Tom Hardy is one of the best and most popular actors working today. He’s worked with such brilliant auteurs as Ridley Scott, Guy Ritchie, Christopher Nolan (of whom he’s a frequent collaborator), George Miller, and Alejandro González Iñárritu – everyone wants a piece of Hardy.
He’s played iconic comic book villains Venom and Bane, and real-world figures including the Kray twins and Michael “Bronson” Peterson. He even starred in a Next Generation-era Star Trek movie. Hardy has enjoyed a vast array of projects across his career. So, here are Tom Hardy’s 10 best movies, according to Rotten Tomatoes.
The Revenant (79%)
Set in the 1820s, this true story of frontiersman Hugh Glass is really brutal. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Glass, who was mauled by a bear and spent days getting hunted down by soldiers on horseback and brutalized by nature on his way home.
Birdman’s Alejandro G. Iñárritu was given a gargantuan blockbuster budget of $135 million for the movie, but he chose to shoot it like a small independent drama, which gave the movie a more intimate feel. When the action set pieces come rumbling through to rock Glass’ world, Iñárritu keeps the camera on DiCaprio the whole time to show the events from his perspective.
Layer Cake (80%)
A pre-James Bond Daniel Craig is the star of Layer Cake, a Guy Ritchie-type crime movie directed by Guy Ritchie’s friend, Matthew Vaughn, with a dark sense of humor. The movie was adapted from the novel of the same name by J.J. Connolly, and Vaughn wisely enlisted Connolly’s services to write the script. Who understands a novel better than the author themselves?
Craig plays a notorious figure in the London cocaine trade who’s hoping to get out of the business altogether. Tom Hardy plays a supporting role alongside fellow greats like Michael Gambon, Sienna Miller, Colm Meaney, and Sally Hawkins.
TIE: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (83%)
A movie adaptation of possibly the densest of John le Carré’s dense espionage novels, 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy starred pretty much every famous actor in Britain: Gary Oldman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, John Hurt, Toby Jones, Ciarán Hinds, and many more.
Tom Hardy plays a pivotal part in the plot as Ricki Tarr. Not a lot of movies get made about the Cold War, because it was an atmospheric battle of wits; an ideological war, with no defining visual look – but it’s still an important chapter in 20th-century history, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy draws attention to it.
TIE: Warrior (83%)
Ever since Rocky set a rigid formula for the genre, it’s been tough for sports movies to stand out. However, Gavin O’Connor’s mixed martial arts drama Warrior did just that back in 2011.
Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton star as two estranged brothers who enter an M.M.A. tournament and come to terms with their own lives and their relationship with each other as they train for it. Nick Nolte gives an Oscar-nominated performance as their father. Warrior wasn’t a huge box office success when it first hit theaters, but it is a very moving story with an emotionally satisfying payoff.
TIE: Inception (87%)
Christopher Nolan took a break from ruining any other director’s chances of directing a good Batman movie ever again with his incredible Dark Knight trilogy to helm this sci-fi thriller about infiltrating dreams. Although he initially envisioned using the concept of entering people’s dreams to direct a horror movie, Nolan ended up writing it as a heist film.
Instead of stealing a jewel or a bank vault’s supply of cash, the team – led by Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb – plots to steal an idea from Cillian Murphy’s dreaming mind. Tom Hardy plays Cobb’s sardonic associate Eames, whose specialty is identity theft.
TIE: The Dark Knight Rises (87%)
Tom Hardy was faced with a virtually insurmountable challenge when Christopher Nolan cast him to play the primary villain, Bane, in The Dark Knight Rises. Its predecessor, The Dark Knight, was praised as one of the greatest movies ever made, with one of the greatest villains of all time, Heath Ledger’s Joker.
Hardy had to follow up Ledger’s Oscar-winning performance after he’d passed away. There was seemingly no way that The Dark Knight Rises could satisfy fans, and somehow, it did. Bane might not be as iconic a villain as the Joker, but Hardy’s portrayal of him was arguably just as memorable.
The Drop (89%)
Michaël R. Roskam’s crime thriller The Drop came and went without making much of a splash in 2014, but it was acclaimed by critics, so hopefully it’ll find an audience in the future.
It was adapted from the Dennis Lehane short story “Animal Rescue” by Lehane himself. (Lehane is one of the sharpest thriller writers working today, so that was a smart move.) Tom Hardy stars alongside Noomi Rapace and The Sopranos’ James Gandolfini in this dark tale of a robbery gone wrong. It’s really a study of a neighborhood, as the investigation into the robbery brings out the worst in everyone.
Locke (90%)
Tom Hardy gives the performance of a lifetime in writer-director Steven Knight’s little-seen drama Locke. The whole movie is set in a car as he drives down the motorway, speaking to all of the other characters on the phone and completely relied on Hardy’s performance to work.
It’s the night before he’s due to oversee the largest non-nuclear facility, non-military concrete pour in European history, and the woman he had a one-night stand with months earlier is going into labor. Meanwhile, his wife and kids are eagerly waiting for him to get home so they can watch an important football game. So, there’s a lot going on, despite the limited visuals.
Dunkirk (92%)
When Christopher Nolan decided to direct his own World War II epic, he chose a pretty unique story to tell. The Dunkirk evacuation didn’t involve American forces and it was a loss for the Allies. You don’t usually get to see this kind of story in Hollywood. But the great thing about the movie is that it celebrates the soldiers, no matter what.
At the end, as the troops return from Dunkirk and fear that they’ll be pariahs for failing their mission, they find that the people respect and cheer for them just because they went out there and tried. Tom Hardy plays a pilot whose plane is hit.
Mad Max: Fury Road (97%)
“My name is Max. My world is fire and blood.” Tom Hardy’s opening voiceover narration in Mad Max: Fury Road is the most he gets to talk in the whole movie. He only has a handful of lines, because director George Miller wanted to tell the story visually.
Miller’s goal with every movie is to make it universally understandable, so audiences in non-English-speaking countries won’t have to read the subtitles to understand what’s going on. Every frame of Fury Road is packed with so much detail that he obviously succeeded. He also used an abundance of practical effects and minimal CGI to give the movie a more visceral feel.