{"id":702034,"date":"2026-05-29T11:05:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T11:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/702034\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T11:05:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T11:05:08","slug":"turning-up-late-and-making-helen-mirren-wait-has-tom-hardy-been-fired-from-mobland-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/702034\/","title":{"rendered":"Turning up late and making Helen Mirren wait: has Tom Hardy been fired from MobLand? | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019re at all familiar with the Paramount+ series MobLand<\/a>, these past few days will have come as an absolute revelation. At long last, just when everyone thought it wouldn\u2019t ever be possible, something exciting has happened. Unfortunately, it didn\u2019t happen onscreen.<\/p>\n

Instead, rumours are swirling that Tom Hardy<\/a> 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 \u2013 partly because Paramount has yet to greenlight a third series at all \u2013 but the takeaway remains the same: Tom Hardy sounds like an absolute nightmare to work with.<\/p>\n

According to the Hollywood Reporter, his MobLand behaviour has involved a greater insistence on creative control \u2013 delivering script notes to producer Jez Butterworth and creator Ronan Bennett \u2013 while generally arriving late and locking himself in his trailer for hours on end. \u201cHe kept the cast waiting, [which is] a power play,\u201d a source told the outlet. \u201cKeeping Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren and others waiting is career suicide, I would wager.\u201d This appears to be a wager that the source has lost, given that Mirren posted a photo of Hardy\u2019s face on Instagram last night, captioned \u201cLove you now and always\u201d.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s also a bold claim, since at this point Hardy\u2019s 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 \u2013 some reports suggest that Theron grew tired of Hardy\u2019s late arrivals, others his insistence on justifying every piece of action and dialogue \u2013 but it apparently resulted in a confrontation where \u201cthings kind of came to blows\u201d, according to Theron.<\/p>\n

There are others. In his recent memoir Making It So, Patrick Stewart lamented the horrible time he had making 2002\u2019s Star Trek: Nemesis, writing that \u201cthe actor who portrayed the movie\u2019s villain, Shinzon, was an odd, solitary young man from London. His name was Tom Hardy \u2026 Tom wouldn\u2019t engage with any of us on a social level. Never said, \u2018Good morning,\u2019 never said, \u2018Goodnight,\u2019 and spent the hours he wasn\u2019t needed on set in his trailer with his girlfriend.\u201d<\/p>\n

While filming 2012\u2019s Lawless he got into a fight with Shia LaBeouf that, according to the film\u2019s director, \u201cescalated to the point where they had to both be restrained\u201d. 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<\/a>, Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu, Hardy had T-shirts made for the cast and crew from a photograph showing him with I\u00f1\u00e1rritu in a headlock. Whether or not the fight was genuine \u2013 Hardy says not \u2013 I\u00f1\u00e1rritu still saw fit to describe the actor as \u201ca beautiful human being\u201d.<\/p>\n

All of which is to say that you don\u2019t hire Tom Hardy for a project if you\u2019re determined that it should go smoothly. Hardy\u2019s career is full of weird eccentricities, from the voice he decided to give Bane to his incessant grunting during Taboo<\/a>. You could argue that even him signing up for MobLand \u2013 a wildly mediocre television series on everyone\u2019s least favourite streaming service \u2013 at the height of his stardom is a pretty eccentric choice.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s centre of gravity, and without him it risks drifting off into nothingness.<\/p>\n

Clearly, the show knows it. Production insiders are now claiming that Hardy hasn\u2019t been fired, and that \u201cthings are being worked through creatively\u201d. According to them, \u201che\u2019s difficult, but he\u2019s a movie star\u201d \u2013 and he\u2019s 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 \u2013 surely production won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you\u2019re at all familiar with the Paramount+ series MobLand, these past few days will have come as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":702035,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-702034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=702034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702034\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/702035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=702034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=702034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=702034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}