Earlier this week, we found out that if this acting sh*t doesn’t work out for Tom Hardy, he could easily jump into the world of hip-hop… at least as a cover artist. His Dubsmash game is on fleek, but you can only go so far with lip-syncing (right, Milli Vanilli?) (too soon?), so the question remains: can Tom Hardy actually kick rhymes?
Judging by this old video, the answer would be yes.
Before we get into his ill performance, you have to give props to Hardy for picking a KRS-One b-side to rap acapella. Mixshow DJs would drop “Hip-Hop vs. Rap” on the radio, but as it was the flipside to KRS’ huge single “Sound Of Da Police,” it makes you realize how much of a head Hardy must be. Then you actually check the lyrics and the flow (which was kind of intense, even for a KRS-One track), and you realize that you can’t just kick this rhyme and be heard properly while drunk at your favorite karaoke dive.
Nor is it that easy to do with a baby strapped to your chest, but for Mad Max? It’s no thing.
Yeah, it’s cute, and his kid seems to love daddy’s hands bouncing all over (and the quick beatboxing in the intro). And Hardy does skip lines—for example, he misses the part about battling Shakespeare, but picks up the bit right after—but this isn’t being recorded for a track, and is a song that he was spitting about almost two decades after it dropped, and keep it real: Hardy recovers well.
About 38 seconds in, he gets stuck on “the difference is” line, repeating it two more times (and possibly turning it into “the differences”) before getting back into the rhyme. Again, stellar recovery. Hell, it was enough for him to a) entertain his baby and b) entertain whoever was recording the clip (possibly his wife Charlotte Riley, whom he married in 2014).
The real question is if Tom can do the second half of the track, where KRS combines a batch lines from a huge number of classic hip-hop tracks.
Tom Hardy, like I said earlier, if this whole Hollywood star thing doesn’t exactly work out, don’t worry, you have a gig on “real hip-hop” tours as a featured attraction ANY time.
