The 45-year-old Briton dives back into a major new series, based on a New York Times bestseller.
The crime genre never loses steam, not least with a star like Tom Hardy starring in a surefire new film. According to Deadline, the 45-year-old Briton will be one of the big names attached to the latest Apple TV+ project, Lazarus, a gripping story about a serial killer based on a critically praised New York Times bestseller of the same name, with 17 million copies sold worldwide.
Deadline compared the series to The Silence of the Lambs, with Tom Hardy challenging, in a Hannibal Lecter-like role, an undercover police detective played by Joker's Zazie Beetz (here, the Clarice Starling of the situation).
Written by Lars Kepler (pen name of author couple Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril and Alexander Ahndoril), Lazarus is one of the best-known chapters in the series of novels dedicated to Joona Linna, a top detective who goes on the trail of the creepiest killers.
In Lazarus, the seventh book in the saga on paper, it turns out that a vagrant found on a railway line is a boy who disappeared thirteen years earlier along with his sister, presumably the victim of the terrifying serial killer Jurek Walter. The police's goal is then to track down the survivor between the two as well: to do so, Beetz's Detective Saga Bauer goes undercover in the maximum-security facility housing Walter, setting up a twisted meeting of minds similar to Jonathan Demme's aforementioned psychological thriller (adapted from Thomas Harris's novel, of course).
The series will be written, executive produced, and directed by Øystein Karlsen, who is considered one of Norway's most sought-after TV writers, having directed acclaimed works such as Dag and Exit, as well as having directed the Netflix crime thriller Lilyhammer.
After lending his face for years to the Venom franchise, Tom Hardy has decided to go back to his roots, and this will be the first TV series in which the Oscar winner will star in a lead role since Taboo, although he has since been seen in a handful of docuseries (most notably the soccer documentary All or Nothing: Tottenham Hotspur in 2020), not to mention Peaky Blinders. This year he will also star in Gareth Evans' action thriller Havoc for Netflix, described as a crime story set in the underworld, and is expected to appear in Jeff Nichols' ensemble drama The Bikeriders alongside Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, and Michael Shannon.
