British actor Tom Hardy won early raves from critics for his physical transformations in feature films and television movies, but his turn as a dream invader in 2010's Inception brought him new attention and became his breakout role. Tom Hardy started out playing tough-guy soldiers in Band of Brothers and Black Hawk Down (both 2001), then made his mark as an evil clone of Captain Jean-Luc Picard (played by Patrick Stewart) in the 2002 film Star Trek: Nemesis. By his own admission, Hardy's brilliant start was stymied by alcohol and cocaine abuse, but he bounced back a few years later in the BBC television movie Stuart: A Life Backwards (2007) and then as a flirty associate of Gerard Butler) in Guy Ritchie's 2008 film RocknRolla. Despite a powerful performance as the violent British criminal Charles Bronson in 2008's Bronson, Hardy was still unknown to most audiences. Then he played Eames, a British identity forger on a sci-fi dream team, in the Christopher Nolan film Inception. The film was a big hit, and Hardy is now recognized as an actor who will go to great lengths for a performance. He went from Inception to accepting the iconic role of Mad Max in a planned reboot of the Mel Gibson franchise from the 1980s, and took the role of the lead villain, Bane, in Christopher Nolan's 2012 Batman film The Dark Knight Rises.