Tom Hardy on the red carpetMediaPunch/INSTARimages
The last week or so has been a roller-coaster ride for fans of the Paramount+ gangster series MobLand. The show premiered to mostly positive reviews in 2025, and instantly emerged as the single greatest challenger to Taylor Sheridan‘s Yellowstone. A second season was quickly green-lit, and was in production until recently. However, shortly after filming concluded on the show’s second season, it was reported that star Tom Hardy had been fired from upcoming seasons for clashing frequently with showrunner Jez Butterworth. Hardy is the de-facto lead of the series, even though Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren‘s characters are given equal prominence in the narrative. That Hardy would be fired sounds extraordinary. Soon after this report broke, an update suggested that the Oscar nominee is still involved in the show and that everyone involved is looking for an amicable way forward.
This sounds like the perfect time for audiences to remind themselves of Hardy’s sheer talent and immense screen presence by rewatching arguably his best performance. It came in a 2014 movie that unfolded essentially like a one-man play set in a single location, a moving car, and relying entirely on the central performance to fuel the narrative and create drama. The movie in question, Locke, featured Hardy as a man who decides to be present at the birth of a child conceived during an affair, while having phone conversations with the unborn child’s mother, as well as his wife and sons waiting for him at home, unaware of the mess he’s put himself in.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Here’s Where You Can Watch ‘Locke’ for Free This Month
Locke marked the beginning of Hardy’s creative partnership with filmmaker Steven Knight, with whom he worked on the television series Peaky Blinders, Taboo, and A Christmas Carol, and as an executive producer on a 2023 adaptation ofGreat Expectations. While Hardy is the only actor on screen in Locke, supporting characters are voiced by Olivia Colman, Tom Holland, Ruth Wilson, and Andrew Scott. The movie was released domestically by A24 and grossed around $5 million worldwide. It holds a “Certified Fresh” 91% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus reads, “A one-man show set in a single confined location, Locke demands a powerful performance — and gets it from a never-more-compelling Tom Hardy.” You can watch it for free in the U.S. this month on Tubi. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
