While those of us in the US were stuffing ourselves with turkey yesterday, the citizens in the UK were fortunate enough to be treated to the release of a special edition of Empire magazine featuring an exclusive interview with director Christopher Nolan and Tom Hardy. They talked at length about the tone of the movie, Batman’s state of mind and character of Bane and his role in the final installment of Nolan’s ‘Batman’ trilogy, ‘The Dark Knight Rises.’

A couple days ago we reported on some of Nolan’s comments about the storyline of the film and shared some tidbits about Bane from the same article. Today we have more information from that interview. Here’s what Hardy had to say about Batman’s nemisis:

“(Bane’s) brutal, brutal. He’s expedient delivery of brutality. And you know, he’s a big dude. He’s a big dude who’s incredibly clinical, in the fact that he has a result-based and orientated fighting style. The result is clear. “Do you know what I mean? It’s: f**k off and die. Quicker. Quicker. Everything is thought out way before. He’s hit you, he’s already hit somebody else. It’s not about fighting. It’s just about carnage with Bane. He’s a smashing machine. He’s a wrecking ball. The style is heavy-handed, heavy-footed, it’s nasty. Anything from small joint manipulation to crushing skulls, crushing rib cages, stamping on shins and knees and necks and collarbones and snapping heads off and tearing his fists through chests, ripping out spinal columns. It’s anything he can get away with. He is a terrorist in his mentality as well as brutal action. So he’s horrible. A really horrible piece of work.”

This brutality meant that there would be a lot of fight scenes which Hardy admits was overwhelming:

“When you’re training in a rehearsal room you go, ‘Okay, I have a contact with seven people. This guy I chin, this one I slip and I punch, this one I pick up and suplex, this guy I kick in the face, and this one, he stops a hammer with his head. And then I meet Batman.’ That’s all alright in a rehearsal room, but then you add 1,000 people that are all dressed the same as the seven you’re supposed to hit — ’cause they’re all police officers — and I don’t know where my police officers are. But the stuntmaster’s like, ‘Don’t worry. They will find you.’”

The physicality and Bane’s dynamic persona was an important aspect as to why Nolan chose this particular villain for the movie:

“… in terms of finishing our story and increasing its scope, we were trying to craft an epic, so the physicality of the film became very important. Bane’s a very different kind of villain than Batman has faced before in our films. He’s a great sort of movie monster, but with an incredible brain, and that was a side of him that hadn’t been tapped before. Because the stories from the comics are very epic and very evocative — very much in the way that Bruce Wayne’s origin story is epic and evocative. We were looking to really parallel that with our choice of villain. So he is a worthy adversary. What Bane represents in the comics is the ultimate physical villain.”

And Nolan feels that casting Hardy in the role was an ultimate feat:

“He has this incredible disjunct between the expressiveness of the voice and the stillness of the movement of his body. He’s found a way to play a character who is enormous and powerful with a sort of calm to it, but also is able to be incredibly fast at times. Unpredictable. He just has a raw threat to him that’s extraordinary. It’s a very powerful thing when you see it come together, beyond what I had ever imagined. That’s what you get from working with great actors.”

What did Hardy think of working with Christian Bale’s Batman? He admits to being awe struck.

“He looks really intimidating! There’s a three-year-old in me that’s going, ‘Oh my God that’s Batman! That’s Batman and he’s going to hit me! But I love Batman!’ Then I look in the mirror. And I hit him back. Twice as hard.”

Filming on ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ were completed last week and the movie is now in post-production. As mentioned previously, a new 6 minute prologue trailer that will introduce Bane will be released on December 16 as a preview only at  70mm IMAX screens showing ‘Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.’ The full movie will be released on July 20, 2012.

After reading all about Bane, how excited are you about seeing Batman and Bane battle it out in this final film?