Excerpt from the Guardian’s writeup on the actors playing the Bondurant brothers in Lawless:___________________________________________________
Tom Hardy plays Forrest Bondurant, the laconic brother who controls the family’s bootlegging operation.
As well as Forrest Bondurant in Lawless, the 34-year-old has played a number of men not to be messed with: the eponymous scourge of the British prison system in Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2008 film Bronson; a martial arts fighter in last year’s Warrior; and most recently the bull-necked villain Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. He has also turned in memorable performances in Inception and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (as agent Ricki Tarr).
Hardy is a thinking man’s tough guy. He combines a raw, muscular screen presence with a fierce intelligence that simmers beneath the surface and occasionally bubbles over.
As Bronson (a role for which he packed on three stone of muscle) Hardy was all talk, running verbal rings around wardens, psychologists and fellow prisoners and delivering unhinged soliloquies – when he wasn’t laying waste to his surroundings. In Lawless, by contrast, as the family’s seemingly indestructible middle brother Forrest, he speaks only when he has to. His default utterance is a grunt – that’s how he responds when Jessica Chastain’s glamorous dancer Maggie swans into town and takes a shine to him – but in spite of his taciturn nature, you can feel the heat of Forrest’s intelligence. Jack may have greater ambition, but Forrest understands the limits of family power.
“Tom’s take on the character was quite audacious,” says John Hillcoat, the film’s director. “He saw Forrest as the matriarch and the patriarch of the family, in the wake of their parents’ deaths. He wanted to explore Forrest’s softer side and play him in a quiet, contained way.”

