Tom Hardy's 20 best film performances – ranked!

20. Rocknrolla (2008)

There aren’t as many mockney-geezery roles in Tom Hardy’s career as you might think, although he has a turn in this and also in Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake, in which he plays one of the lackadaisical members of a crew run by Daniel Craig’s icily professional cocaine dealer. In Guy Ritchie’s notorious gangster drama he plays Handsome Bob, a bit of a lairy bastard, with a secret emotional life, who works with Idris Elba. The film set my teeth on edge, but Hardy brings some of his trademarked truculent charisma.

19. This Means War (2012)

This is a dodgy one for Hardy fans, although he gets points for an excursion outside his comfort zone into the world of larksome capers. In this frantic, strained comedy, Hardy plays a super-tough federal agent, a cockney superlad with a V-necked jumper and a simian walk. His partner is smooth hottie Chris Pine. Both guys fall for adorable Reese Witherspoon, and use all their spyware paraphernalia to spy on each other taking Reese out on dates. Maybe Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson would have been better.

18. Venom (2018)

Hardy deserves a high-profile role in a Marvel movie — and he is one of the very few actors who would be equally credible as superhero or supervillain. But this isn’t the one. Here he plays tough investigative reporter Eddie Brock, who takes down corporate bad guys in his weekly online show. But then he “fuses”, horribly, with a symbiote organism imported from outer space by precisely the kind of evil business behemoth that he exposes on his programme and becomes the monstrous Venom. The element of broad comedy really isn’t Hardy’s thing.

17. Marie Antoinette (2006)

Hardy has a tiny role in Sofia Coppola’s film, playing Raumont, the discontented nobleman at Marie Antoinette’s court, a young intriguer who is a keen enough participant in the power politics of the day, but without the status to which he thinks himself entitled. Hardy’s relatively low profile here is probably because he is not fully plausible as a pretty-boy figure and had yet to grow into a his bulkier, more macho looks.

16. Child 44 (2015)

Hardy is here well into his broodingly impassive hunk phase in this hefty adaptation of the historical bestseller, set in the postwar Soviet Union