Tom Hardy on crime drama 'MobLand': 'It's gangsters and Guy Ritchie'

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Tom Hardy knows how to play a comic book villain. For proof, just look at his roles as a symbiote in Marvel’s Venom franchise or his interpretation of Bane in 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises.

But he was intrigued by the idea of playing an entirely different type of bad guy in MobLand. The Paramount+ crime drama casts him as the brooding Harry Da Souza, a ruthless fixer for a London-based crime family who find themselves teetering on the verge of a gang war when the son of one of their rivals goes missing.

“My immediate thought was, ‘How can I make him nice or polite or friendly or charming or invisible, like a butler,'” Hardy, 47, said speaking over Zoom. “He’s somebody who’s helpful, but he does some heinous stuff that you don’t see coming.”

Playing the street-smart character was about trying to inhabit somebody who he “might meet and not know what they did for a living,” he said. “I might go, ‘Oh, he seems like a nice person,’ and actually they’re doing a lot of stuff that they don’t want you to know about.”

MobLand debuted to a record-breaking 8.8 million viewers in its first seven days on Paramount+ last week, making it the biggest global series launch ever.

The third episode of the 10-part series streams Sunday night.

Originally envisioned by The Day of the Jackal creator Ronan Bennett as a spinoff of Showtime’s Ray Donovan, MobLand counts Jez Butterworth (The Agency) among its writers and has Guy Ritchie as an executive producer and director of its first two episodes.

Two-time Oscar-winner Helen Mirren plays one-half of the family Harry protects, starring as the manipulative Maeve, while Pierce Brosnan tackles the menacing mob leader Conrad Harrigan.

Hardy said he wanted to act in a project that was “nefarious and fun.”

“It’s gangsters and Guy Ritchie,” the Oscar-nominated actor said, namechecking the director whom he first worked with on 2008’s RocknRolla. “But the writing is fantastic and the characters are wonderful. In a way that’s Dickensian; a bit like (literary characters) Bill Sikes and Fagin and that Oliver Twist world.”

The show also mines the same narrative territory as “Greek tragedies and myths and monsters” as it traverses through London’s criminal underbelly, the British actor added. “It’s kind of like Games of Thrones, too, in (its use of) old-world families that are just awful to each other. But it has a slickness and an edge … Those two things excited me, because it wasn’t just a gangster show. It was about a dysfunctional family that’s no different to one from 2,000 years ago. That’s how empires are built.”

MobLand also features House of the Dragon’s Paddy Considine, Geoff Bell, Jasmine Jobson, Joanne Froggatt, Lara Pulver, Anson Boon and Mandeep Dhillon in supporting roles.

Months after Hardy starred opposite Austin Butler and Jodie Comer in last year’s The Bikeriders, he wrapped his work on Marvel’s Venom trilogy.

Hardy says his evolving work as an actor isn’t part of a calculated plan and it’s a bit like “having clients.”

“I just get lucky, I guess,” he said with a shrug. “I don’t think I have any control over (the roles I’m given). I’m just fortunate to have opportunities and all of them have been really exciting … It’s been really nice.”

He’s played dozens of characters, earning an Oscar nod for his part opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant and booking memorable roles as Max Rockatansky in George Miller’s 2015 Mad Max sequel Fury Road and Alfie Solomons on another British gangland drama Peaky Blinders.

“It’s a strange thing. It’s as if you painted a lot of different people and I know their (faces). I can look at them and say, ‘I wish I had known that there’ or ‘I figured this one thing out here.’ It’s a collage of people I’ve played,” he said with a laugh.

Hardy will surprise audiences once again when he shows up later this month in the action thriller Havoc, which pairs him with writer-director Gareth Evans (The Raid series) for a story about a jaded cop that fights his way through a corrupt city’s criminal underworld to save a politician’s son.

A second season of his British period drama Taboo is also on the way.

It’s a charmed life now, where he gets to choose things he wants to act in. And it taps into the feeling he had growing up in West London when he first got an inkling that he’d like to be an actor.

“I liked playing and I liked stories,” he said softly. “When you’re young and not good at other things … I think it was a more forgiving atmosphere of understanding and acceptance and I latched onto that feeling of belonging in the arts … And now I’m here … and I can make a living out of this.”

mdaniell@postmedia.com