If you’re at all familiar with the Paramount+ series MobLand, these past few days will have come as an absolute revelation. At long last, just when everyone thought it wouldn’t ever be possible, something exciting has happened. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen onscreen.
Instead, rumours are swirling that Tom Hardy has been fired. Almost a week ago, Puck reported that Hardy had departed the MobLand set after clashing with cast and crew. As things currently stand, that has been walked back a little – partly because Paramount has yet to greenlight a third series at all – but the takeaway remains the same: Tom Hardy sounds like an absolute nightmare to work with.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, his MobLand behaviour has involved a greater insistence on creative control – delivering script notes to producer Jez Butterworth and creator Ronan Bennett – while generally arriving late and locking himself in his trailer for hours on end. “He kept the cast waiting, [which is] a power play,” a source told the outlet. “Keeping Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren and others waiting is career suicide, I would wager.” This appears to be a wager that the source has lost, given that Mirren posted a photo of Hardy’s face on Instagram last night, captioned “Love you now and always”.
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It’s also a bold claim, since at this point Hardy’s entire reputation revolves around him being difficult on set. The most famous instance came during the filming of Mad Max: Fury Road, which was marked by blowups between Hardy and his co-star Charlize Theron. Various theories abound about what happened – some reports suggest that Theron grew tired of Hardy’s late arrivals, others his insistence on justifying every piece of action and dialogue – but it apparently resulted in a confrontation where “things kind of came to blows”, according to Theron.
There are others. In his recent memoir Making It So, Patrick Stewart lamented the horrible time he had making 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis, writing that “the actor who portrayed the movie’s villain, Shinzon, was an odd, solitary young man from London. His name was Tom Hardy … Tom wouldn’t engage with any of us on a social level. Never said, ‘Good morning,’ never said, ‘Goodnight,’ and spent the hours he wasn’t needed on set in his trailer with his girlfriend.”
While filming 2012’s Lawless he got into a fight with Shia LaBeouf that, according to the film’s director, “escalated to the point where they had to both be restrained”. This has been disputed a little, with it being diluted in retellings to them falling down some stairs during a playful wrestle. During the making of The Revenant, after he got into a fight with the director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Hardy had T-shirts made for the cast and crew from a photograph showing him with Iñárritu in a headlock. Whether or not the fight was genuine – Hardy says not – Iñárritu still saw fit to describe the actor as “a beautiful human being”.
All of which is to say that you don’t hire Tom Hardy for a project if you’re determined that it should go smoothly. Hardy’s career is full of weird eccentricities, from the voice he decided to give Bane to his incessant grunting during Taboo. You could argue that even him signing up for MobLand – a wildly mediocre television series on everyone’s least favourite streaming service – at the height of his stardom is a pretty eccentric choice.
You also need to consider the fact that, by some distance, Hardy is the best thing about MobLand. As the fixer (Harry Da Souza) at the centre of the show, Hardy provides the series with charm and forward momentum. Without him around, viewers would be left with nothing to chew upon, except the inexplicable way that Pierce Brosnan can have the very worst Irish accent of all time and simultaneously literally be from Ireland.
The choices now available to the MobLand producers are limited and painful. Assuming that the show will be recommissioned (which, since it was the biggest launch in the history of Paramount+, seems like a no-brainer), MobLand will have to toy with the idea of letting Hardy go and recalibrating without him. This would be easy to do, because nobody should be safe in a mob drama, but not recommended. He is currently the show’s centre of gravity, and without him it risks drifting off into nothingness.
Clearly, the show knows it. Production insiders are now claiming that Hardy hasn’t been fired, and that “things are being worked through creatively”. According to them, “he’s difficult, but he’s a movie star” – and he’s not the only one at fault. Quite how they will manage to make a TV show with an openly hostile set is a big question – surely production won’t be fun at all. But in return the show would retain the only good thing it has; a magnetic performance by a capable lead. Perhaps the only thing MobLand can do at this point is suck it up and endure.