(Note: The only movie that was not included in our study was the 2007 micro-budget film The Inheritance it has apparently been scrubbed from existence, perhaps by Tom Hardy himself, possibly because the movie shows too much of his face.) To quantify Hardy’s face obscuring, The Ringer-in what may or may not be a human rights violation-had three interns (myself included) watch every single one of Tom Hardy’s credited theatrical releases to figure out how much, to the second, Tom Hardy’s face has been obscured relative to his total time on screen. And so now feels like the perfect time to truly study Tom Hardy’s face-obscuring tactics, to get to the bottom of this with some real, hard science. It’s long been a joke that Tom Hardy is only taking roles that allow him to hide his objectively beautiful face, but lately that feels less like a gag and more like a statement of fact.

And, this summer, ahead of the release of Venom, in which Hardy plays Eddie Brock, basically all the movie’s promotional material had half of Hardy’s face obscured by the alien symbiote.

In Hardy’s past four most prominent feature-film roles, his face is mostly covered in a variety of ways-by a crustacean-looking inhaler thing, that thing that looked like Hell’s version of orthodontic headgear, or an aviator’s face mask. Now that we’ve established Hardy’s handsomeness as a baseline of fact, I think it’s fair to ask: Why the hell does Tom Hardy keep covering up his face? I mean, look at this guy! Tom Hardy looks like if Charlie Hunnam and Ben McKenzie had a baby a muscular, English-Irish baby who can wear the hell out of a sherpa-lined coat. He has that “rugged man with a heart of gold” thing going on.

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