Tom Hardy has become a household name in Hollywood thanks to his incredible performances in movies like Inception, Mad Max: Fury Road and The Dark Knight Rises.

He is particularly skilled at bringing villainous characters to life on the big screen.

However, even with all of his success, Hardy has had some missteps in his career, particularly early on.

Some of his performances have been just plain weird, featuring a plethora of different accents for audiences to enjoy.

Despite this, more often than not, the strangeness in Hardy’s performances works incredibly well.

The varied list of projects on his CV shows that he is never afraid to take risks.

From the inspired to the downright bizarre, these are the actor’s most surprising on-screen appearances.

In 2008, Hardy starred as Handsome Bob in Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla and Charles Bronson in Bronson, one of the strangest and most compelling movies in his filmography.

Hardy’s terrifying central performance sees him embody the UK’s most violent prisoner Charles Bronson with unnerving conviction.

Nicholas Winding Refn’s film mixed musical interludes with absurdist sequences, including one memorable scene in which he interrogates himself dressed as half man, half woman, as well as extreme violence and full frontal nudity.

Hardy took a key creative role in the BBC series Taboo, writing the script with his father Chips Hardy, and playing the tormented James Delaney.

Delaney returns to London after 12 years in Africa with a collection of stolen diamonds.

The show featured scenes of witchcraft, apparitions and other supernatural elements, which were brought to screen in increasingly surreal ways during the show.

Hardy’s ridiculous top hat and an unfeasible amount of grunting was pretty off-putting too.

However, it seems to have done something right – it’s set to return for a second series soon.

In 2012, Hardy starred in the anodyne romcom This Means War.

It’s hard to believe that Hardy starred in this movie in the same year as The Dark Knight Rises.

The two feel worlds apart, with the former marking something of an anomaly for the actor.

It saw Hardy and Chris Pine star as best friends and CIA operatives who find out they’re dating the same woman, played by Reese Witherspoon.

It was certainly one of the actor’s weakest high-profile movies to date and while the film isn’t strange in its own right, it feels staggeringly out of place compared to the rest of Hardy’s filmography.

The experience seems to have put Hardy off the genre for good too.

He previously said that his experiences on the set of the film were so bad, he’d never star in another romcom.

In 2003, Star Trek: Nemesis marked Hardy’s most significant film role to date and saw him act opposite Patrick Stewart.

His character in the movie, Shinzon, is in fact a clone of Stewart’s character Jean-Luc Picard, who eventually attempts to destroy the earth.

The character is certainly one of the most striking of his early career — complete with shaved head and a pantomime dame campiness, along with incredible 80s shoulder pads and a latex cape.

Nevertheless, it marked the first significant villainous role in the Hardy back catalogue, something he’d build on in movies like Bronson, The Dark Knight Rises, The Revenant and most recently, Venom.

However, the idea of Hardy in the Star Trek universe still feels like a pretty odd thing to comprehend.

Hardy achieved what every actor dreams about after graduating from drama school in 2003 – starring in a low-budget British horror movie with Mel B called LD 50 Lethal Dose.

The film followed a group of animal rights activists, Hardy and Mel B amongst them, who break into an isolated research facility running strange experiments on one of their former members.

The film came out a year before Hardy’s role in Layer Cake alongside Daniel Craig, which took his career to the next level.

In 2013, Locke saw Hardy take on the title role in a movie that takes place over the course of a single car journey.

The film follows Hardy’s character as he leaves home in mysterious circumstances the night before he’s due to oversee a concrete pour — not just any concrete pour mind, but the largest facility concrete pour in European history.

The movie plays out with Hardy making a total of 36 phone calls, with the camera barely leaving his face the entire film.

Hardy’s first on-screen appearance was in the groundbreaking war drama series Band of Brothers in 2001.

While the actor has limited lines in the role of John A. Janovec, Hardy did have one memorable scene, in which a commanding officer finds him n^ked and in a compromising position with a local German woman, forcing him to, ahem, leap to attention.

Tom Hardy popped up in 2006’s bizarre Brit movie Scenes of a s**ual Nature, which centered around a series of interlocking events taking place on Hampstead Heath.

With Ewan McGregor, Hugh Bonneville, Andrew Lincoln and Mark Strong all involved, it should have been better than it was.

However, Hardy’s sequence with Sophie Okonedo, which sees him caught, literally, with his trousers down, was one of the highlights of an otherwise uninspired movie.

Hardy delivered a brooding and occasionally unhinged depiction of Heathcliff in the BBC mini-series adaptation of Wuthering Heights in 2009, managing a convincing northern accent too.

It was surprising to see him go from the tour-de-force performance in Bronson to the wiggy costume drama in the space of a year (check out those sideburns), although the film proved another profile-boosting moment for the actor.

It’s also a notable moment for Hardy, as he met his wife Charlotte Riley during the production.

Two of the biggest British stars of their generation, Tom Hardy and Benedict Cumberbatch, appeared as relative unknowns in the TV movie Stuart: A Life Backwards, produced by BBC and HBO.

Hardy played a homeless alcoholic and addict with a traumatic and aggressive past, who forms an unlikely friendship with a writer in the movie.

Finally, one of Hardy’s earliest screen appearances wasn’t in an acting capacity, but as a model.

Hardy appeared on The Big Breakfast’s Find Me a Supermodel competition as a fresh-faced 21-year-old, winning the whole thing and earning a contract with agency Models One back in 1998.

He also revealed his dream was to star in films — something which has since been realized many times over.