In the British indie drama Locke, Tom Hardy spends nearly the entire film seated in a car and talking to people on the phone—and it's brilliant. It's also the strongest evidence of his singular excellence to date.
Chances are, the casual moviegoer's first exposure to Tom Hardy was in Christopher Nolan's cerebral 2010 blockbuster Inception, in which he played the charming scene-stealer Eames, an identity thief in the literal sense. Or, perhaps, it was in 2012's The Dark Knight Rises, with Hardy turning a second-rate Batman villain, Bane, into one of the most fascinating cinematic creations ever. Always level-headed and always rocking that monstrous mask, Hardy's Bane is an imposing gargantuan in sight but a mesmerizing elocutionist in sound, talking like a regal Englishman who's just eaten half a jar of peanut butter.
Also directed by Chris Nolan, The Dark Knight Rises is technically Christian Bale's Caped Crusader's movie, but it's almost entirely Tom Hardy's show—the "almost," of course, saving room for Anne Hathaway's criminally sexy turn as Selina "Catwoman" Kyle.
Either one of those Hardy performances makes for a strong first impression, but entering the 36-year-old London native's career with those flashy summer bank-breakers is going about it all wrong. The proper introduction to Hardy's filmography is the one that I had, back in 2008: a little indie biopic called Bronson, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, three years before he'd collaborate with Ryan Gosling on Drive. In the dark, aggressive, and combustible Bronson, Hardy plays the real-life English career prisoner Michael "Charles Bronson" Gordon Peterson, a psychotic anarchist who wasted away 30 years of his hard life in solitary confinement and got off on beating the shit out of guards and other inmates. Refn's film is pure Stanley Kubrick revisionism, popping with wide-angle shots, hypnotic moments of slow-motion violence, and oddly complementary uses of classical and soulful jazz music to off-set the brutality. It's one of the more underrated movies of the new millennium, for sure.
Hardy's work as Bronson, to that point, is literally the most underrated acting performance of the new millennium. When he's not filming movies, Hardy is barely five feet, ten inches tall and reasonably lean, but in Bronson? He's a hulking behemoth, a bruiser whose physicality only seems puny when compared to his bring-hell-down personality, which Hardy breathes roaring life into throughout the film. Walking around in circles inside his prison cell, totally naked and with his shaved head, twirling mustache, and piercing eyes, Hardy's Bronson is a feral animal.
