Tom Hardy Steps Fully Into Rap With Czarface on New Full-Length Album

Tom Hardy has spent years orbiting Czarface’s comic book-obsessed rap world. On Friday, he stepped into it completely. Under the alias Frankie Pulitzer, Hardy appears across the full length of Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer, a 15-track album with the group built around Inspectah Deck and producers 7L & Esoteric.

The record is not a one-off celebrity feature. Hardy first appeared with Czarface on music tied to Venom: Let There Be Carnage, then resurfaced on 2024’s “Knull & Void” with Method Man. This project expands that relationship into a full-length, with Busta Rhymes, El-P, and Kendra Morris also on the tracklist. The references lean heavily into comic-book and film territory — Green Goblin, Doctor Doom, Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead — but the most precise moment arrives on “Grim-Visaged War.” At the 1:33 mark, Hardy delivers Shakespeare’s “Now is the winter of our discontent” in the half-muffled cadence he used as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.

The performance would read as a gimmick if Hardy’s rap history didn’t predate his acting career. He pursued a record deal as a teenager in the late ’90s, recording an unreleased project under the name Tommy No. 1 with producer Eddie Too Tall. Those sessions eventually surfaced online in 2018. Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer gives that earlier ambition a legitimate outlet, pairing Hardy with a group whose aesthetic leaves room for exactly this kind of genre-blurring.