Tom Hardy discusses how he came up with Bane’s voice in The Dark Knight Rises. In the upcoming comic book sequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Hardy will reprise his role as Eddie Brock. He made his superhero debut as Batman villain Bane in the third Dark Knight film before joining the Spider-Man/Marvel universe as Brock.

Hardy has spoken up about what inspired the unusual and unique accent he adopted for his character in the film almost a decade later.

Tom Hardy and Andy Serkis sat down for the famed WIRED auto-complete interview to promote their upcoming film. One of the most frequently asked questions about Tom Hardy on the internet was how he created Bane’s accent for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. While the accent has gotten mixed responses from fans and reviewers, it was created with considerable effort. Hardy elaborated:

“That was actually a really cool choice that Chris [Nolan] made. Bane quintessentially is Latinx in origin…and I’m not. So I looked at the concept of Latin and found a man called Bartley Gorman, who’s a Romany gypsy. The king of the gypsies, in inverted commas, is a bare-knuckle fighter and a boxer. And he said [doing Bane-like voice], “When I get into a ring with a man, and we want to wipe you off the face of the Earth, and he wants to kill me.” And I was like this is great. And I showed Chris. I said Chris, we can either go down a sort of arch Darth Vader route, straight just neutral tone villain voice, or we could try this. And this I’ve been thinking of just in case we’ve got to consider the roots and origins of Bane. But we could get laughed out of the part of it, it might be something that we regret, but it’s your choice ultimately. He says, no I think we’ll go with it. And that was that. And we played with it, and made it a bit more fluid, and now people love it [laughs].”

Inspiration for Hardy’s Bane,  Gorman, was indeed a bare-knuckle boxer who participated in illegal fights during the 1970s and 1980s and became a legend until his death in 2002. While Gorman appears to be a colorful man who may inspire a movie character or two, it’s tough to discern much of a connection between his voice and the one Hardy eventually came up with for Bane. Bane is, of course, disguised in The Dark Knight Rises, which alters the timbre of his voice and makes it more muffled. Hardy and Dark Knight Rises director Christopher Nolan did “play around” with the voice, as Hardy stated in his Wired interview. Hardy also makes a joke about people “loving” his Bane voice, although many people dislike what he did with the character’s voice in the film.

On October 1, Marvel’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage will be released. The film also includes Michelle Williams as Eddie’s ex-fiancee Anne Weying and Reid Scott as her new paramour, in addition to Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock/Venom. Cletus Kasady/Carnage will be played by Woody Harrelson, while Frances Barrison/Shriek will be played by Naomie Harris.