It's an intensely weird film, more Twin Peaks than The Untouchables, and much more of a horror movie than you'd expect. Hardy plays infamous Chicago gangster Al Capone at the very end of his rope, living out the last year of his life practically braindead, wandering around a vast Florida mansion screaming at alligators and soiling himself.
The idea of recommending a movie for the Hardy performance, not the movie itself may never be as clear as in the case of his latest, director Josh Trank's Capone. "Just walk through the door, Tom" followed by Tom Hardy front-flipping into the door, shrieking. The funniest thing in the world is picturing a director asking Tom Hardy to perform an everyday task. Every film is just another stop on his ongoing quest to never look, sound, or move like a normal human man. The point being, Tom Hardy is many things-many, many things-but never in all his days has Tom Hardy been boring on-screen. Even Christopher Nolan, the most shenanigans-adverse filmmaker in Hollywood, couldn't help strapping a mask over Hardy's objectively beautiful face in two separate movies. But there's also the profusely-sweating lobster-chomping of Venom, the incomprehensible-to-human-ears rumble of Taboo, or even his Max Rockatansky in Fury Road, an already-iconic character that Hardy updated with the exact voice of a man who has sucked radioactive sand into his windpipe for decades. Sometimes the role warrants Hardy's manic delivery, like the case of dong-slinging criminal Charles Bronson in Bronson or the brutal fur trapper John Fitzgerald in The Revenant. Tom Hardy does not "phone in" performances, he personally crams performances into a shipping container, which is packed aboard a leaking transport vessel, only to emerge 3-4 weeks later sea-mad and unable to form coherent sentences.
In a technical, academic sense he's probably not the "best"-off the top of my head I'd probably let Adam Driver and Lupita Nyong'o duke it out for that one-but if you put Tom Hardy's name on a poster you're 100% guaranteed a whirling dervish of a performance so committed it's unsettling. That's just one of the many check marks on the list of reasons why Hardy is the most interesting actor working today.
When I think of this rule, the absolute first thing that comes to mind is Tom Hardy's choice to play iconic Batman villain Bane in The Dark Knight Rises like Mr. The divide between good and great lies in those choices. We tend to think of actors in terms of their overall performance, but the real measuring stick is in the choices they make, be it role to role, scene to scene, or even moment to moment.