Tom: Um, it's more psychosomatic. If I panic then it's not easy and if I'm chilled then it's fine. It's got plenty of room
to breathe but if I'm a bit panicky doing something, or a bit too high up or whatever, then I'm going to, you know, gasp a bit more.
But once again I get used to the mask, I'm happy in it.
Empire: How would you define the fight style? Obviously you did Warrior before this... immediately before?
Tom: I did Inception after Warrior, then a play, The Long Red Road, with Philip Seymour Hoffman in Chicago. Then Tinker Tailor,
This Means War, then The Wettest County [now titled Lawless], then this. Warrior took a year to edit. Took a long time to edit.
Empire: So - the fighting style. How is it different to Warrior?
Tom: It is brutal and military. It's more military in many ways. MMA [Mixed Martial Arts] is very athletic. It's an athlete's sport.
And you've got your Krav Maga and what not from Bourne, the Bourne world. Very tight movement, very contained but aimed to kill. To kill,
do you know what I mean? And maim. Then you've got the Keysi lot that Batman does I suppose, which is a lot of elbow business. But Bane is
brutal. It's not about fighting. It's about just carnage with Bane.
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Which is different to [Warrior's] Tommy Conlon, who is in the eye of the storm when he's fighting. He has peace of mind. Until he meets his
brother and then it's all out of the window. He loses the fight because it implodes on him, you know? Whereas Bane's not that. Bane's a
superhero villain. So that's what the violence is there to imply, and the style is heavy handed, heavy footed.
Empire: Does it bother you that Bane's not so well known by the broader public? Obviously the comic-book fans will...
Tom: ...They'll go mental for it, yeah. I think one has to be aware that when you get involved in the Batman family, Batman is owned
by so many of the fans already. Everybody has a right to an opinion, and some of the opinions on Batman are very hardcore [laughs] about
how it should be done. Now for somebody like me who's a small, small part of a huge vehicle, who has been asked to play a character who has
great importance to a world which I've been largely incubated to, there's a certain pressure that comes with that. I respect this is how you
want to see your villain, or this is what you think this villain is, and granted, this is what this villain looks like. It's comic books. But
I'm also working for Chris Nolan. So I am going to have to trust my director as well to go and deliver the Bane that we're about to deliver
together, and I'm standing shoulder to shoulder
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