Tom Hardy’s become one of the biggest names in the world over the last two years. With a CV overflowing with brilliant performances on the big screen, it may be a little difficult to remember our Eye Candy Of The Year’s time on TV.
With Lawless out next week on home release, we decided to have a little jaunt down memory lane and relive the times when we saw Mr Hardy in our sitting rooms.
While most British actors start in soap operas or appearances on medical or crime dramas, Tom Hardy bypassed all of that and went straight into one of the biggest televisual events of the decade, Steven Spielberg’s Band Of Brothers.
A show that featured many of today’s biggest stars, including Michael Fassbender and Damian Lewis, Tom Hardy made his acting debut playing a fresh faced private in the final two episodes of the show. Even back then he appeared to have all the makings of a star, putting plenty of pathos into a soldier with relatively little screen time at his disposal.
He would return to World War Two later on in feature length TV drama Colditz, a production that would once again see him join up with Damian Lewis, but between work on an increasing number of movies would start going to the well that many British TV actors have drunk at over the years. Period dramas.
This was an area where he really could thrive, bringing all the passion that has made him such an incredible presence on the movie screen and diving head first into the new worlds he inhabited. Over the next few years he’d travel back in time to take on roles in a new version of Sweeney Todd featuring Ray Winstone, Queen Elizabeth’s lover in sweeping BBC drama The Virgin Queen, and crucial roles in both Dickens favourite Oliver Twist and the classic and tragic love story of Wuthering Heights.
Playing the iconic roles of Bill Sykes and Heathcliff in the latter two productions really let him show off both the light and dark sides of Hardy that we’ve become so familiar with. Coming out the same year as Bronson, Hardy’s interpretation of bruiser Bill Sykes was just on the same levels of intensity, this time just slightly more veiled. A true match for the classic performance of Oliver Reed from decades earlier.
2008 proved to be a real break-out year for Hardy, with him being BAFTA nominated for his role as the wounded junkie wasting away at the heart of biography adaptation Stuart: A Life Backwards. It was a complete physical transformation, with the gorgeous Hardy turned into a dishevelled, wheezing husk. Utterly deserving of the award nomination, it showed that Hardy wasn’t just a screen bad-boy, but a truly special talent.
In the guise of Heathcliff a year later, we saw a different, quieter side to Hardy’s acting. While Heathcliff is a role easy to get bogged down in, Hardy managed to inject a dash of fun and playfulness to the emotional drama, whilst still making his Heathcliff one of the most rounded we can remember. He’s yet to equal the same levels of introspection on the big screen, but we can’t wait to see him try.
The same year we’d see him going back to the world of London crime that he’d visited in both Layer Cake and Rock N Rolla in the lead of yet another book adaptation in the form of Sky’s The Take. Taking the lead role of sociopathic and womanising Freddie, we got to see the silky smooth bad boy Hardy once more, terrifying in one breath and charming in the next.
That was the last time we’d seen Hardy on our TV screens, with his growing movie career truly taking off after casting directors the world over got to see him strut his stuff in Inception and with all the signs pointing towards him staying at the top for quite some time, we don’t expect to see Hardy back on TV any time soon.
FemaleFirst Cameron Smith
Tagged in Tom Hardy TV Wuthering Heights