Tom Hardy Wins Top Honors at UK Jiu-Jitsu Competition After Surprising Audience With Appearance

Tom Hardy has shown his fighting skills onscreen, but the 45-year-old actor can mix it up when the cameras aren’t rolling. As mentioned by PEOPLE, Hardy competed in a Jiu-Jitsu tournament in England over the weekend, which surprised all the fans in attendance. The Venom star entered the 2022 Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Open Championship at Oakgrove School and won the title. 

According to a representative of Ultimate Martial Arts, “Tom was a really nice guy” who “was very humble” and “happy to take time out for people to take photographers with him.” The person went on to say that “everyone” recognized Hardy at the competition. According to the Daily Mail, Hardy secretly arranged to participate in the tournament weeks beforehand.

“We found out he was coming probably a couple of weeks before,” event sponsor Sean Rosborough said. “He was brilliant. A lot of people were asking for photos, and coming up to him, and he had no problem with that at all. The mums were all over him. It didn’t bother him.” 

Hardy defeated all of his opponents before getting to his final foe, Andy Leatherland. He told the Daily Mail that he was thinking about entering another tournament before seeing Hardy’s name on the list. “I was contemplating the Milton Keynes tournament as it was very local. And then one morning — he goes by the name Edward Hardy — I saw that he’d actually signed up.”

Hardy is no stranger to winning martial arts tournaments. In August, Hardy won a gold medal at a charity competition in Wolverhampton called the REORG Open Jiu-Jitsu Championship. The Mad Max star won two golds overall — one in the gi category and one in the no-gi category in his belt and weight division. The tournament helped raise funds for military personnel veterans and emergency service workers.

Over the years, Hardy has starred in films where he plays a tough guy, including Inception, Dunkirk and The Revenant, which earned him an Oscar nomination. On the television side, Hardy starred in the Netflix Series Peaky Blinders and played the role of Alfie Solomons who is the leader of a Jewish gang in Camden Town. The next movie Hardy will star in is Havoc which also stars Forest Whitaker and Timothy Olyphant and will stream on Netflix.