YAY TOM HARDY. I really, really want this fall and winter to be exciting for some of our favorite people. In the coming months, we should have a lot coming from Michael Fassbender, Tom Hiddleston, Lupita Nyong’o and of course, Tom Hardy. The Bloke has already started promoting Legend, where he plays two (twin) characters, Reggie and Ronnie Kray. The film actually has an early release in the UK next week, which is why Tom covers the new issue of Shortlist Magazine (sidenote: America won’t get Legend until October). While our Bloke is lovely and bloke-y in this piece, there really aren’t that many stand-out quotes, although Shortlist does note that Hardy will talk your ear off (at one point he says, “Sorry man, I can talk for f–king ever!”). Some highlights:

On playing twins: It’s “the hardest thing that I’ve ever done, technically… It is one of them situations. You get an actor to play two characters, and immediately, it’s pony. It’s gonna be rubbish. Just: no. It’s a bad idea.”

He talked his way into playing both characters: “I was like, ‘Well, I feel Ronnie.’ So which actor am I gonna give up Ronnie to, if I play Reggie? Errrrrggh…. I can’t have that. ’Cos that’s all the fun there! And Reggie’s so straight! But there was a moment when I could have come away just playing Reggie. We could have gone and found a superlative character actor to play Ronnie, and that would have been the best of everything.”

He doesn’t want to glamorize the Krays: “One has to approach these things thinking about the families of the victims who were involved in the other end of it. Before you find the heart to like somebody, you’ve gotta look at their track record as best as possible: the people who’ve been hurt, the bodies, the suffering, people who were bullied, who lived in terror, who lost significant parts of their lives in the wake of these two men. There’s a lot of sh*t to wade through. And a lot of people who do not, quite rightly, want to see anything to do with these two men. And if I were them, I wouldn’t want to be involved myself, but there’s also part of me that wants to know. That wants to get under the skin.”

But he still found a way to relate to them: “I think the first port of call is, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to do and say whatever you wanted to do and say in the world, regardless of the ramifications and the consequences?’ Ultimately, when I – we – go to the cinema or read a book or we go to escape, we respond to certain types of characters that go, ‘F*ck it: I’m gonna do whatever I want.’

[From Shortlist]

He also tells some stories about his body double, a New Zealander, and it sounds like they’re very close. The story about Tom wanting to play Ronnie – the muscle, the gay twin – is interesting too, because the director initially just wanted Tom for one part, Reggie. Anyway, what does it ever matter? Just look at this beautiful photo of The Bloke.

Ahead of playing both Kray twins in Legend, we spoke to the immaculate Tom Hardy http://t.co/sp72coSWdd pic.twitter.com/BDlkN1NHN8

— ShortList Magazine (@ShortList) September 2, 2015

Photos courtesy of Shortlist Magazine.