The underrated Tom Hardy movie Ron Howard loves: “He should have gotten awards attention for that”

Tom Hardy has scored some major blockbuster successes in his career, including a string of Christopher Nolan movies. He’s starred in Mad Max: Fury Road, Warrior, and went all-in on Venom. He’s even tried his hand at critically acclaimed drama with Jeff Nichols’ 2024 film, The Bikeriders. The throughline of his characters is extreme intensity, which has made him the perfect fit for action movies and gangster roles.

Although Hardy has achieved A-list celebrity status in recent years and earned an Oscar nomination for his supporting role in 2015’s The Revenant, there is one director who doesn’t think he’s been granted the respect that he is due, and for one film in particular. In a 2015 ‘Ask Me Anything’ Reddit thread, Ron Howard was asked if there were any recently released movies that he felt had gone unfairly under the radar. 

After singing the praises of Alex Garland’s sci-fi flop Ex Machina, Howard wrote, “There’s another one called Locke starring Tom Hardy, which is a great movie and I really thought that he should have gotten awards attention for that performance.” 

It isn’t just Hardy fans who would agree with him. Directed by Steven Knight, who went on to cast the actor in his hit series Peaky Blinders, Locke makes ingenious use of the actor’s innate intensity. He plays Ivan Locke, a construction foreman who discovers that a woman with whom he had a brief affair is pregnant and going into premature labour.

Despite being a devoted husband and the father of two sons, he decides to drive from Birmingham to London to be there for the birth, putting aside the time-sensitive job he’s working on and missing out on the evening he had planned with his family. Throughout the drive, he has several dozen phone calls with his wife, his boss, the woman who is going into labour, her medical team, and his co-workers, building to a fever pitch so nail-biting it puts Mission: Impossible to shame.

The genius of the film is that almost all of it takes place within the confines of the car and with the camera trained on Hardy. It also avoids unnecessary drama, eschewing life-and-death stakes to focus on a man who is desperately trying to right his past wrongs and be the man his father never was. It’s one of the most exciting thrillers of the decade and a flawless showcase of Hardy’s dramatic skills. Few other actors could portray the anguish, rage, love, and desperation that he does throughout the film, with only the voices on the other end of the phone as co-stars.

It’s exactly the kind of performance that deserves an Oscar, and exactly the kind of performance that never wins one. Despite having a set-up that lives or dies on a single performance, it doesn’t have the showiness that many Oscar-baity roles do. Made on a shoestring budget of $2million, it earned back $5million, which was far less than it deserved. 

The film went all but unnoticed when awards season rolled around, though it was nominated for ‘Best Actor’ at the British Independent Film Awards and won for ‘Best Screenplay.’ Hardy earned his first and as-yet only Oscar nomination two years later, but he has yet to top his performance in Locke.

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