Tom Hardy’s Best Movie Is Getting A Streaming Series
This should be interesting.
There are few films that Tom Hardy has helped bring to the big screen that could be called more impressive than the 2011 sports drama Warrior. Hardy starred as Tommy Conlon in the film, an MMA fighter destined to square off against his brother, played by Joel Edgerton. Now Warrior writer and director Gavin O’Connor says he is bringing a Warrior TV series to Paramount+.
According to what O’Connor told Deadline, it’s a sure bet we won’t be seeing Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton, Nick Nolte, or any of the film’s stars reprising their roles in the upcoming series. Rather than being an adaptation of the film, the Warrior series will be a new take on the concept with brand new characters. The only cast announced so far are Gina Rodriguez (Annihilation) and retired UFC champ Daniel Cormier. Warrior will follow two pairs of fighters — two male fighters and two female fighters — in the days that lead up to their matches, eventually culminating in the matches themselves.
Gavin O’Connor says in the decade since he worked with Tom Hardy on Warrior, he was approached multiple times by Lionsgate to turn the concept into a TV show and that he was never interested. It was the relative newcomer writer Adair Cole (Lawless Range) who changed his mind. O’Connor said Cole had a new and unexpected take on the concept, which convinced him to finally give the series idea a try.
Like the Tom Hardy film, O’Connor says, the Warrior series will be “about a life fight.” O’Connor went on to say that he intends to challenge viewers with the same kinds of questions that he posed to them in the film: “Where are your loyalties? Where do your sympathies lie? Who are you rooting for? If I hook the audience into the stakes of each character’s life outside of the cage, what I call the life fight, then people are going to be invested in the stakes. That’s the heart and soul of the show.”
Warrior released in 2011 to rave reviews. Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton are both sons of the abusive Paddy Conlon, a recovering alcoholic, played by Nick Nolte who was nominated for a Best Supporting Acting Oscar for the role. Paddy tries and fails repeatedly to reconcile with his sons and in the meantime Tommy and Brendan struggle just to survive. Separately entering an MMA tournament, the brothers ultimately wind up meeting each other in the final match.
Considering the description of the series it doesn’t seem likely Tom Hardy will appear, but that doesn’t mean the Oscar-nominated actor isn’t going to be busy. Expected some time this year on Netflix, the crime thriller Havoc will star Hardy as a detective trying to save a politician’s son. Written and directed by Gareth Evans, Havoc will also star Timothy Olyphant, Forest Whitaker, Justin Cornwell, and Jessie Mei Lei. Then hopefully sometime not too far in the future, Hardy will reprise the role of the eponymous road warrior in the upcoming sequel to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road.
