Deciding on Tom Hardy’s greatest performance of all time is tricky. While some would say it’s impossible to top his performance in Mad Max: Fury Road, others would say his turn in smaller roles, like Rikki Tarr in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, reveals his full brilliance. Others might rep for Venom, or Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, and the truly strange Hardy stans among us might make a case for his forgotten Captain Picard clone in Star Trek: Nemesis. But today, if you’re paying attention, there can be little doubt that Tom Hardy’s true, greatest role is none other than Harry Da Souza, the embattled “fixer” from the Harrigan crime family in the hit series MobLand. Produced by Guy Ritchie and under the watchful eye of showrunner Jez Butterworth, MobLand was a refreshing jolt in 2025, but in Season 2 this year, it hasn’t lost any of its magic.
And that’s because the show is best when it remembers that Tom Hardy is a secret weapon in nearly anything. And like his conflicted role in the Venom franchise or his turn in Mad Max, as Harry in MobLand, Hardy gets to do what he does best: combine being a badass with also being a likable and extremely insightful guy. If you’ve slept on MobLand, Season 2 is a great time to jump in, and oddly, as great as Season 1 is, if you start with Season 2, Episode 1, you won’t feel left out.
The premise of MobLand, in case you missed it, concerns a fictional contemporary London-based mob family called the Harrigans, headed by Conrad Harrigan (Pierce Brosnan) and Maeve Harrigan (Helen Mirren). Respectively, Conrad is like King Lear, and Maeve is like Lady Macbeth; they’re both totally nuts, and at the start of Season 2, even a new viewer can understand the basic conflict. In Season 1, Harry was given the chance to betray the Harrigan family and work for another, bigger, international crime syndicate run by the ruthless Kat McAllister (Janet McTeer). Because he turned Kat down, things have gotten harder for the Harrigan family at the start of Season 2, but you also get the sense that the madness within this crime family would tear them apart anyway.
In a way, MobLand is like if the story of The Sopranos focused on Paulie being the only sane and intelligent member of the entire gang. The fun of MobLand is that Hardy imbues Harry with a sense of frustration that feels akin to how a normal person would feel at their office job. While trying to flip a witness to retract a statement in the first episode of Season 2, Harry mentions that he’s “under a lot of pressure,” as though his work situation is just another job with regular problems people have at regular jobs.
Tom Hardy as Harry Da Souza and Joanne Froggatt as Jan Da Souza in MobLand.
Paramount+
Added to this idea is that everyone’s relationship and/or marriage is taken somewhat seriously in MobLand in a way that perhaps other crime shows or mob movies haven’t ever really quite nailed. Joanne Froggatt’s Jan — Harry’s wife — has been trying to get him to go to couples counseling forever, and in the debut of Season 2, she’s gotten her wish, and it doesn’t go well. These scenes are as heartbreaking as they are hilarious, all of which is pulled off with aplomb, but also hidden sadness from both Froggatt and Hardy. While Brosnan and Mirren get to strut around in an elevated Shakespearean haze, Hardy and the rest of the cast provide a sort of counterpoint of realism.
To be clear, MobLand wouldn’t work at all without Conrad and Maeve being over-the-top looney-tunes bananas, but it’s Harry, and those in his orbit, that give the show its real heart. We’re rooting for Harry to win. We’re rooting for Harry to figure it out. But the brilliance of MobLand is that we don’t know what winning or figuring it out looks like in this particular world, which is what makes the unfolding of the story riveting, addictive, and a miniature TV masterpiece.
