Tom Hardy has released a rap album under the alias Frankie Pulitzer.
The 48-year-old actor dropped “Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer” on Friday, a collaboration with underground hip-hop group Czarface — the duo 7L & Esoteric — and Wu-Tang Clan’s Inspectah Deck. The project marks a dramatic expansion of a musical passion Hardy has quietly nurtured since adolescence.
Fans flooded X with disbelief as news spread. “Tom Hardy and Inspectah Deck collab album is a sentence I never thought I would say,” one stunned listener wrote on the platform. Another commented, “Tom hardy really said method acting wasn’t enough.” A third remarked, “David Bowie may be gone but we still have Tom Hardy,” while a fourth chimed in, “bro really unlocked a secret rap persona.” One person gushed, “Frankie Pulitzer just confirmed what we already knew: Tom Hardy’s IMDb page is going to keep getting weirder in the best possible way.”
The album is dense with pop-culture references. In “Raw Forever,” Hardy raps, “I be somewhat of a scientist / like Willem Dafoe / If you know, then you know / Goblin up crumbs.” He continues, “Doctor Doom / how I’m the Victor / the Scripture.” The lyrics nod to Dafoe’s Green Goblin in 2002’s “Spider-Man” and to Marvel’s armored villain. A fan reacted to the cinematic references via X, writing, “MARVEL sipped through his brain like some sort of a symbiotic element… I appreciate that.”
Guest appearances include Busta Rhymes and Method Man. On “Grim-Visaged War,” Hardy delivers Shakespeare’s “Richard III” monologue in what listeners identified as the guttural cadence of Bane, the masked revolutionary he portrayed in 2012’s “The Dark Knight Rises.” The track fuses Elizabethan verse with the distorted vocal affectation that became one of his most recognizable screen performances.
The “MobLand” star has been candid about his rap origins. He once shared that he began rapping at the young age of “14 or 15.” In a 2011 interview, he confessed, “Because I come from a nice middle-class neighborhood, it was a very hard sell. And I wasn’t very good!” He added, “I’ve recorded loads of stuff but it’s never been released.”
Hardy follows other established actors who unveiled musical projects this year. Last month, Anthony Hopkins, 88, released “Life is a Dream,” a classical album of original compositions recorded with the Philharmonia Orchestra under conductor Gustavo Dudamel. “Music was my first desire, my first wish. I’ve been composing music all my life. Some of these pieces have lived with me for decades, and I still find myself returning to them,” Hopkins shared in a Facebook post.
Earlier in 2025, Nicole Kidman, 59, revealed she was studying to become a death doula following her mother Janelle Kidman’s death in September 2024. “As my mother was passing, she was lonely, and there was only so much the family could provide,” the “Big Little Lies” star explained to University of San Francisco students during the school’s Silk Speakers series. She continued, “[We] want[ed] to take care of her because my father, [Antony Kidman], wasn’t in the world anymore.” In her mother’s final days, Kidman wished that there were “these people in the world that were there to sit impartially and just provide solace and care.” She declared, “that’s one of the things I will be learning.”
Death doulas are “non-medical professionals” providing support to those “navigat[ing] death, loss, and mortality,” according to the International End-of-Life Doula Association.
Hardy’s album arrives without advance promotional campaign, preserving the pseudonymous mystique of his Frankie Pulitzer persona.