Tom Hardy has come a long way from rock bottom. Now he's a married, in-demand actor starring in one of the biggest, most well-reviewed movies of the year — but back in the day, he was more into hard living than hard working.
The Mad Max: Fury Road actor, 37, opened up about his past struggles with drug abuse in a new interview with Essentials magazine, which was reported by Yahoo New Zealand earlier this week.
"I was a shameful suburban statistic," he said of his cocaine problem. "I was told very clearly, 'You go down that road, Tom, you won't come back. That's it. All you need to know.'"
In fact, he almost didn't come back. "That message stayed with me clearly for the rest of my days," he told the mag. "I am f–king lucky to be here, to be honest."
At one point, he said, things got so bad that he would have sacrificed his family to feed his drug habit. "I would have sold my mother for a rock of crack," he admitted to Essentials.
Now clean, the British star (who quietly wed Charlotte Riley in 2014) is focused on building his resume in Hollywood, which includes blockbusters like Inception and The Dark Knight Rises.
"People didn't sit up and take any notice of me until I started putting on weight, kicking people, and being aggressive!" he told the mag (via Yahoo). "The trouble with Hollywood is that they want you to be something, then they think you're who they wanted you to be. I'm not a fighter. I'm a petite little bourgeois boy from London."
