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Tom Hardy doesn’t have a huge part in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tomas Alfredson’s fine new adaptation of John Le Carre’s thriller about the race to expose a highly placed Soviet mole in British intelligence. But directors don’t hire Hardy to disappear into the woodwork—not if they know what’s good for them, anyhow. He’s got a way of making movies curl around him for however long he’s on-screen.

As rogue agent Ricki Tarr, who crashes in on the gray world of “The Circus” like a juggler in a morgue, he gets to deliver one of the script’s key lines: “I don’t want to end up like all of you,” he tells careworn, emotionally seared master spy George Smiley, who’s played by Gary Oldman as if death’s door is just another Cold War filing cabinet to him. Hearing Hardy say his line, you can’t help imagining that, by extension, he’s addressing the veteran members of Her Majesty’s Loyal British Acting Establishment who have so fittingly been cast as Le Carre’s aging glory boys. After all, when you think about it, acting—not spying—is the U.K.’s best shot at retaining world influence.

His eminent costars deliver the blue-chip work we expect of them, whether it’s meticulous (Oldman), debonair (Colin Firth as arch-cad Bill Haydon) or craggily hammy (John Hurt as Control, Smiley’s wintry-souled mentor). Yet it’s no slight on their talents to guess that Hardy doesn’t intend to end up like any of them, either. He’s probably still best known Stateside for his puckish turn as Eames, Inception’s languidly unimpressable identity forger. And to Trekkies, ever a breed apart, for playing Shinzon in Star Trek: Nemesis back in 2002. But Tinker Tailor comes on the heels of his should-have-been-a-breakthrough performance earlier this year as the sullen prodigal son in Gavin O’Connor’s ambitious mixed-martial-arts epic, Warrior—a movie too few people saw, but one worth discovering on DVD just for the three-way brawl for acting honors between Hardy, patriarch Nick Nolte, and up-and-coming Aussie Joel Edgerton.

Hardy is always imaginative, and his best stroke in Warrior was to treat the camera as a prying threat. The more he ducked away, the deeper we were drawn in. He also likes to make himself unrecognizable from one movie to the next, but his appearance in Warrior was a shape-shifter even by his standards. Lank-haired and clammily booze-riddled, he was as convincingly American as a car junkyard.

To put it mildly, being typecast is not this man’s problem. In 2008, he charmed the daylights out of people as the elfin gay gangster in love with Gerard Butler—now, that’s a sunny view of human possibilities—in Guy Ritchie’s characteristically sloppy RockNRolla. The same year, he packed on 40 pounds of muscle and went startlingly full-frontal nude as the wild-man antihero of Bronson, Nicolas Winding Refn’s posh biopic about England’s most notorious prisoner.

In hindsight, neither movie deserved him. But if he didn’t care, why should we? It wasn’t just that those two characters, criminality aside, were about as unalike as anyone could ask. Displaying Hardy’s intuition for recognizing what kind of movie he’s in and reinventing his m.o. to match, the frisky ease of his acting in Ritchie’s mobfest was a universe away from his uproarious theatricality in Refn’s vaudeville show.

Better yet, no kind of movie is alien to him. If the joyless Daniel Day-Lewis that audiences know today seems fit only for cathedrals, Hardy has something that went missing in Day-Lewis’s acting long ago: a sense of mischief. He’s so naturally droll that he found a curdled wit even in Warrior’s dysfunctional Americana, just as he adds a zest for life (not John Le Carre’s specialty) to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Next year, he’s reuniting with his Inception director, Christopher Nolan, to play the villain in The Dark Knight Rises, and try to feel bad for Christian Bale if you can. Between being overshadowed by Heath Ledger last go-round and facing off against Hardy in this one, the guy just can’t catch a break.