In a poll conducted by Preply about two years ago, Tom Hardy secured his spot as the hardest-to-understand actor, placing above other such notable names as Sofia Vergara and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Of course, anyone who's seen a Tom Hardy movie probably doesn't need a poll to tell them what their own two ears can hear. Two decades into his career, audiences inherently understand that masking his voice with a wild accent is simply part of the Tom Hardy experience.

In a certain sense, it can't be easy being Tom Hardy. After all, he's a method actor trapped inside the body of a gorgeous leading man. While he could no doubt alter his physical appearance in each new film, he realized it's far simpler (if not more effective) to mask his voice instead. Whether his tongue is wrestling with a Cockney accent, finding its way around an American one, or inventing the speaking patterns of a symbiote out of whole cloth, each new Tom Hardy performance is as unique as a snowflake, and it's all thanks to the accents.

10 The Bikeriders Sees Hardy Combining a Biker Aesthetic with the Sounds of a Looney Tune

What better place to start than with Tom Hardy's most recent invention? In Jeff Nichols's newest film, The Bikeriders, Hardy plays Johnny, the ringleader of the Vandals Motorcycle gang, a fictionalized version of the Outlaws Motorcycle gang, the oldest outlaw biker club in the world. For this role, Hardy is, theoretically, supposed to be donning an old-school Chicagoan accent, but in practice, it sounds like it's turned into something else entirely.

When speaking with Variety about his dialect choices for The Bikeriders, Tom Hardy told the outlet that he chose the sound of his voice to stand in stark contrast to the sexiness of the rest of the film's aesthetic. To highlight how much of a tragic clown Johnny is, Hardy even admitted to modeling his speaking patterns in the movie after the legendary cartoon character Bugs Bunny.

9 Inception Is Hardy at His Most Lyrical

Even though No Time To Die came out three years ago, we still don't know who the next James Bond will be. There was a point when Tom Hardy would have been in the running to pick up Bond's Walter-PPK next, but considering the stage of his career he's in now, that probably won't happen. Instead, fans will have to settle for other roles in which Hardy adopts a suave and sophisticated English accent, and there's no better example of this than in Christopher Nolan's Inception​​​.

Starring as the master forger, Eames, Tom Hardy's screen time is limited in Inception, but he makes the most of it by radiating endless amounts of charm. He speaks so smoothly in this film that it's honestly hard to believe the same vocal cords that produced the infamous line, "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling," would soon be followed up by the indecipherable utterances of Bane just two years later.

8 Dunkirk Sees Tom Hardy's Voice Thematically Integrated

Few actors love to obscure their faces more often than Tom Hardy, even when the film doesn't necessarily demand it, like when he played the British Royal Air Force pilot Farrier in Dunkirk. While protecting the Allied troops evacuating from France with the help of his fighter plane, Farrier speaks the vast majority of his lines through the confines of his flight helmet.

In a certain sense, Dunkirk feels like the movie Tom Hardy (and Christopher Nolan) had been working towards throughout their entire partnership. It relies almost solely on prioritizing action and tension over plot or dialogue. As such, understanding every word from Farrier's mouth would have been unnecessary and contrary to what the film aimed to achieve.

7 Child 44 Sees Hardy As a Russian by Way of Sesame Street

If there's one accent every actor relishes performing, it's a Russian one, which is why it's genuinely shocking to discover that Tom Hardy has only ever attempted it once in his career in the film Child 44. Of all the films on this list, Child 44 is the one audiences are likely to know the least about, and for good reason. Not only was the film a complete box office dud, it was trashed by critics and helmed by the same director responsible for the tragedy that became Morbius.

Starring as a Soviet agent named Leo Demidov, Tom Hardy prepared for Child 44 by watching copious amounts of The Count on Sesame Street (no, really). One critic described the result as sounding like "barks and gulps like a demented sea lion." As inauthentic as Hardy's accent sounds in this film (and it does), there's no denying that if the surrounding movie had been a bit better, the voice was just hammy enough to work.

6 ​​Capone Is Hardy's Most Off-The-Rails Accent

British actors adopting American accents in film is a fine tradition that, at this point, goes back almost a century. As such, Tom Hardy is decidedly no stranger to trying it out for himself, and he absolutely relished the opportunity to adopt a form of the classical New Yorker accent when assuming the title role in Capone. Starring as the Italian American gangster at the tail-end of his life when he was battling dementia, Hardy's voice sounds as broken, battered, and close to death as the monolithic mob boss in a film directed by the mastermind behind the Fantastic Four reboot debacle, Josh Trank.

Since little to no recordings of Al Capone's voice exist, Tom Hardy had free rein to reinvent the man's voice as he saw fit and was said to (once again) pattern his vocal stylings after Bugs Bunny. While that might have more to do with how frequently Capone is chomping down on carrots throughout the film than the actual sound of his voice, there's no denying that Hardy's vocal utterances sound like an intoxicated frog trying desperately to be understood.

5 The Revenant Is Hardy at His Most Indecipherable

If one were looking for reasons why Tom Hardy loves masking his voice so much, it's probably because one of the first times he went full-blown indecipherable was when he was nominated for an Oscar for his work in The Revenant. Starring as the ignoble fur trader, John S. Fitzgerald, he leaves Leonardo DiCaprio's Hugh Glass behind following a bear attack and even murders Glass's son.

If there's one thing about The Revenant that audiences tend to remember (outside of DiCpario getting mauled by a computer-generated bear), it's Tom Hardy's accent. Harsh, unintelligible, and impossible to place, every monologue Hardy has in the film makes it harder and harder for the audience to decipher who (or what) he's trying to sound like. Even still, there's no denying how enthralling the performance is, and hopefully, Hardy won't remain without an Oscar win for too much longer.

4 Venom Sees Hardy Combine Funk with Monstrosity

Venom offers Tom Hardy the unique chance to voice two separate characters. As the symbiote's host (and native New Yorker), Eddie Brock, Hardy employs a rather run-of-the-mill Big Apple accent, even though he is a journalist based in San Francisco. While most of what Eddie has to say in the film is easily understood, there are the odd occurrences of slurred words and outbursts as he wrestles with the alien parasite trapped inside his body, best exemplified in the infamous lobster tank scene.

When Eddie Brock dons the black-and-white goop of his alien symbiote and becomes Venom, Tom Hardy's vocal performance is unleashed. Every syllable sounds like it's being shouted from the rooftops and locked in ALL-CAPS. According to Hardy, he styled this performance after an amalgamation of performers, including Busty Rhymes, Method Man, Redman, James Brown, and Richard Burton. That's such an eclectic list that patterning his accent after Bugs Bunny suddenly doesn't seem as weird as it once did. Unfortunately, we'll only be blessed with this performance one last time, so enjoy it while it lasts.

3 Peaky Blinders Is Hardy At His Close-Captioned Best

Considering his roles, there's certainly an argument to be made that Tom Hardy feels the most comfortable playing rugged characters who grew up rough on the streets. Take, for instance, his role as the Jewish gangster Alfie Solomons on the hit television series Peaky Blinders. Not only does Hardy serve as an intriguing adversary to Cillian Murphy's Tommy Shelby, but he is, of course, nearly impossible to understand.

Talking in a Cockney accent that sounds like it's been nitro-fueled with a local anesthetic, Hardy's performance practically requires the audience to turn on the subtitles to decipher Peaky Blinder's plot whenever he's on-screen (and yes, that goes for the English-speaking audience as well). It doesn't particularly help that Solomons is supposed to be a brute, but his accent in this series is so assorted that even British people have problems placing it. Thankfully, we'll all get another chance when Hardy appears in the upcoming feature film conclusion to the series.

2 Bronson Is Hardy's Most Authentic Accent

Peaky Blinders might have offered Tom Hardy's Cockney accent at its most incomprehensible, but Bronson presented that same accent at its finest. Hardy, who stars as the infamous career criminal Charles Bronson, is mesmerizing, commanding every moment of the film with his demanding physical presence and, of course, his many mumbled monologues.

As undeniably great as Tom Hardy is in Bronson, the role earned him the only seal of approval he ever needed from Charles Bronson himself. After seeing the film, the notorious prisoner reached out through the press to offer his whole-hearted endorsement. As a result, Tom Hardy was subsequently banned from ever visiting Bronson in prison again after stopping by frequently during pre-production to get his accent just right.

1 The Dark Knight Rises Is Hardy Performing the Wildest Accent in the History of Mainstream Cinema

Now we've come to it: the accent that launched a thousand memes. From the opening moments of The Dark Knight Rises, Tom Hardy's performance as Bane is not only physically imposing, it's off-putting. No, not because of how ruthlessly he disposes of his enemies, but because he's employing the single wildest accent in the history of movies.

Hardy's performance was so incomprehensible during early screenings of The Dark Knight Rises prologue sequence that Christopher Nolan was forced to clean up the audio. Not that that decision impacted Tom Hardy's iconic performance one iota. As much as The Dark Knight Rises might be the black sheep of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, no other entry can claim an accent so iconic that even now, more than ten years later, the memes and TikToks are still going strong. As hard as it might be to believe (with so many choices), Bane's accent is the wildest of Tom Hardy's entire career.