"Warrior"'s Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton Take the Piss Out of Each Other

In Warrior, Tom Hardy (Inception, Bronson) and Joel Edgerton (Animal Kingdom, The Thing) play a pair of estranged brothers and mixed martial arts contenders in a drama that offers a great excuse to ogle the two stars’ bulked up frames as they get all sweaty and grapple with each other in a cage. Not bad, as entertainment goes.

But the two actors, who hit San Diego Comic-Con to promote the film, were quick to point out that the experience of making Warrior didn’t make them better fighters.

“You know that we trained because now we know even less about fighting than we did when we started,” Hardy said. “You don’t go swaggering, because it will come home to roost. It’s normally the quietest guy in the room. You learn things like, if I can hear my own voice in a bar fight, I’m just about to get knocked out.”

Edgerton, for his part, wholeheartedly agreed. “Any one of you guys could beat me up right now,” he said.

Warrior was originally set to come out last year, but according to the stars, some additional editing time and an unfortunate coincidence led to it being delayed. “As they got closer to any kind of finished form of the movie, this film called The Fighter came out — a little family drama that centers around a bit of fighting,” Edgerton explained. “They’re completely different movies, but on a trailer or on paper, the supposition is they’re the same thing.”

Hardy put it more succinctly: “Two brothers fight,” he said. “But Christian Bale obviously is going to win an Oscar, so let’s not put ours out now.”

Hardy actually filmed Warrior before joining Christopher Nolan’s Inception, though the sci-fi blockbuster was released a year ago. “It was like putting on a pair of slippers and a robe and, like, rubbing myself in lavender oils,” Hardy said of the transition. “Having everything done for me, it was heaven, to be honest. I had a wire instead of having to leap over things, and no one was trying to hit me in the face. Heaven.”

With Warrior long in the can, the two men are thinking more about their next projects. Hardy is famously taking on Bale’s Batman as the musclebound Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, a project he “can’t talk about at all,” he was sad to say. And Edgerton is heading back to his native Australia to star alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Carrie Mulligan in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby — the mere mention of which gave Hardy another opportunity to razz his co-star.

“In 3-D!” he boasted, interrupting Edgerton with a laugh. (Luhrmann is actually shooting the film in 3-D.) Happy to play along, Edgerton added, “Yeah, just imagine this coming at you,” motioning to his face.

And Hardy confirmed that his update on Mad Max was still set to happen, “but it might not be in Australia now,” he said. “Baz Luhrmann’s got his 3-D cameras all over the place down there, and we can’t move for polo horses and billiards, and people in plus-fours and long-johns.”

Warrior hits theaters in September