Tom Hardy

During the early 2000s, he was showing up in Band of Brothers and Black Hawk Down while privately bottoming out on crack cocaine and alcohol. He got sober at 25, and the career that followed had an intensity that felt like a debt being paid. Bronson (2009) put him on the UK map as a physical actor willing to disappear into a role. Inception gave him a mainstream audience. But playing Bane in The Dark Knight Rises in 2012, 30 lbs heavier and barely intelligible behind a mask, made the industry stop arguing about whether he was a character actor or a movie star.

His career now runs on two tracks that have almost nothing to do with each other. Critics have been writing off the Venom franchise since 2018, and audiences have spent over $1.5 billion at the box office disagreeing with them. The third film underperformed by franchise standards but still cleared $478 million worldwide in 2024. Meanwhile, he's doing a Guy Ritchie crime series for Paramount+ (MobLand) and a Gareth Evans action film for Netflix (Havoc). He doesn't need the critical establishment's approval to keep working at the very top of the market.

His father is a Harvard-educated screenwriter, his mother is an Irish artist, and neither background explains the crack cocaine habit he developed as a teenager. He got sober at 25 in 2003, after what he's described as finding himself in a genuinely bad state. He met his wife Charlotte Riley playing Heathcliff and Cathy in an ITV Wuthering Heights in 2009. They live quietly in the British countryside with three kids. His son Louis advised him on his Venom performance. Hardy took notes.