Tom Hardy Made a Rap Album: The Timeline Checks Out

There is a version of this story that is a joke, and there is a version that is completely logical, and the longer you sit with it the more you realise they are the same version. Tom Hardy — Oscar-nominated actor, certified unhinged in the best possible way, the man who played both Bane and Venom with what can only be described as *commitment* — has recorded a rap album under the persona Frankie Pulitzer, also known as Face Puller. The single is called "Brothers Grimm." This is real. None of this has been fabricated.

The instinct is to laugh, but then you remember that Hardy has always existed slightly outside the system of celebrity legibility — the kind of performer who shows up to press tours and says something that makes everyone in the room quietly recalibrate. He is not method, he is something past method. So honestly? A rap alter-ego named Face Puller is not the betrayal of his brand. It *is* his brand. The man contains multitudes and most of them are slightly feral.

Meanwhile, the week's other piece of news that deserves more than a passing scroll: Lee Cronin's *The Mummy* is arriving on HBO Max in July, completing its journey from theatrical release to streaming in under three months — which is the current pace of everything and says more about the theatrical window than any industry thinkpiece has managed to. Cronin directed *Evil Dead Rise*, which earned its reputation. Whether he can do something genuinely unsettling with a mythology that Universal has historically treated as a franchise ATM rather than a horror property is the actual question. The original 1999 version was fun. The 2017 Tom Cruise reboot was a disaster so spectacular it killed the Dark Universe before it started. The bar has been set on both ends of the spectrum.

And then there's Larry David, who cannot retire. Director Jeff Schaffer, in an interview about the new *Life, Larry* project, offered a description of his subject that I will not repeat here because you have already read the headline and you know what it is, and it is the most accurate thing anyone has said about creative compulsion this year. Larry David does not work because he needs to. He works because the alternative is silence, and silence is where he would have to sit with himself. That's not a joke. That's the whole theory.

The devastating verdict this week belongs to Hardy, not for the album — but for the reminder that the most interesting people in any room are the ones who stopped caring which room they were in.