Tom Hardy: Hollywood hardman or lip-syncing, dog-loving Myspacer?

It is hard to remain dignified in the millennial age. If you were born after 1988 it’s likely just a matter of time before someone launches an online attack on you. Not anonymous trolling or hacking — instead, your downfall will come when a mate likes a Facebook photo of you from 2009 and sends it to the top of the newsfeed.

You are bug-eyed, sweaty, and podgier than you realised, and your arm is draped around someone you haven’t spoken to in five years but who is also tagged in the photo. Some of their friends are liking it too. Obviously, you should have deleted the “predrinks & Sacha’s houseparty!!!!!!” album.

Good news: it happens to celebrities too. Like you, celebrities have also embarrassed themselves on the internet. They have uploaded terrible photos and written drunk posts on Facebook walls and almost bought a micropig for £700 after a night out because it seemed funny at the time.

If you really need solace in your sorrow, google Tom Hardy.

Hardy, 37, is a Hollywood hard man who has starred in Band of Brothers, depicted notorious criminal Charles Bronson, played the villain Bane in the Dark Knight Rises and was the eponymous nutter in Mad Max: Fury Road. He is currently publicising his latest film, Legend, a big-budget gangland biopic in which he plays both Kray twins, which will be released next week. He thrills critics. But he also has a hilarious internet footprint that just won’t die. Tom Hardy is the millennial Everyman.

Most recently it was the Dubsmash videos. Dubsmash users upload short videos of themselves lipsynching to popular music. Hardy is a Dubsmash enthusiast — putting in animated performances to the Bee Gees (Staying Alive, obvs), Queen (Bohemian Rhapsody — of course), Whitney’s I Will Always Love You (everyone’s considered it at karaoke) and 50 Cent’s P.I.M.P (few have considered it at karaoke). He ropes a pal in for Hard Knock Life and a Bobby Shmurda hit. His lipsynching is faultless on Silverado by Action Bronson.

Hardy dresses up too, though admittedly the costumes lack a coherent link to the artist he’s imitating — perhaps that would be a derivative nod too far. For the Bee Gees he is dressed like a terrorist — sunglasses, a thick scarf and wielding a (presumably fake) machine gun.

For his turn as Mercury, he wears sunglasses and a leather (pleather?) glove, to which your eyes are drawn during the overblown fist clenches that he pulls out for the crescendos. During I Will Always Love You there’s a different prop centre- stage — the white plastic smoke detector in the background (great location scouting).

When playing 50 Cent he really nails the droopy-eyed rapper swagger — you could argue he overdoes it on the hat pop but if you’ve got it, flaunt it until viewers realise they’ve watched the clip 14 times.

Partly, the humiliations keep resurfacing because Hardy is working prolifically. And while obviously the Krays wouldn’t have lipsynched to Whitney if you paid them in the organs of their enemies, instead of undermining him, Hardy’s dweeby internet persona just makes him seem more real.

The MySpace profile is a definitive case in point. Hardy’s resurfaced recently and was hurriedly deleted, though not before its greatest moments were captured for posterity.

The profile is thought to be from around 2008, when Hardy was a 30-year-old actor preparing for the Charles Bronson biopic, Bronson.

It’s sort of hard to know where to begin with it, though you could try the “About Me” section — it’s too long to quote in full but there are standout lines. For example, “if you suck you suck” — an axiom of the calibre you find on T-shirts at Camden Market. “I pray I don’t get caught up ‘living the dream’” is a lesson to us all, while “I have a head like a disco ball” is winningly self-deprecating. “The mind is like a parachute — it will only work when it is opened” gives us all something to think about.

He signs off his (manifesto?) with “what a load of self-satisfied smug and charmless tatter x” — showing he’s the one having the biggest laugh of all. He registers his location as “L.O.N.D.O.N”, his height as 0’1” and his body type as “bodybuilder”. BuzzFeed turned quotes from the About Me section into “motivational posters”, overlaying lines (like that one about the disco ball) onto haunting mountain vistas and beautiful sunrises.

Then there are the pictures. The clear winner is one of him in a tatty baseball cap, (barely) wearing what looks like some kind of sports-not-luxe gilet and joggers, holding the phone above him with one hand, while sticking the other one we know not where. He has a duck face.

There is another of him posing against the door frame of an uninspiring bathroom wearing some loose Y-fronts. He snapped a blurry selfie while cooking, the flash catching the tinfoil just so (“I’m cooking a turkey yo”). There is another of Hardy dressed up as a security guard hanging out in a normcore kitchen.

Even further back in the annals of humiliation there was the time when Hardy won The Big Breakfast’s modelling competition back in the heady days of 1998, despite the fact that he is wearing an alice band, like Gossip Girl’s Blair Waldorf, or Princess Diana. There is a video of him catwalking, then holding aloft his prize on YouTube (a toolbox — don’t you miss the Nineties?). It has been viewed more than 175,000 times.

Where Hardy goes the fans follow — homage sites have popped up, drowning the internet with yet more Hardy digital real estate. There’s @tomhardyholdingdogs, an Instagram account with 8,500 followers. The pictures show Hardy in various poses with numerous different dogs, including his own (he has two). Then there is F*ck Yeah Tom Hardy, where his most ardent fans upload their favourite pictures of the actor.

Of course, back in the real world, Hardy is a real person rather than an extended meme. He is married to actress Charlotte Riley — the pair met on the set of Wuthering Heights in 2009 (obviously, he played Heathcliff; she played Cathy), and the couple live in London. He was previously married to Sarah Ward but the couple divorced in 2004, and he has a son, Louis Thompson, with another previous partner.

His father is novelist and comedy writer Edward “Chips” Hardy, and the pair have written a television series, Taboo, based on a short story that Chips wrote. It is set in 1813 and follows a “rogue adventurer who returns from Africa with 14 ill-gotten diamonds to seek vengeance after the death of his father. Refusing to sell the family business to the East India Company, he sets out to build his own trade and shipping empire and finds himself playing a very dangerous game.”

It will air on FX in 2016 — by which point Hardy might have Dubsmashed the Bad Blood video and roped in some famous mates in homage to T-Swift. Fingers crossed.

Follow Pheobe on Twitter: @phoebeluckhurst