Tom Hardy is no stranger to intense and morally complex characters. He's played a few gangsters over the years. His characters are often tough and bruting as they navigate the underworld of British crime.
But in MobLand, which airs on Paramount+, he leans into a much quieter menace. He's a man struggling with balance in both the family he's sworn to protect and a family of his own. "How do you walk away from this?" Hardy asked in reference to his character's lack of ability to both protect his family and walk away from the job that puts them in danger.
Hardy sat down for an interview with Parade to discuss his iceberg philosophy behind the performance, working with prolific actors like Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren, as well as long-awaited reunions working with Paddy Considine and Guy Ritchie.
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You've played a fair number of tough guys. But talk to me about finding Harry de Souza, specifically. I think I wanted to go counter to finding a tough character. I wanted to find somebody who you would let into your house and think was a really nice person and reasonable. Obviously, you get to see Harry doing some very unreasonable stuff. But for the most part, I think he's a sort of invisible person. That was what attracted me to playing Harry, a contained and invisible individual that could move through from the street to the corridors of power quietly and unassuming. I like to have an unpredictability in the characters. It's a definite range. But for the most part, it's like an iceberg. The tip of the tip of the iceberg is very mellifluous and open and invisible. Contained and quite reasonable and polite.
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He's also trying to find some balance. Everything's on a knife's edge - not just in his work but at home. Does Harry feel like he can solve his family life just as easily as he can solve the work he does for the Harrigans?I think he's so caught up in another family that he in many aspects, neglects his own family. And then you have to wonder whether he has a message that he can transmit in that aspect. Paradoxically, he fixes problems, but that should really start at home. So I don't know how aware he is of that, or if he is aware of how hard it is for him to deal with it at home. And coming to terms with the sort of heinous things that are involved in world that he is in. Can he ever really come home? I mean, how do you go to a therapist and tell them what you do? How can you heal if you're distanced from a centered form of reasonable? Because, when you suppose, it must be quite hard to come to terms with who he is. He's a bit of a monster in many aspects, I would say. It's a question of balancing the two, the work life and the home life, as much as I think it's an innate inner horror that if in order to really sort of be a dad and a partner and come home, he'd have to take to task everything he's doing.
So there's some obliviousness to the things he can't solve, which is the rift that's been created between him and Jan?Yeah, can just walk away from it? How do you walk away from this and then everything be normal? What's normal? I think that's going to be interesting to watch develop. He's on a trajectory, which I think the barn door is wide open, and the horse is already bolted. Where do you start repairing? The damage has been done.
I think you are quite well-known for characters that can be rather funny. And we see some humor in Episode 2 when Harry offers the boys some money and tells them to go buy some cheesecake. Is that lighter element something you're looking for in the intense scripts you're a part of?It's in there already. But you look for places to make things light or more human. I think there is an effort to normalize any behavior, and humor is always part of that. Ultimately, he's being a bit of a bully at that moment in time. It's interesting where it's not obvious jokes. I think that's a character who had invited them over to speak to his car. It's the tension. I think that particular joke has a release of tension. It's also cruelty because he told them to come to the car in trouble. They're kids who would choose cheesecake in some aspect. I think that's his deconstruction of the kind of thing that they would probably buy themselves in the café, or his imposition of what impression of what type of people they are. But I think there's a character reflection to some of the comedy in it, as opposed to playing for laughs. How people interact with each other is always interesting. And it's gallows humor.
Related: Helen Mirren Talks Her New 'Psychotic' Role and Partnering with Pierce Brosnan on 'MobLand' (Exclusive)
This was your first time working with Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren. What was that like?It was wonderful. I've always admired Helen and I've always admired Pierce's work. And so to be able to watch them do something I think they're brilliant in and to be part of that experience is fantastic. They're great, brilliant actors. Super talented, and they've done so much great work. It's an absolute joy to be able to work with Pierce and Helen.
And it's a reunion between you and Paddy!I've been a huge fan of Paddy since I started here with Stephen Graham. Him and Michael Shannon, they were certain character actors that were just amazing and just absolutely, incredibly inspiring. And at the same age as I am. So I've been dying to work with Paddy since we did Child 44. So, to spend time building a friendship on screen with him, which progresses throughout the episodes, as you'll see, was just fantastic. He's a brilliant actor.
AndGuy Ritchie is someone you've worked with before. He's the director of the first two episodes, so in many ways he is setting the tone. Guy has a signature style, starting back with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and going onto Snatch and then obviously RocknRolla and The Gentlemen. So it's a similar vein, and he has an energy which is palpable and specific. So he's a wonderful totem pole of style and signature flair. But you've got Anthony Byrne, who I worked with on Peaky Blinders, who's brilliant. He's a brilliant director and very different. Thenand Daniel Sorkin — he's fantastic as well. Israeli director. Lovely, sensitive, brilliant director. And Lawrence Gough who's brilliant. They're all very different.
So for them, they've got to keep in line with it. We've all got to maintain a throughline of the style and the tone that Guy has set sail with on Episodes 1 and 2. But Anthony did 3 and 4, and he did 9 and 10. Gough did 7 and 8 and Sorkin did 5 and 6. It becomes a sort of mosaic, a tapestry of different visionaries coming together and harmonizing under the pacemaker that is Guy. He set the pace and he'll overlook all the episodics and their edits with David Glass from 101 [Studios].
I think what's interesting about TV is it becomes many voices, many different chefs come in and start to cohesively put together a menu over the 10 episodes. Which is really exciting because you have a collaboration of generals overlooking the same problems but delving into micro on their on their episodics. And each episode has got its own tail. It becomes a very interesting journey with the show, and it starts to develop in its own way. So I think it's not just Guy Ritchie, if that makes sense. He set sail on it. He is a huge influence. But I'm really interested to see what you think of the episodes as they develop with the other artists that are directing as well, who have got their own way of doing things.
Do you approach television roles differently than movie roles?Not really, no. The speed with which we shoot television... because in film, we can spend a lot of time. Let's say, [it 's] a page a day filming a movie, sometimes less, depending on the size of it. In the same amount of time, we would shoot sort of between five and eight pages on a TV show. So it's a lot faster. But it doesn't make my work any different; it just means that we cover more ground. For me, I prefer the speed of a television shoot in many respects because you don't do things over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and then refine them and then over and over and over. [On TV], we're just different. They're different experiences.
But it's not a different approach to character for me, personally. In the same way, theatre is different. You do two, three, four weeks. So when you go into a run, it's not until two weeks after the run is opened that I start to get back to the place where I was in the first read-through. But I just know it inside my body. It becomes a show. It becomes a project that is now fully functional, and it's alive. It becomes an organic thing. So, there's different levels of different windows of opportunity to capture a scene. TV moves faster than film, and theatre runs the slowest, I think. But each are relevant. Each have their own ability to capture or harvest exciting storytelling.
New episodes of MobLand are available to stream Sundays on Paramount+.
Related: Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren Lead Guy Ritchie's New Paramount+ Series 'Mobland'
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