Tom Hardy has finally addressed his controversial response to a reporter who questioned the actor's sexuality during a press conference at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) last Saturday for his film "Legend."
Hardy said in an interview on Thursday that journalist Graeme Coleman, who works for the LGBT publication Daily Xtra, phrased the question "inelegantly" and the "Mad Max" star felt the reporter's query was "humiliating."
"That really, really annoyed me," Hardy said, according to Entertainment Weekly. "It was just the inelegance of being asked in a room full of people. [...] Now I'm happy to have a conversation, a discussion, at a reasonable time about anything. I'm confident in my own sexuality, and I'm also confident in my own being and talking about any issue you want to talk about it. But there is a time and a place for that."
"I found it very humiliating for somebody to decide that on his dime and his time, to openly and inelegantly pursue a line of questioning which I could only sense at the moment - which was quite awkward - that it was zeroing in on a reaction from me that would become a topic of discussion that had nothing to do really, really to do with what was there," he added.
The actor then went on to state that he feels badly for the reporter, whom he believes had no malicious intent behind the question, yet he can't seem to shake the interaction
"I'm quite sensitive and I feel like I've let people down for something that I actually didn't ask for, for something that's important to a lot of people," he said. "Should I come out of the closet when I'm not in one? I ought to maybe come out of the closet, even though that's a lie, to do the right thing. Or, if I say no, then I'm homophobic? Bless him, he's young. But at the same time, it left me feeling like I have to do something about that. And it's like why? Whose business is it anyway and isn't that the point?"
The release date for Hardy's film "Legend" has been pushed back seven weeks and the gangster flick is now slated to hit theatres on Nov. 25, as HNGN previously reported.
