Anna Daniels
Tom Hardy is known for giving his characters bizarre, hard-to-understand accents, and his turn in Capone is no exception. Throughout the film, Capone speaks in a low, raspy voice that sounds kind of like a very, very drunk Donald Duck.
It’s impossible to tell how accurate the impersonation is. As Trank notes, no vocal recordings of the actual Capone’s voice survive, meaning the filmmaker and the actor had to improvise. He tells Looper, “Instead, I tried to look for what recordings exist of somebody who is from that neighborhood, born around the same time.”
“I landed on Jimmy Durante. The funny singer, with the funny voice, and the big nose,” Trank continues. Yes, that’s kind of a surprising choice. While Al Capone was the ruthless leader of a sprawling criminal syndicate, Durante was a vaudeville and Broadway star known for novelty songs like “Inka Dinka Doo” and comedic appearances in movies and, later, television shows.
There’s a method to Trank and Hardy’s madness, though. Like Capone, Durante was “was Italian, he’s from Park Slope, Brooklyn, and was pretty much born within five years of when Al Capone was born,” Trank says. Thus, “that was a guide for what the accent would actually sound like.” (Capone is usually associated with Chicago, but he was actually born and raised in Brooklyn — he only moved west when asked by his boss, Johnny “The Fox” Torrio.)
Obviously, Durante was only a starting point, and Trank and Hardy worked together to make sure that Capone’s voice stood alone. “It was very much a collaboration that started with the character in the script, and then just naturally took on a life of its own when the cameras were rolling,” Trank says. Still, whatever you think of the results, you can’t deny that their work paid off. Hardy’s Capone is a one-of-a-kind character, and not one you’re likely to forget any time soon.
Capone, which is distributed by Vertical Entertainment, is available to stream on all major video-on-demand services.
Written by: Looper
