Bane Lets It Rip in Dark Knight Rises’ Menacing Prologue

Director Christopher Nolan repeats that winning strategy in The Dark Knight Rises, as revealed in Thursday night’s press screening here of the first six minutes of the highly anticipated follow-up. This time around, intense British actor Tom Hardy, playing Batman nemesis Bane, sparks his own “Holy crap!” moment about three minutes into an Abu Ghraib-inspired airplane hijacking from hell.

“I first saw Tom Hardy on an airplane in Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla,” Nolan told Wired.com in a chat following the screening of The Dark Knight Rises‘ powerful pre-credit prologue. “He can do anything he sets his mind to.”

If anybody stands a chance to sustain Joker-level ferocity, it’s Hardy. In Ritchie’s 2008 Brit gangster film, which persuaded Nolan to cast Hardy as nervy dream invader Eames in Inception, the 34-year-old actor played cockney thug Brutally Handsome Bob. That same year, Hardy ripped up the screen playing a devilish criminal locked up for years in solitary confinement in psychopath biopic Bronson (clip embedded below).