Tom Hardy’s Most Bizarre Accents Ranked

«Locke» strips away all other visual distractions to focus only on the man in the van — or a BMW X5. Tom Hardy plays Ivan Locke in 2013’s «Locke», the story of a family man reckoning with a time he stepped out on his family, managing a huge work project from afar, and basically trying to be a better man at the end of an 80-minute car ride than he was at the beginning.

To some, Locke’s accent sounds like a strangely musical, soft-spoken posh British one. But Hardy is doing his best Welsh accent. It’s not an accent often given the big screen treatment. Bewilderingly, Hardy’s Welsh becomes a bit Slavic at times, and Pakistani at others — like in the scene where he talks his assistant, Donal (Andrew Scott, using his own Irish accent) into handling a massive concrete pour on his own.

While Hardy isn’t always consistent with his accents, there’s a story behind why in «Locke.» Hardy told WalesOnline he based Locke’s accent on a seemingly Welsh guide who helped him do research for a different role in the Middle East, and later discovered the man wasn’t Welsh at all, but English. He told WalesOnline «When my fiancee found out she went, ‘Oh Tom, you idiot’.» Idiot or not, «Locke» does give us Tom Hardy in his pseudo-Welsh accent saying the phrase «Cartwell’s a donkey.»