5 Times Tom Hardy Reportedly Clashed On Set 

Tom Hardy is one of the few actors working today who can make you feel — genuinely feel — that cinema is still capable of doing something no other medium can. Locke is basically a man driving and talking on the phone for 85 minutes, and it is absolutely devastating. The Drop is probably the best thing he’s ever done, and nobody talks about it enough. Going toe to toe with James Gandolfini, after all, is no easy feat.

All of which is to say: the talent is not in question. The talent has never been in question. What’s been in question, for going on two decades now, is whether the industry’s tolerance for the rest of it has any bottom. Hardy’s MobLand firing suggests it might.

The mythology that’s built up around Hardy’s reported on-set behavior — in which difficulty is just the price of the genius — only holds if the work keeps justifying it. Here, in roughly chronological order, are the times it reportedly didn’t.

When He Hit Rock Bottom During Star Trek: Nemesis

Hardy played the young Picard clone Shinzon in what became one of the Star Trek franchise’s most expensive and dispiriting failures, and by most accounts, the set was a preview of the pathologies to come. 

Patrick Stewart, the franchise stalwart, writing in his memoir Making It So, describes a young Hardy thusly (via Business Insider): 

“I didn’t have a single exciting scene to play, and 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.” 

On his part, Hardy himself has opened up about the experience, saying he was terrified while filming Star Trek: Nemesis. In his own words (via Total Film):

“Every day on that set, I was terrified — which worked for the character anyway. You can’t hide that, the camera will pick it up. I was genuinely out of my depth. The whole thing was, How can I do this?’ I took it very seriously.”

There’s something almost Greek about the image of a young actor of extraordinary physical presence burning through his first real shot at franchise stardom while barely conscious of doing it.

When He and Shia LaBeouf Allegedly Came to Blows on Lawless

The story that circulated that Shia LaBeouf knocked Hardy clean out on the set of John Hillcoat’s Prohibition-era crime film Lawless is almost certainly more myth than fact. But the kernel it grew from is documented. Hillcoat confirmed in a Reddit AMA that there was definitely a fight between them, and both had be restrained. 

He said (via Collider):

“There was definitely a fight between them,” Hillcoat recalled. “It escalated to the point where they had to both be restrained. But I was very pleased to hear it didn’t go that way because I would hate to see the outcome.” 

LaBeouf’s version, offered years later to Hot Ones, reframes it as rough-housing between two method-committed actors who were essentially wrestling for sport. However, he also admitted that for the rest of the shoot, Hardy told everyone LaBeouf had knocked him out.

When He Reportedly Made Charlize Theron Feel Threatened on Mad Max: Fury Road

This one is documented, corroborated, and serious. Kyle Buchanan’s oral history of Mad Max: Fury Road’s production includes testimony from crew members describing Hardy as deliberately provocative — arriving, on one occasion, three hours late to set, at which point Charlize Theron confronted him and he charged toward her in response. Camera operator Mark Goellnicht recalled the moment (via A.V. Club):

Hardy eventually offered something like contrition. At Cannes 2015, he said he owed director George Miller an apology for being “so myopic” (via Empire). Miller himself, revisiting the feud years later, told The Telegraph:

“Tom has a damage to him but also a brilliance that comes with it, and whatever was going on with him at the time, he had to be coaxed out of his trailer. Whereas Charlize was incredibly disciplined — a dancer by training, which told in the precision of her performance — and always the first one on set.”

The film, widely considered one of the best action movies in history (if not the best), won six Academy Awards. Nobody involved seems to think that makes any of it okay.

When He Clashed with Iñárritu on The Revenant

The Revenant story is the least alarming of the lot — which is either reassuring or its own kind of revealing. The shoot was brutal and months-long. It was conducted almost entirely in natural light in remote locations spanning from Canada to the southern tip of South America. Hardy’s method of releasing tension, as he told Entertainment Weekly (via SlashFilm), was to physically grab director Alejandro González Iñárritu and wrestle him into the snow:

“When things get a bit too serious, I go, ‘Why don’t we have a cuddle in front of all these people here?’ It ends with both of us falling down in the snow. I think that’s a good thing. If I’m the naughty boy for doing that, then I’d rather be the naughty boy and release that tension.”

Iñárritu, on his part, praised Hardy as a “beautiful human being”. He said in the same Entertainment Weekly interview (via The Film Stage):

“On the surface, he can look inaccessible or difficult. But he is just a beautiful human being. He’s incredibly sensitive and lovable.”

That it ended in mutual warmth says something about Hardy’s genuine gift for charming the people he’s just finished exhausting. It also makes MobLand harder to explain away. The Revenant, meanwhile, won Leonardo DiCaprio his first Oscar.

When He Got Fired from MobLand

And now we arrive at the one that doesn’t have a redemption arc attached to it. Or not yet, anyway. Guy Ritchie-produced MobLand launched on Paramount+ in 2024. It was a gritty British crime drama built almost entirely around Hardy’s considerable gravitational pull as Harry Da Souza, a fixer for a dangerous London crime family. The show was one of the streamer’s 3 biggest premieres (via The Wrap) with 8.8 million views in its first week. It was a success through and through. The trouble came during the making of Season 2.

According to Puck News, Hardy clashed repeatedly with producers Jez Butterworth and David Glasser, and became increasingly unhappy as the show expanded its ensemble (with additions such as Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan) and shifted focus away from his character.

What the MobLand scandal strips away, at last and with little poetry, is the mythology. Earlier instances were on a scale large enough. Here, all we have is simply a guy who has an alleged inability to share the spotlight with legends such as Mirren and Brosnan, something he didn’t want to overcome. 

Here are all these projects in a nutshell:

Title	Year	Director/Creator	Other Cast Members	IMDb (as of May 23, 2026)	Rotten Tomatoes (as of May 23, 2026)
Star Trek: Nemesis	2002	Stuart Baird	Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, Jonathan Frakes	6.4/10	27% | 49%
Lawless	2012	John Hillcoat	Shia LaBeouf, Jessica Chastain, Guy Pearce, Gary Oldman	7.2/10	67% | 74%
Mad Max: Fury Road	2015	George Miller	Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Zoë Kravitz	8.1/10	97% | 86%
The Revenant	2015	Alejandro González Iñárritu	Leonardo DiCaprio, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter	8.0/10	78% | 84%
MobLand	2025–	Ronan Bennett	Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, Paddy Considine	8.3/10	76% | 67%

Here are the answers to a few questions you may have:

Have thoughts on Tom Hardy’s on-set reputation or what the MobLand firing means for his future? Drop a comment below.