When a director is responsible for what Letterboxd describe as “single-handedly the best action movie I [have] ever seen,” you make sure to stand to attention whenever they’ve got a new release coming. After spending some time in the world of television with Gangs of London, Welsh action maestro Gareth Evans (The Raid, The Raid 2) is back to feature filmmaking. Havoc, a white-knuckle concoction of carnage, stars Tom Hardy as a cop fighting his demons while navigating a corrupt unnamed metropolis to try to rescue Charlie (Justin Cornwell), the son of a murky politician (Forest Whitaker).

Havoc piles on the cop movie tropes, with a rookie officer (Jessie Mei Li) assigned to partner up with Hardy’s Walker, a squad of corrupt detectives led by Timothy Olyphant posing as much threat to our leading man as the local Triad and the mother (Yeo Yann Yann) of their murdered leader who incorrectly blames Charlie for her son’s death. Oh, and it all takes place around Christmas. While the material may seem familiar, there’s no mistaking it’s Evans behind the camera, as his remarkable expertise in well-choreographed and unbelievably brutal violence is front and center yet again.

“Nobody does this sort of thing like Evans,” writes Ross, while Zach proclaims that the film is “chaotic, bloody and above all, violently relentless.” Comicbookfan ties Havoc to Evans’ iconic duology, stating that “[The Raid] films are brutal and violent and it’s cool to see that same level of brutality, gore, violence and exhilarating scenes of carnage, fighting and bullets everywhere again but with Tom Hardy.” “Tom Hardy hasn’t been this cool since Mad Max: Fury Road,” Shivu declares, as the actor brings his trademark personification of brooding despair while Evans sets the pieces for what CinemaCollect describes as “an insane, action-packed second half delivering two of the craziest action sequences of the decade that could only be delivered by Evans.”

I spoke with Gareth Evans and Tom Hardy about the specific cinematic influences they brought to the table for Havoc, the visceral approach they take to the film’s action and how Hardy’s role as producer helped shape the project.

Is that typically how your process goes, starting with an image? Like for The Raid 2, was there an image that you locked into or was this unique for Havoc?
GE: No, I think it’s always happened across everything. Literally everything I’ve done has been springboarded off a single image in some way or another. With Apostle, I always think it was an image of a deity underneath the floorboards, which was one sequence in that film that was probably one of the first things I imagined. And then suddenly building out all the mythology around that from just that image.

Tom, Havoc is one of several recent examples of you producing as well as starring in a project. Is there a different frame of mind you’re in day-to-day on set when you’re an actor-producer as opposed to being just an actor?
Tom Hardy: Yeah, it validates your opinion. [Laughs] There’s often times, when you come up as an actor, no one cares what you have to say because they’re too busy and that makes us feel insecure. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of actors, including myself, are irritating when we start giving our opinion when we’re at the beginning of our career.

GE: Oh, no, no. No way. [Laughs]

TH: We’ve got so many things we’re worried about right now, but what your character feels in the moment, it is important, but not right now. The producer label allows me to legitimately have a say and be heard, and that’s great. I strongly advocate for people to work hard and be persevering and ask all those annoying questions, and eventually it will pay off.

With that, there’s also a level of investment with an opinion. If I’m not bringing something to the table, I won’t expect it to end up still on the table, or to be digested, or to be taken on board. So as you get older, the more the shift has come from in front of the lens to laterally aside it around the back and being part of the pastoral care of a film project. All my specialties are probably more towards acting and story, but I do understand the games that are needed to play in finance and how things need to be moved around logistically and the investment and marketing and producing. It covers a lot of those bases.

GE: I think it’s quite multifaceted, isn’t it?

TH: It’s almost like a tribe.

Tom, you’re an actor whose physicality has always been so impressive. When approaching action sequences, how much are you thinking about what each character’s fighting style says about who they are? For instance, what does Tommy Conlon in Warrior’s fighting style say about who he is as a character, versus Bane’s fighting style, versus Walker’s in this?
TH: I do think about that, but it’s all very instinctive. Once I’ve picked a character’s shell or understand some of the fabric of their internal patterns and what type of person we’re going for within a wheelhouse, then a lot of the guys that you described, they’re all very primal and instinctive. They’ll be some kind of mammal. I don’t really play many reptiles in retrospect. Although I kind of do hybrids, sometimes, reptilian work and stillness like with Taboo and James Delaney, and all of these little bird-like elements.

But with fighting, I always look for an animal. I think of animals like the orangutan or the gorilla, the rage to a gorilla. There’s a stillness and then there’s an unequivocal traumatic force that will come out of nowhere, and I try to personify that somehow within those characters. It could be a bear or something primal and something animalistic. Then we look and go, “Okay, so what’s the choreography?”

With Batman, it’s already pre-laid. The guys have said, “Well, Bane does this. Batman’s doing this.” It’s the key scene pieces that we’re doing. And with Bane, we were thinking more like this and that. Everybody has their unique skills that they bring to choreography. Then you look at the actor and you go, “Well, I don’t think he’s capable of doing the splits. [Laughs] He’s not a high-kicky person. That one’s got absolutely zero flexibility.” So there’s a logical element of like, “Well, we just don’t ask Tom to do something where he’s touching his toes because it’s just not going to happen, so let’s not and say we did.” Or we get [stunt double Jacob Tomuri] to do it, because Jacob can touch his toes, do you know what I mean? We’ll put him on a wire.

That’s the great option as well about creating characters in movies or films and TV. Because there’s a [stunt] department, there can be multiple me’s to play Walker. So there are multiple people that can play Walker, multiple people that can play Eddie Brock or whatever, or Bane. And each of those people have the elastic limit of—perhaps they have squid stem cells, they can move their legs wherever they need to, and then I can do the act-y bits and I can be the gorilla here and they can be the octopus over there. So you can hybridize all of that kind of stuff into physicality.

All of that is taken under the caveat of physical life and how they would fight. And each character has their own smorgasbord of options that befits them within the tapestry or the landscape of their movie. Whether that’s Bane, James Delaney, Venom and Eddie, Walker. It’s  really important stuff. It’s the same as having an accent, a physical silhouette, a vocal silhouette. It’s part of their explorative nature and their communication skill set leading towards being convincing and compelling, hopefully

The whole sequence was logistically difficult to shoot, primarily because we were having to track through the gradual destruction of that property, step-by-step, shot-by-shot. Then also, a sequence like that was being split across two units. So we had our main unit shoot and then our second unit shoot that would follow behind us and then mop up shots that we maybe didn’t get. But those shots wouldn’t be the end of the sequence, they’d be dotted around throughout the scene. They would have to track their version of it where it’s like, “Oh, no, that window wasn’t blown out yet.” And then the next shot, now it is because we’ve jumped fifteen shots forward. So on a technical logistical level, it was a huge undertaking, and so thank goodness I had Tom Pearce, my production designer, across that film, and he was across Apostle as well and episode five of [Gangs of London]. So he was sort of accustomed to the level of destruction that I tend to do to his sets on a regular basis. [Laughs]

Other than that, the execution end becomes bite-sized little chunks and making sure that we can follow the flow of the POVs of the characters and make sure that we are hitting the percussive elements of the action design and then finding moments in there for an escalation of those punch lines, those key moments that make you gasp before we move on to the next gag. So whether it’s Charlie with an Uzi being a little bit gun happy with the person’s face, or Mia grabbing another Uzi off the floor and spray firing across a corridor as my little homage to A Better Tomorrow II. These were all little beats within there that were kind of designed to elicit a reaction from the audience, building all the way up to that crescendo with the harpoon gun.

The idea was to try to find someone authentic and then play with it, because oftentimes it feels that leading characters can be quite tokenary in an action movie. They’re just like tough guy heroes, but there’s nothing to learn. Or we all know that somebody’s partner may have died or they’re the still type who has got problems, but we don’t know what they are necessarily. So I was just trying to shore that up a little bit more. To find the ability to go, couldn’t I believe Walker if you took him and you put him in Platoon? I can see Walker in Platoon with Sergeant Barnes and Elias. I could see that being quite an interesting dynamic as well, and I wanted to bring that to Gareth and say, okay, do what you want with him.