Tom Hardy Proves His Rap Chops on Czarface’s Latest Cinematic Track

If you're still treating Hardy's rap bag like a Hollywood vanity project, you're about a decade behind the actual story.

A Four-Part Stack With a Hollywood Closer

The cut comes off the freshly released album Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer, the latest entry in a partnership that stretches back to 2021. Czarface is the trio of 7L, Esoteric, and Wu-Tang's Inspectah Deck — a respected underground-meets-Brooklyn veteran crew with their own mythology and discography. They've been letting Hardy loose on the mic since the Venom: Let There Be Carnage soundtrack era, and the "actor dabbling in rap" framing is officially expired. Hardy is a recurring voice inside this operation, and on "Raw Forever" the lineup runs Busta Rhymes, Method Man, and EL-O passing the baton before Frankie Pulitzer — Hardy — takes his run somewhere around the 2:50 mark. A second Hardy cut, "Knull & Void," references the big bad from Venom: The Last Dance and Marvel's King in Black arc, and there's a separate "Frankie" video that gives him center stage.

The Pen Game Is Pure Cinema

This is where reference culture eats. Hardy opens his verse with "With the raps we go to bat like Jim Gordon," tips a cap to Martin Scorsese, name-drops Frank Pierce from Nic Cage's Bringing Out the Dead, calls himself "something of a scientist" like Willem Dafoe, then declares he's "Goblin up crumbs." He drops a fleeting nod to Dog Day Afternoon, hits DC's war hero Sgt. Rock, and closes with "Doctor Doom, how I'm the 'victor' of the scripture" — a line whose shelf life depends entirely on which Marvel regime you ask. The video pairs the "rip you out your costume" bar with a Batman Halloween mask shot, because of course it does. Per A.V. Club's read, the lyricism leans "especially nerdy," and Hardy's bars are doing exactly what good pen game does — earning the references through cadence rather than coasting on name-drops.

Hardy's Arc — and Your Move

Here's where the framing flips for me. This isn't a press-tour gimmick or a quarantine hobby. Before Hardy broke out with Black Hawk Down and Band of Brothers in 2001, he was recording with childhood friend Edward Tracy under the name Tommy No 1 + Eddie Too Tall, cutting a 1999 mixtape called Falling On Your Arse that quietly surfaced online in 2018. The rap bag has been in the trunk for over two decades; Czarface is just the version where it got a proper release vehicle. Locking in with a crew that respects the pen, earning a slot alongside Busta Rhymes and Method Man without the whole thing reading like stunt casting — that's cultural cachet the long way, and it's exactly the lane Hollywood usually can't navigate.

Practically: stream the "Raw Forever" video first — it's the visually loaded one with all the comic-book and film deep cuts in frame. Then hit "Knull & Void" for the full Venom-era Hardy showcase and work through the Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer tracklist if the cadence locks for you. The Tommy No 1 + Eddie Too Tall material from '99 is worth a session too, just to trace where the flow started. And if you're serious about catching every frame of Hardy's verse, don't try it on a phone screen — this is reference-dense, visually stacked content. If your setup needs an upgrade, swapping to a compact projector with Google TV and Netflix baked in turns a two-minute Hardy verse into a proper screening.