Back from the dead

Tom Hardy tells TV Times why playing a 19th-century adventurer in his ‘personal’ drama was his toughest ever role.

- Rebecca Mahoney

Tom Hardy doesn’t make life easy for himself. Not only has he bulked up for roles in Warrior, Bronson and The Dark Knight Rises, but he insisted on playing both Kray brothers in crime thriller Legend and it was Tom, not a stuntman, who dangled upside down from a speeding rig in Mad Max: Fury Road.

But while he does admit that shooting The Revenant – for which he earned his first Oscar nomination – in Canada’s frozen wilds was ‘a stretch’, Tom, 39, says his gritty new period drama Taboo, which begins on BBC1 this week, pushed him like never before.

‘I found filming this harder than The Revenant,’ Tom tells us when

we meet in a central London hotel, along with his father Chips Hardy and friendly Labrador cross Woody, who’s enjoying the attention from TV Times.