Tom Hardy has collected a number of intimidating roles, from the brutish title character in 2008’s “Bronson” about the British criminal, to his dual performance as the Kray twins in 2015’s “Legend,” to his role as the Jewish gangster Alfie Solomons in “Peaky Blinders.”
Of course, anyone remotely familiar with “The Dark Knight” trilogy has done their own impression of his hulking Batman villain, Bane.
But his character Harry Da Souza in the Paramount+ TV series “MobLand” is not the type of tough guy audiences might expect him to play.
Da Souza, a fixer for the London-based Harrigan crime family led by the stoic Conrad Harrigan (Pierce Brosnan) and his impulsive wife Maeve (Helen Mirren), is tasked with tracking down the missing son of a rival gang before a bloody war erupts between the two. Da Souza’s cool, calm, and collected approach to the underworld represents a departure for Hardy — at least within his beloved subgenre of ultra-violent miscreants.
Tom Hardy’s ‘MobLand’ role allowed him to play an ‘unfazed’ gangster
Hardy told Business Insider that Da Souza’s self-contained nature is inspired by his role in the claustrophobic 2013 thriller, “Locke,” which is set entirely in one car during a road trip.
“I’ve always wanted to play somebody who’s contained after I did a film called ‘Locke’ with Steven Knight,” Hardy said. “I enjoyed the level of containment that was required to play high stakes emotionally with people who are quite irregular in many aspects.”
Playing a fixer in a world of gangsters provided just the opportunity Hardy wanted. “I mean, gangstering is pretty dramatic, isn’t it? Immoral? Very much so,” he continued.
Portraying Da Souza was an exciting challenge for Hardy, who called the role “an exercise in containment, of how to deal with people’s problems and concerns in a way that he was unfazed, and how to justify that in a natural way.”
“How to portray that excited me,” Hardy added.
‘MobLand’ reunites Tom Hardy with Guy Ritchie for the first time since 2008
“MobLand” also marks a reunion for Hardy and Ritchie, who last worked together on 2008’s “RocknRolla,” another Ritchie film about London’s criminal underworld. (Hardy had a supporting role as the closeted gay mobster Handsome Bob, who has a crush on his best friend, Gerard Butler’s One-Two.)
But a lot has changed in the last 17 years, and Hardy was eager to bring all he learned in the ensuing years back to Ritchie’s set as a leading man.
“I loved doing “RocknRolla,’ but I didn’t feel like I had much of a chance to work with Guy, because that was Gerard Butler’s film, really, and he led it, so I only really got to shoot for a couple of weeks,” he recalled.
“Now I’m sort of older and have been around the block a bit more, Guy is somebody that I wanted to go back and work with,” Hardy said, adding that he felt it was time to return to “the gangster world, and the miscreant world.”
“I think Guy has his own signature style for that, which has been punctuated into popular culture,” he continued. “So I was really keen to go back and do something a bit more meaty.”
“MobLand” airs weekly on Paramount+.
The post Tom Hardy says his role in Guy Ritchie’s ‘MobLand’ is another gangster — but not like you’ve seen him before appeared first on Business Insider.
