Every Tom Hardy Movie Performance, Ranked

There’s no such thing as a typical Tom Hardy performance. In the 24 years since his film debut in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, he’s settled into a set of quirks: You know Hardy’s going to do a freaky little voice, engage in some light homoerotic flirting, and walk around with a hint of imaginary lat syndrome. But those tendencies are often in service of performances in which Hardy enlists every element of himself as an actor, transforming his body, his speech, and his affect to play heroes, villains, and complicated men of every measure. Whether collaborating with one of his go-to guys like Christopher Nolan or Steven Knight, centering classics from Nicolas Winding Refn and George Miller, or anchoring the Venom trilogy of films that concluded with last year’s Venom: The Last Dance, Hardy has become one of our most reliably risk-taking actors, willing to rip away identities or layer on the artifice as much as any role requires.

Hardy’s 2025 centers him in the crime and action space; he’s starring in the currently airing Guy Ritchie series MobLand on Paramount+, and he’s attached to two different Cary Fukunaga films. Most importantly — and for the purposes of this ranked list — his collaboration with The Raid director and Gangs of London co-creator Gareth Evans, Havoc, finally hits Netflix today. But some of his most intriguing work is outside of that genre. In the below list, we’ve ranked nearly all of his 30-plus major movie performances. Cameos that didn’t take full advantage of Hardy’s gifts were excluded from this list, as were three of his early movies (2003’s horror LD 50 Lethal Dose, 2004’s thriller EMR, and 2007’s road movie The Inheritance) that weren’t available for streaming or digital rental at the time of this ranking. And although Hardy has done a fair amount of TV (his turn as Heathcliff in 2008’s Wuthering Heights is character-defining; his Peaky Blinders supporting role is solid; and Taboo, the series he created with his father and worked on with Knight, is a must-watch), we’re keeping the focus on his major film roles in this list. Because Hardy doesn’t appear in a movie without making an impression.

35.

Black Hawk Down (2001)

Hardy’s first film role! He gets a few lines in a shaky American accent as a soldier barking orders to others deployed with him in Mogadishu and a nice moment when he mocks Ewan McGregor’s character. But if you weren’t looking for him, you probably wouldn’t know he’s here.

34.

Minotaur (2006)

A generic attempt to update the titular Greek myth as a horror film, Minotaur looks like it cost $5 (but was somehow actually $7 million?) and has dialogue like “You know nothing of the beast” and my favorite, “I’m here, Minotaur!” Yes, the latter line is Hardy’s, and for all this movie’s flaws (and there are so, so many), it at least clued us into his ability to take the most ludicrous scenarios seriously as an actor. You don’t get Venom without this mess.

33.

The Reckoning (2004)

A mystery about a traveling theater troupe who get involved in a murder investigation, The Reckoning is toplined by Paul Bettany, Willem Dafoe, and Brian Cox, who all gnaw through the scenery. But Hardy is a shifty little scene-stealer, especially when he plays the role of a woman in one of the group’s productions — complete with a long blonde wig, drawn-on breasts, a full face of makeup, and a persistent pout. That’s his early-aughts Myspace energy jumping out. (Otherwise, the movie is kind of a talky slog.)

32.

WΔZ/The Killing Gene (2007)

A spin on Saw and Se7en that stars Stellan Skarsgård and Melissa George as New York detectives investigating a serial killer (Selma Blair???) who forces their victims to either kill to save themselves or die; Hardy plays one of the victims/killers in this daisy-chain of violence. His character is monstrous but the script is flat; pretty much everything here is forgettable.

31.

Sucker Punch (2008)

Hardy plays a mechanic in this Guy Ritchie ripoff about bare-knuckle boxers and small-time gangsters. In one scene he shames a guy for not knowing how to pop open the hood of his car. That’s about it!

30.

Dot the I (2003)

Look, all your boyfriends are together: Hardy, Charlie Cox, and Gael García Bernal co-star in this overly twisty psychological thriller about a movie director (James D’Arcy) who tricks his actress fiancée (Natalia Verbeke) into cheating on him with a man he hired (García Bernal) and then forces her to endure a bunch of psychological torture as he makes her feel like shit afterward. Hardy and Cox play the director’s sycophantic producers, who are constantly filming everything going on and who eventually get framed for a crime they didn’t commit. The film is a bit too self-serious, but Hardy and Cox both excel at playing dumb; they totally sell their characters as a pair of clueless morons. In the time of Tumblr, screengrabs of these two pouting at each other in confusion were probably a hot commodity.

29.

Deserter/Legion of Honor (2002)

Nestled in this film (marketed with two titles) about the French Foreign Legion in occupied Algeria is an intriguing early role for Hardy: He plays Pascal Dupont, a French soldier who becomes friends with Brit Simon Murray (Paul Fox) while they train. As their approaches to service and morality diverge, Hardy sometimes overrelies on frowning and scowling to play the bitter and selfish Dupont, but it’s an ethically meaty role that certainly gave him more to do than most of his other work around this time. And hey, look, an iffy accent!

28.

Capone (2020)

A dreary biopic centering Hardy as gangster Al Capone in his final days, when his mind was going from untreated neurosyphilis and his sense of reality was compromised. The role requires an over-the-top performance, and Hardy certainly goes for it in a memorable way. But he also dives overboard — he garbles unintelligibly, he squints constantly, there’s a ton of grunting and muttering — and the film remains stuck in a monotonous mode because of that. Maybe with some scenes chopped off, Capone could feel worthwhile and less like punishment for its character. Instead, we get an absurdly elongated scene in which Capone defecates in his pants during a meeting with the FBI agents.

27.

Thick As Thieves/The Code (2009)

A direct-to-DVD thriller about art thieves and Russian mobsters, Thick as Thieves/The Code (the movie was marketed with both titles) has a surprisingly stacked cast for a movie of its kind. Morgan Freeman, Antonio Banderas, and the wonderful Robert Forster leave little space for Hardy to do much. His Detective Michaels primarily exists as a character to receive exposition dumps from Forster’s Liutenant Weber about how long the NYPD have been chasing Freeman’s Ripley, but Hardy’s performance is serviceable enough, and it showcases one of his first attempts at the American accent he’d default to for years to come. I’m going to call it the “urban white” — a little drawling, a little old-timey Brooklyn, a little White Mike McArdle from The Wire — and his scoffing “Come on” is probably his character’s only memorable moment. More than anything, this role feels like a tentative step outside of the British film industry to see if he could make it in the States.

26.

Flood (2007)

A pretty generic action film with yet another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance from Hardy as Zak, a London Underground maintenance worker who tries, and fails, to save his colleague from getting swept away by the titular flood. Hardy gives Zak a respectable amount of interiority in his colleague’s death scene and in the immediate moment afterward, when he realizes he’s still holding the man’s wedding ring.

25.

Layer Cake (2004)

Layer Cake was Daniel Craig’s breakout — he’s simply cool in this, the same way that Brad Pitt and George Clooney were in the Ocean’s films — and he deservedly dominates the film’s narrative and screen time. But Hardy has a fun supporting role as his drug-dealing chemist partner, Clarkie; his constantly-giving-shit personality works with Craig’s more beleaguered one. Plus, Hardy says the word “kinky” in one scene, which is probably of interest to some of you.

24.

Scenes of a Sexual Nature (2006)

Scenes of a Sexual Nature is an odd duck of a movie that often seems like a practical joke on both its actors and on us; it’s ostensibly a romantic comedy of loosely connected vignettes, but the tone isn’t humorous enough, serious enough, or sexy enough to really make much of an impact. Hardy is somewhat miscast as an awkward rando wandering around London’s Hampstead Heath grounds and hitting on women to nearly universally negative reactions; the gag gets old. But! During the credits, Scenes of a Sexual Nature cuts to Hardy’s Noel sitting on a park bench and cuddling with an incredibly enthusiastic dog, and his genuinely broad smile and “You cheeky bugger” praise go a long way in winning us over.

23.

Child 44 (2015)

2015 was big for Hardy, but Child 44 is the weakest link of all his releases that year. Based on the same-named thriller by Tom Rob Smith, the film is set in the USSR in the 1950s and stars Hardy as a Soviet agent and war hero whose investigation into a series of child murders puts him in conflict with both the state and one of his professional rivals (Joel Kinnaman). Hardy’s Leo refuses to stop investigating the case, Kinnaman’s Vasili will do anything to make Leo’s life harder, and the conflict between them drives most of the film. Maybe it would be better if they weren’t both doing distractingly stilted Russian accents? Still, the film lets Hardy display Leo’s moral compass, in particular during a scene where he comes across Vasili killing a pair of farmers in front of their daughters. After Leo beats Vasili and screams at him for being “a little shit,” he weeps in apology to the girls and helps them pack their things. It’s a whiplash emotional arc that only someone like Hardy could pull off.

22.

The Drop (2014)

Gangster-movie pedigree doesn’t get much better than “written by Dennis Lehane” and “featuring James Gandolfini in his final role.” But even with those elements, The Drop is mostly just fine, a familiar-but-serviceable film in which Hardy gives one of his more stiff performances. He stars as the bartender at a Brooklyn bar used for money laundering by a Chechen gang — a guy who tends to tell long-winded stories and seems somewhat nebbish, and whom no one really takes that seriously until his capacity for violence is revealed. Hardy plays him with a bit of a lisp and rigid physicality, seemingly to make him more unassuming, but it gets a little affected after a while. Still, it would make a good double header with David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, and Hardy and Noomi Rapace make a good pair (they also acted together in Child 44).

21.

Venom: The Last Dance (2024)

Hardy’s final ride with his symbiote is, as Vulture critic Alison Willmore wrote in her review, “bad on purpose,” and as journalist Eddie Brock, the actor spends a lot of the movie in a more downbeat register. The film’s frenetic pace keeps zipping Eddie around from place to place, sometimes on the back of a Venom-fied horse and sometimes not, but the mode is basically “hungover dude on vacation forced to visit tourist attractions by his life partner.” On the Eddie side of things, Hardy is in his regular groove. But he’s having a ton of fun voicing Venom this time around, and he cultivates great comedic timing with himself during the franchise’s recurring “We are Venom” gag.

20.

London Road (2015)

Hardy isn’t in this big-swing musical mystery for very long — he basically pops in for a quick few minutes as a taxi driver and disappears afterward. But that scene! Hardy plays a man who insists he’s not a serial killer but who also knows quite a bit about how serial killers operate and sings that knowledge to his passenger. Hardy can’t quite hold a tune; he’s more rhythmically talking than actually belting out the lines to the tune of “Silent Night.” Still, he speeds through lyrics like “He’s a white male, aged between 23 and 47” and “He would have tortured animals” with a bizarro confidence that makes this little cameo a highlight of an already odd film.

19.

Dunkirk (2017)

Christopher Nolan’s worst sound mix means that most of Hardy’s performance as the pilot Farrier isn’t exactly clear; I’ve seen this movie both in 70mm in a theater and at home and didn’t have much luck either way. But what I can decipher is an authoritative, vulnerable performance that brings to mind Hardy’s great work in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; he’s measured and wistful in each of these films in a way he isn’t in much else. Plus, his silhouette in front of his burning plane is just a gorgeous image, one of Nolan’s starkest and most declarative about the toll of war.

18.

RocknRolla (2008)

Are you tired of reading “This movie’s not so hot, but Hardy’s compelling in it”? Sorry, here’s another one. In the same year that Hardy appeared in the Ritchie knockoff Sucker Punch, he starred alongside Gerard Butler and Idris Elba in the actual Ritchie movie RocknRolla — a lesser offering from the director compared with its predecessors Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, but one with a surprisingly complex role for Hardy. He plays Handsome Bob, the closeted best friend of Butler’s Scottish mobster One-Two, who admits his feelings for One-Two and then gets a barrage of homophobic abuse afterward. Before Bob comes out, Hardy plays him as the guy always making homoerotic jokes; the little pause Hardy adds after each one, like he’s considering whether to tell the truth about himself or tell off anyone who laughs, is a great glimpse into this man’s inner struggle. And his despair in response to One-Two’s initial disgust is solidly underplayed: As One-Two leaves the car they were in together to rage, Bob simply buries his head in his hands, goes quiet, and absorbs his best friend’s revulsion. The movie can never really decide whether it wants to treat Bob’s sexuality as a joke or not, but Hardy never lets the movie’s ambiguity get in the way of his own emotional performance.

17.

Havoc (2025)

Conservative estimate: There are probably 100 times more bullets fired in Gareth Evans’s long-awaited action thriller than there are lines of dialogue uttered by Hardy, who plays compromised cop Patrick Walker. If you thought The Raid, The Raid 2, and Gangs of London were as gory as Evans could get, guess again! The neon-lit, surreal-flavored Havoc is destined to live forever as background noise on one monitor while gamers play Grand Theft Auto on another, and Hardy’s central performance is more than serviceable enough to serve as a momentary distraction. His ability to be believable as both a laconic grump and a hysterically shrieking interrogator helps add some emotional grounding to Havoc, which otherwise indulges in Evans’s more-is-more-is-more ideology. The film follows a tangled plot about various betrayals and double-crosses between a group of cocaine thieves, a Triad gang, a local politician, and various dirty narcotics officers; it could probably have chopped off about 15 minutes. And while Havoc doesn’t necessarily stretch Hardy’s skills, the role leans on him to provide some of the film’s only laughs (like a high-pitched “I’m a fucking cop” scream into an uncooperative suspect’s face) and a few memorable in-fight moments. Kudos to Hardy and his stunt double Jacob Tomuri for a number of insane bits, like a flying horizontal kick into frame, a sequence where he uses a curl of metal to impale guys through their cheeks and fishhook-throw them around the room, and a final fight with former MMA champion Michelle Waterson in which she kicks his ass through a load-bearing beam.

16.

This Means War (2012)

An interminably tedious romantic comedy that would be infinitely better if Reese Witherspoon and Chelsea Handler were edited out, because actually, Hardy and Chris Pine are a lot of fun together! The two star as CIA agents and best friends who fall for the same woman (the miscast Witherspoon), and who constantly try to one-up and sabotage each other to win her affections. There’s nothing new about the setup and nothing convincing about Witherspoon in the obsessively-desired-woman role, which makes Pine and Hardy’s chemistry that much more impressive. They’re just two hothead idiots locking horns, and it’s really a shame that they don’t kiss (and that Hardy didn’t get the opportunity to do comedy again until Venom).

15.

Venom (2018)

Hardy’s first turn as Eddie Brock and Venom is so pleasantly off-kilter: He plays the former as twitchy and hysterical and the latter as grandiose and diabolical, and the weirdness of this relationship is established quite effectively. Some of it is maybe too weird (all that moaning as Eddie makes out with Venom-fied Michelle Williams; how Hardy’s Eddie voice sort of sounds like one of the weasels from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?), but a movie this absurd only works because he is able to ground that surrealness in both characters’ emotions.

14.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Following Heath Ledger’s Joker performance in The Dark Knight was always going to be a difficult task, and this movie’s sound design (like Dunkirk’s) does Hardy a disservice by muffling so much of his dialogue as Bane through that damn mask. What comes through in the dialogue we can hear, though, coupled with Hardy’s hulking physicality, is a man horny for chaos, a principled anarchist with a personal vendetta who will do anything he needs to get the revenge he’s convinced he’s owed. Hardy based Bane’s voice on the Irish Traveller boxer Bartley Gorman, who called himself King of the Gypsies, and his delivery of incredibly florid dialogue like “You think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it” is simultaneously arch and threatening. Hardy has always had a strong propensity for camp, and while this performance isn’t his most maximalist, it’s up there.

13.

Lawless (2012)

Perhaps Hardy’s most BDE performance, and also the point at which we all probably realized, “Yeah, he’s not going to quit it with these accents.” He stars as the notoriously unkillable Virginia bootlegger Forrest Bondurant, whose personality quirks are like playing a round of Hardy-inspired Bingo: He’s braggadocious, he can throw a punch, he resents authority, and he sits with his legs spread way, way wide. Like his work in The Drop, Hardy plays Forrest as a wound-tight dude who communicates any sadness, affection, or nonauthoritative emotions with blinks and head tilts. But the character is written to have a fair amount of depth — protectivity toward his brothers, played by Shia LaBeouf and Jason Clarke, and growing love for a former dancer played by Jessica Chastain — and Hardy conveys all that, plus the character’s inner conflict over how their life of crime might one day kill them all.

12.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Every year that passes in Hardy’s career emphasizes how against-type his work in ’70s spy thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy really was (and how nice it would be for Hardy to do another performance this quiet and remorseful again). He plays British spy Ricki Tarr, whose realization that there’s a double agent within British intelligence sets off paranoia and fear within the organization. Much of Hardy’s time in the present-day story line is spent recounting his story to Gary Oldman’s intelligence higher-up George Smiley, and, in the past, romancing a Soviet agent who immediately recognizes who he works for, and Hardy is all softness and melancholy. Through little eyebrow raises, adjustments to the set of his mouth, and his slumped posture on Smiley’s couch, Hardy communicates how downtrodden Tarr feels. The scene in which he wistfully describes his role in British intelligence as “someone you can hand your dirty little jobs to” is possibly the most heartbreaking moment Hardy’s ever put onscreen.

11.

Marie Antoinette (2006)

Let me list the two most important things Hardy’s nobleman Raumont does in Sofia Coppola’s lavishly anachronistic portrait of the French queen: He brings oysters to a party (erotic!), and he immediately picks up on the sexual tension between Kirsten Dunst’s Marie and Jamie Dornan’s Count Fersen, a dude who is definitely not Marie’s husband, Louis XVI. This smirking bitch’s biggest scene is one in which he gossips about Marie and Fersen’s flirting, and it’s such a wonderfully against-type performance for Hardy and so perfectly in tune with this movie’s atmosphere that it must be ranked high.

10.

Inception (2010)

The so-haughty-it’s-sexy “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling” is probably still the line you remember best from Nolan’s dream-sabotage thriller, if not from Hardy’s entire career.

9.

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

A pivotal early role for Hardy, and our first introduction to his crazy eyes. Star Trek: Nemesis is divisive among franchise fans, but Hardy’s performance as Captain Picard’s secret clone Praetor Shinzon feels exactly right. He’s arch and sneering, rubbing his existence in the face of the Enterprise crew and clearly delighting in Picard’s confusion; his introduction is gleefully melodramatic, and his whispered line delivery of “I feel exactly what you feel” quite sinister. Hardy’s persona has a certain element of rawness, like he’s just a dude working on instinct and spontaneity, but the level of care he puts into mimicking Patrick Stewart’s Picard proves how incorrect that perception may be.

8.

Legend (2015)

Not one, but two Hardys onscreen? Legend is Hardy showing off, flexing over his ability to make two violent and unhinged dudes seem violent and unhinged in different ways. How Hardy differentiates infamous twin gangsters Reggie and Ron Kray maintains the film’s tension. Reggie is the polite, sophisticated one who stands up straight, holds a person’s gaze, and speaks with crisp precision. Ron, who has paranoid schizophrenia, is more inhibited (until pushed; then he’ll bite your face off), has a prominent underbite and stiffer posture, and speaks with throaty gruffness. Hardy always seems most alive when his characters can shake off society’s structures and attack, and he gets to do that over and over again in Legend, most memorably during an unsettling climax where Reggie takes out all his aggression toward his brother on another man.

7.

The Revenant (2015)

The old-timey-Baltimore voice Hardy deploys as trapper John S. Fitzgerald in his Academy Award-nominated turn was wacky, of course. But Hardy’s performance in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s film about the enmity between his character and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Hugh Glass, whom Fitzgerald secretly tries to kill, is all in the eyes. Hardy’s are either flat and amoral or smoldering and possessed, and his glare is the character’s greatest weapon — he exudes such a sense of other that you’ll grow to fear him more and more as the film goes on. Hardy as a force of cosmic evil? I’m honestly sad he’ll never get to work with David Lynch.

6.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)

Here are some of the performers Hardy has listed as influences on his Venom voice: James Brown, Method Man, Redman, Richard Burton, and Busta Rhymes, in addition to lounge singers and standup comedians. Of all three Venom films, that attention-hogging bluster and performative boasting comes through perfectly in middle movie Let There Be Carnage, the most buddy-comedy-esque of the franchise and Hardy’s funniest performance to date. His bantering with himself is high-key excellent, especially during a fight in Eddie’s apartment between Eddie and Venom that plays out exactly like a romantic spat between lovers who just can’t get on the same page. The little shriek Hardy lets out when Venom headbutts him in the face? Delightful.

5.

The Bikeriders (2024)

Hardy’s giving his all playing a heavy more weary of his power than luxuriating in it, and man, does it land. Jeff Nichols shoots Hardy like the man is carved out of stone or a tree trunk come to life — craggy, exhausted — and Hardy approaches motorcycle-club president Johnny Davis with an economy of movement that underscores how used to authority this man is, and how tired he’s growing of it. The film’s homoerotic subtext between Hardy’s Davis and Austin Butler’s Benny Cross is key, and it comes through beautifully in the moonlit scene between the two men as Davis tries to persuade Cross to take over leadership of the club. The pleading vulnerability Hardy gives Davis in that scene is perfect setup for the film’s later tragedies.

4.

Warrior (2011)

Gavin O’Connor’s beloved dad classic about two estranged brothers who end up facing each other in an MMA championship fight couldn’t work without both Hardy and Joel Edgerton giving it their physical and emotional all as the Riordans. But if there’s one moment that captures everything this film is trying to say about generational trauma, masculine self-loathing, and how our families infuriate, define, and treasure us all at once, it’s when Hardy’s Tommy, sporting a dislocated shoulder from older brother Brendan, advances forward in the octagon and urges Brendan to keep fighting him. This is euphoria and punishment all mixed together, and the feverish, broken, yearning look on Hardy’s face says it all.

3.

Locke (2013)

Some actors aren’t compelling enough to sell a one-man-show-style film (looking at you, Ryan Reynolds in Buried). But it’s impossible to look away from Hardy in Locke, Hardy’s first project with Knight before reconvening on Peaky Blinders and Taboo. Hardy plays Ivan Locke, a construction foreman who is the only figure onscreen for the film’s two hours; during that runtime, we see and hear him make dozens of phone calls to the people in his life, varying his voice, tone, and delivery as he vacillates between speaking to his boss, to his protégé, to his family, to police officers, and to his mistress, whose in labor with his child. The film’s claustrophobic setting is an experiment in form, and it works entirely because of how committed Hardy is to the premise and how mercurial he is in the role. It’s perhaps the strongest display of Hardy’s skill at transformation without having to resort to his physicality, and the film’s exploration of loneliness is so poignant because of his work.

2.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

The best performance of Hardy’s obscured-face era. Hardy uses his muttering, murmuring, manic energy to perfect effect to make his Mad Max not at all like Mel Gibson’s — he’s more fidgety and feral, and that untamed quality contrasts excellently with Charlize Theron’s committed and disciplined Furiosa. (I’m not saying more actors should hate each other when they work together, but hey, that dynamic got results in this specific instance!) A lot has been said about the feminism of Furiosa using Max’s shoulder to level and aim her gun at their pursuers, but the scene in which Max refuses to let Furiosa die and sets up an IV transfusion for her with his own blood is a particular highlight for Hardy. He slows his performance down, he sloughs off the character’s prickly edges, he lets us see what keeping this woman alive and helping Immortan Joe’s wives on their quest for freedom means to him. Again, it’s Hardy giving soft eyes, and his “Max, my name is Max” is one of the film’s most memorably humane moments.

1.

Bronson (2008)

The defining Hardy performance, in a role that encouraged his greatest range and in a film that understood how Hardy is a capital-A Actor, a dude who loves to be the center of attention, craves being perceived, and feeds off other people’s fascination. This fourth-wall-breaking biopic of the man considered Britain’s most violent criminal is a perfect showcase for Hardy because he gives Charles Bronson all the complicated masculinity that the role requires without tipping the character over into sentimentality, over-explanation, or rationalization. Bronson was an enigma, and Hardy plays him as simultaneously strutting and closed off, a man willing to play with gender to emphasize that in any form, he can be the biggest badass in the room. The film’s Kubrickian final sequence, in which a nude, smeared-with-black-paint Bronson takes his prison art teacher hostage and fights a squad of cops in slow motion, asks Hardy to command our attention through brazen violence, and he does. Hardy hasn’t worked with Refn again. But the Danish director and writer, who also tapped into Mads Mikkelsen and Ryan Gosling’s visceral qualities, was one of the first filmmakers to understand how Hardy’s volatility is best deployed in fits and starts, and Bronson is a testament to how well he can seduce through simmering rage.