The stakes are at an all-time high in Predators, the new series narrated by The Dark Knight Rises star Tom Hardy, tracking the hunting animals who range all over the planet. For even the strongest, fastest, and stealthiest members of their species, every day is an intensely waged war against hunger and rapidly changing elements.
“A legendary lioness and her pride face the battle of their lives, as they fight to keep ten cubs alive,” Hardy intones, over footage of the still baby-faced brood storming alongside their mother through crocodile-infested floodwaters. A brotherhood of cheetahs gloriously sprints across the Serengeti in hot pursuit of zebras. Ghost, a wild dog whose big ears listen vigilantly for approaching danger, leads her pack on a vital nomadic journey in search of food. Rising numbers of pumas in Patagonia turn the wild cats against each other. In subarctic Canada, mighty polar bears journey for survival against a stunning backdrop of Northern Lights and the alarming sounds of cracking sea ice.
Each episode of the series travels to a new land, from Chile to Zimbabwe, delivering a riveting and intimate look at the hard-won lives of these “deadly and cunning” hunters. Even when you’re at the top of the food chain, survival is never easy, especially when adapting to fresh and unpredictable threats in the age of climate emergency.
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That familiar, touch-of-gravel, London-accented voice you hear delivering a play-by-play of the heart-stopping animal drama of Predators belongs to none other than Academy Award nominee Tom Hardy, who narrates all of Season 1.
The star of The Revenant, Peaky Blinders, Lawless, and Bronson is the latest in the tradition of esteemed actors turned documentary narrators (from James Earl Jones to Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh to Tilda Swinton). Hardy steps into the leagues of such trusted nature doc narrators as Morgan Freeman (Our Universe), David Attenborough (Our Planet), and Jacques Cousteau, beloved for their variously foreboding, soothing, wry, and emotion-tinged delivery.
For Hardy, it’s a chance to exercise the muscle behind thrillers like Locke into internal wars among pumas and polar bears — in a tonal delivery that summons both the enthralling suspense, gravity, and meditative qualities of witnessing these hunters and nomads up close.
Hardy’s love of dogs has been well documented, but when it comes to speaking to the interior worlds of wild animals, he also brings an even more ineffable quality to the table. As George Miller, who directed Hardy in Mad Max: Fury Road told The New York Times about his first meeting with the actor: “I had the same feeling about Tom that I had when Mel Gibson first walked into the room: There was a kind of edgy charm, the charisma of animals. You don’t know what’s going on in their inner depths, and yet they’re enormously attractive.”
Each episode travels to a different region of the world, bearing witness to cheetahs in Tanzania’s Serengeti; lions in Botswana’s Okavango Delta; pumas in Torres del Paine National Park, Patagonia; polar bears in Hudson Bay, Canada; and wild dogs on the banks of the Zambezi River, forging across Zimbabwe.
