be able to look after yourself in this wicked world, but in a numbers game it’s not possible to be the strongest.
So eventually I was like: “Just have a go, who cares who wins.”
And of course I care who wins, but you spend the first couple of years trying to forget it.
You’re not winning anything. It’s very humiliating, in the right way.
He also drew a comparison between stage fright and stepping onto a competition mat:
Getting stage fright is sh*t. It’s really sh*t. But going down the local sports centre to brawl some bloke from Southampton or Milton Keynes who you’ve never met before is terrifying!
And people are watching, and they’ve got their phones out, and it could be embarrassing.
It could end really badly.
Going out on stage you can kind of blag it. People might go, ‘awww’, or ‘booo!’ but it’s not quite the same as someone sitting on you and tying you up like a pretzel.
That dedication to BJJ has come with a physical cost:
I’ve had two knee surgeries now, my disc’s herniated in my back, I’ve got sciatica as well. And I have that… is it plantar fasciitis? Where did that come from? And why?
And I pulled my tendon in my hip as well. It’s like, it’s all falling to bits now, and it’s not going to get better.
That same self-examining instinct extends to how he thinks about what comes next:
This isn’t the first time I’ve had feelings like this. I thought I’d handled it, but there’s another layer of the onion, and there will be more layers of the onion.
But after that, we get off the treadmill. You start writing your book, and I maybe open up a jiu-jitsu academy or something, and there’ll be another layer of the onion, and another one, if we’re lucky.
But I genuinely am keen to take on the painful journey of being brave enough to try something new, because I’d like to not look back and say: “I regret not making the effort to do something that was scary.”
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