‘Locke’: The “experimental” movie Tom Hardy compared to a student film
When you’re as famous as Tom Hardy, you can work with pretty much anyone your heart desires.
The British star has lent his talents to a number of famous directors with mixed results. He replaced Mel Gibson as the title character in Mad Max: Fury Road, giving George Miller his biggest ever film. Alternatively, his turn in Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch leaves a lot to be desired. Still, you can’t deny the ability of someone who has worked with figures of this calibre, among others.
Another key collaborator in Hardy’s story is Steven Knight. An acclaimed writer who was recently chosen to pen the script for the next James Bond film, Knight has worked with Hardy on a number of major projects. He most famously cast the Venom star in his incredibly popular TV show Peaky Blinders. Hardy plays Alfie Solomons, the leader of a Jewish gang in Birmingham. They also co-created the BBC series Taboo, which ran for just one season in 2017, but still has an intensely strong cult following.
The pair first got together to make Locke, an experimental drama that came out in 2013. Knight wrote and directed the piece, while Hardy stars as basically the only character in the entire project. In an interview with The Playlist promoting the film, the actor revealed why he was drawn to such a strange idea.
“It’s not often you get to make a student film, but when you’re not a student, you’ve got the full assets of a professional world,” he reflected, adding, “Because you know we’re going to do something which is ultimately massively experimental, you don’t really get the freedom to do things like that since you probably were a student, but with the assets of having x amount of years in the professional environment to play with. So it’s a proper bit of fun but with everybody knowing what they were doing and doing something out of their comfort zone.”
Hardy plays the titular Ivan Locke, a high-flying construction executive on the verge of sealing the biggest deal of his life. While driving to the project, Ivan receives a number of phone calls that slowly reveal that his cushy existence isn’t actually as great as it seems. While Hardy rides the screen solo, he’s joined by a number of big stars in voice form, from Olivia Coleman and Tom Holland to Ruth Wilson and Andrew Scott, all of them playing key roles in Ivan’s story without ever showing their faces.
It takes a hell of a lot to carry an entire film on your back. Robert Redford damn-near killed himself making All is Lost, a movie in which he plays a man stranded at sea. Like Redford, Hardy was also confined to a single location, only he couldn’t get up and move around. Locke is carried entirely by dialogue and Hardy’s performance, but, luckily, it excels in both those arenas.
The box office wasn’t kind to this ambitious project, for it made next to nothing in revenue upon release, but critics raved about it and almost everyone who saw it absolutely loved it. Hardy’s performance was heralded as one of the best of his career, so it’s safe to say that he sleeps happy knowing he took such a risk in agreeing to this novel approach to filmmaking.
