Can you believe it’s been nearly four years since Inception? It feels like only yesterday that impossibly dapper Tom Hardy managed to steal scenes from a murderer’s row of well-pedigreed talent — and taught us all, in the process, that we mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling. Hardy’s official “breakthrough” was Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson, from 2008, but it wasn’t until Inception that we could really envision him as a proper, tantalizingly promising leading man, one as comfortable in blood-soaked mania as he was in a tailored suit and a sly grin.

In the years since, he’s done fine work, mostly by opting to channel his nutbaggier self: juiced-up in Warrior, epically grumbly in Lawless and, of course, terrifyingly incomprehensible as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. (To his credit, he did try a Reese Witherspoon movie, too.) If Hardy’s still to fulfill his A-list potential, there’s time and chances — namely, the upcoming Mad Max reboot, plus Child 44, a Richard Price–penned adaptation of Tom Rob Smith’s best seller. But he doesn’t seem too concerned with all that, does he? Otherwise, we probably wouldn’t get him following up a blockbuster like TDKR with Locke, a crafty-looking thriller in which he’s the only one onscreen the entire time. We can still pine for him to become a movie star, sure. But let’s not forget that all Tom Hardy really wants to do is drive around getting weird.