Tom Hardy and The Bikeriders Cast on the Danger, Power, and Beauty of Motorcycles
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At the junket for Jeff Nichols’ new drama The Bikeriders, hosted at The Bike Shed in Los Angeles, I get to ride on the back of a Harley through the streets of downtown L.A. and over the Sixth Street Bridge. With a professional driver doing all the actual work, I’m able to enjoy the air hitting my face, the way we’re able to move easily through traffic, unencumbered by the bulk of an automobile. It feels like… freedom.
“I’m sure every single article about motorcycles ever in the history of the world has the word freedom in it, but it’s true,” Norman Reedus tells me, the day after my ride. “It’s like you’re in your own little world and flying through the sky — and you can feel it.”
But for Tom Hardy, the question of whether motorcycles mean freedom isn’t as easy to answer. “I think anything that allows you choice gives you a certain element of freedom,” he says. “So do motorcycles mean freedom? I think they’re symbolic in some aspect of that. But they’re also a responsibility, and there’s a distinct lack of freedom [in being] responsible. You have to be extremely responsible on a vehicle like a motorbike — especially if you want to live.”
That dichotomy between the freedom of motorcycles and their real dangers is a big part of The Bikeriders, which Nichols was inspired to write and direct after coming across the book of the same name. In Danny Lyon’s photographs and interviews with the members of motorcycle gangs of the 1960s, Nichols found “a full portrait of this subculture. And so, as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, he gave me everything I needed to show the breadth of the human beings involved in this very particular outsider group.”
The Bikeriders begins in the 1960s, as a group of motorcycle enthusiasts, led by Johnny (Hardy), form the Vandals MC — a group which begins initially as a way for men to find a sense of community, before darker forces transform the gang into a more violent operation. Caught up in the Vandals are younger member Benny (Austin Butler) and his wife Kathy (Jodie Comer), whose relationship is complicated by Johnny’s hold on Benny — and Benny’s own passion for riding.
“All my films have had to do with masculinity, usually father-son relationships, ’cause that’s kind of what I’m in the middle of. But this film seemed to tackle it on a broader spectrum, definitely a more American spectrum, the idea of masculinity in all of its prose and all of its cons,” Nichols says.
This inspired him to lean heavily on a real woman named Kathy, whose interviews in Lyon’s book were “the most fascinating” to Nichols. As played by Jodie Comer, Kathy serves as the film’s narrator, which allowed Nichols to “enter this extremely masculine world with a little bit more delicate hand.”
As that delicate hand, Comer says that, “I just love that at the center [of this group], there was this kind of woman who was able to see things from a very different perspective. And you know, very luckily Danny Lyon asked her what she thought and she had an awful lot to say.”
Kathy’s perspective, according to Comer, brings the insight that “these men want to belong to something — they want community and they find it in this space, which actually starts off very innocently and through the shared love of something, and then over time shifts and becomes quite violent. So you can see that kind of longing within them for that. But it’s how it manifests that becomes tricky.”
Meanwhile, Hardy says he never thought about the film as an exploration of masculinity. Though, he notes with a laugh, “there are a lot of men in it.”
Hardy did have a lot to say about the potential dangers of riding, something which the film does explore in earnest. “It’s not unusual or uncommon within the riding community to lose people from user error or bike errors, you know? That’s a fundamental prerequisite to getting involved with anything that has more power than you do,” he says. “You could say the same about rivers, you could say the same about climbing. You could say the same about weapons.”
Nichols says that as a director, “the scariest days on set were when we had actors riding these motorcycles. I think people are so used to seeing, you know, Jason Bourne movies and stuff with giant motorcycle chases, that they’ll probably look at the motorcycle scenes in our film and not necessarily be impressed. But what they’re looking at are very, very famous people, without helmets, on very, very old bikes, riding at speed on highways. It was very stressful.”
Fortunately, Nichols says, “we had actors that were committed enough to work hard enough to get up to speed so they could do that. And it’s a really important part of this film because motorcycle riding, it holds attention. If you look at a motorcycle, it’s beautiful. You want to get on it, you want to ride it, there’s a lot of freedom associated with it. It can also kill you. So there’s this complexity in it, and it’s representative of the complexity in this film. People are attracted to things that are quite dangerous for them. That’s human nature.”
Director Jeff Nichols and Austin Butler behind the scenes of The Bikeriders, courtesy of Focus Features
Austin Butler was banned by his mother from riding motorcycles at a young age after his older sister got into an accident — however, years later, “my dad and I would sneak out and ride motorcycles together. I’ve known people who’ve lost their lives and I’ve known people who’ve lost limbs and so that is one of the inherent dangers. But on the flip side of that, you know what it feels like for your own life to be in your hands. You are responsible for your own wellbeing in that moment, or if you have somebody on the back, for both of you. And there’s something really empowering about that as well. The danger ends up making you feel incredibly present.”
Says Reedus, “It’s no joke that if you drive a motorcycle poorly, you might get hurt. Motorcycles are dangerous, but, you know, don’t drive like a jerk, I guess.”
The Walking Dead star is nearly unrecognizable in the film thanks to his shaggy hair and gnarled teeth — the prosthetics, he says, were made by The Walking Dead zombie effects maestro Greg Nicotero and his team, an idea Reedus came up with after a conversation with his director. “I said, ‘You got a lot of good-looking guys in this movie.’ And [Nichols] goes, ‘Yeah.’ And I said, ‘Can I try something and go in the opposite direction?’ And he went, ‘Yeah.'”
Like many of the other actors featured in the project, Reedus wanted to be involved with the film because he feels passionately about motorcycles (if you hadn’t already guessed, based on the fact that he’s hosted six seasons of Ride With Norman Reedus, a show in which he and friends explore the world on bikes).
“It was the first thing that I had that was like my thing,” Reedus says, bringing us back to all the positive emotions riding inspires in him. “I could get lost in it, and then I met other people who felt the same way about it. It’s different when you go through a town and you can smell the town and feel the town on your face. It’s different than being in a car with air conditioning and the radio on. It’s a different world.”
The Bikeriders is in theaters now.
Tom Hardy and The Bikeriders Cast on the Danger, Power, and Beauty of Motorcycles
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