How Tension On The Revenant Set Turned Into A Wrestling Match With Tom Hardy

Alejandro G. Iñárritu's "The Revenant" may have earned Leonardo DiCaprio that long-coveted Academy Award, but as the simple act of watching the movie quickly proves, filming it was clearly never easy. Every day on the "Revenant" set was a race against time thanks to the challenges brought by the cold, unforgiving major locations the movie was filmed in – not to mention the carefully choreographed action and the age-old challenge of losing the light before capturing the perfect shot.

Hugh Glass' (DiCaprio) quest to survive back to civilization and find the killer of his son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), John S. Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), is such a deeply uncomfortable trip that it's no surprise that whispers about on-set discontent and tension were swirling before the movie even premiered. While it's true that filming the movie was an ordeal, the long-standing rumor about things escalating to a point where Hardy physically fought Iñárritu isn't quite true. And while the actor previously confirmed to Entertainment Weekly (via Vanity Fair) that the two did very much have a small match of sorts, the key difference is that it was a brief bout of wrestling to release tension instead of a real, white-knuckled fight.

Hardy was keenly aware that the mood on "The Revenant" set did indeed require need to be lightened, and the brief moment of actor-director wrestling was his release valve of choice. As he told the story in the EW interview: 

"When things get a bit too serious, I go, 'Why don't we have a cuddle in front of all these people here?' It ends with both of us falling down in the snow. I think that's a good thing. If I'm the naughty boy for doing that, then I'd rather be the naughty boy and release that tension."

"The Revenant" is filled to the brim with the sort of realism that radiates extreme discomfort, including DiCaprio's famous bear carcass scene, which was more real than you'd think. Some crew members found the circumstances so difficult that they walked away from the production, and Iñárritu even had to address the swirling rumors about the movie's many difficulties well before its premiere. Amidst all this, it's fairly difficult to see Hardy as the "naughty boy" for trying to keep things comparatively light. Nor is it particularly surprising that the rumor mill took the brief, comparatively friendly tumble he described and promoted it into a full-blown fight.