NEW YORK (AP) — Tom Hardy has collected troves of knowledge and skill throughout his journey as an actor, forming a megastar career. But any education he received from director Guy Ritchie during their time on the 2008 “RocknRolla” film was gained from afar.
“I didn’t have very much to do with him ... the first time I worked with him. Gerard (Butler) was leading that film and in many elements, we were support staff,” said Hardy. "So, I got to experience being on the Guy Ritchie set, and it was a bit from a position of not being a lead, and that’s a different responsibility.”
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Director Guy Ritchie, left, and Helen Mirren pose for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of 'MobLand' on Thursday, March 27, 2025, in London. (Photo by Millie Turner/Invision/AP)
Tom Hardy, from left, director Guy Ritchie and Pierce Brosnan pose for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of 'MobLand' on Thursday, March 27, 2025, in London. (Photo by Millie Turner/Invision/AP)
Helen Mirren, from left, director Guy Ritchie, Pierce Brosnan and Tom Hardy pose for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of 'MobLand' on Thursday, March 27, 2025, in London. (Photo by Millie Turner/Invision/AP)
Tom Hardy attends the Paramount+ television series premiere of "MobLand" at the SVA Theatre on Monday, March 31, 2025, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
But time can bring people and experiences back around, especially in Hollywood. Since that film 17 years ago, Ritchie has transitioned into esteemed directorial status. And Hardy has morphed into a box office superstar with films like “The Dark Night Rises” as the imposing villain Bane, and the titular role for Marvel’s “Venom” franchise. Now, the two have reunited for Ritchie’s gritty, yet sophisticated series “MobLand.”
“I was really keen to go back and work with him because he’s a fellow Brit and he’s done quite incredible work,” explained Hardy. “I wanted to go and play with him, actually, and see what that was like now I’m older, and it was good fun.”
The Paramount+ original series follows Harry Da Souza (Hardy), an intimidating, yet calm fixer for a London-based crime family hoping to find the missing son of a rival faction to prevent a catastrophic gang war.
How did Hardy prepare to play such a menacing, yet even-keeled character?
“No acting required” he said with a big laugh. “Just turn up and, ‘Oh, yeah, that makes sense’ and say the lines. Don’t bump into the furniture.”
The second episode of the 10-part “MobLand” series airs Sunday on Paramount+.
The series was created by Ronan Bennett, known for popular crime shows like “The Day of the Jackal” and “Top Boy,” and written with playwright Jez Butterworth. Ritchie serves as executive producer and directed the first two episodes. The “MobLand” idea began as a spinoff from Showtime’s popular “Ray Donovan” series, before becoming a stand-alone show.
Two-time Oscar-winner Helen Mirren stars as the devious Maeve, matriarch and manipulator of the crime family, while Pierce Brosnan plays her husband and mob leader, marking a reunion for the pair who worked on the 1980 film “The Long Good Friday.”
It may be hard to think of a role that Dame Mirren hasn’t played, but she found one with “MobLand.”
“There are always characters out there that are going to take you by surprise and … I think, ’Oh my god, I’ve never done anything like that before,” said the “1923” star who believes the line between shooting film and TV is now nearly nonexistent. “That’s one of the sort of beauties of my job, actually, is to constantly be entering into such very, very different worlds.”
Mirren said the opportunity to work with Hardy was intriguing.
“Tom’s involvement in it was one of the reasons I signed up because I’ve admired his work over many years,” Mirren said. “Different actors, you can see, ’Oh, they’re a great actor' … they can perform. But certain actors like Tom, it’s an interior power that just communicates with the camera. And Tom’s got that. You know what? It’s called star power.”
The “MobLand” cast features Paddy Considine of “House of the Dragon” fame, Joanne Froggatt, Lara Pulver, Anson Boon and Mandeep Dhillon. While this show technically reunites Mirren and Brosnan, they also shot the upcoming “The Thursday Murder Club” film prior to this project.
While much was unknown when Brosnan signed on, “MobLand” had all the right ingredients for the former James Bond to dive in, starting with Ritchie, who released his Netflix series “The Gentlemen” last year.
“He’s naughty. He’s cheeky. He’s bold,” said Brosnan. “I love his work. His movies. The way he’s acquitted himself on the landscape of cinema. He’s a unique talent all his own … so I said yes. I wanted to go back to London. I wanted to work."
Next for Hardy is the crime drama film “Havoc” premiering later this month, and there's chatter of a potential sequel to his 2015 “Mad Max: Fury Road.” A second season of “Taboo” is on the way — nearly a decade after its debut. What about a “Spider-Man” and “Venom” crossover? Hardy addressed the rumors that an alleged project fell apart, clarifying it was never in the works.
“People embellish a story. I just said I would have loved to work with ‘Spider-Man,’ but it never happened, which is a fact. It hasn’t happened. And I’m no longer working with ‘Venom’ … it is a shame because my kids would love to watch Venom and Spider-Man together,” said Hardy. “I would have liked that.”
This story corrects title of film in paragraph 3 to “The Dark Knight Rises.”
Follow Associated Press entertainment journalist Gary Gerard Hamilton at @GaryGHamilton on all his social media platforms.
Director Guy Ritchie, left, and Helen Mirren pose for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of 'MobLand' on Thursday, March 27, 2025, in London. (Photo by Millie Turner/Invision/AP)
Tom Hardy, from left, director Guy Ritchie and Pierce Brosnan pose for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of 'MobLand' on Thursday, March 27, 2025, in London. (Photo by Millie Turner/Invision/AP)
Helen Mirren, from left, director Guy Ritchie, Pierce Brosnan and Tom Hardy pose for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of 'MobLand' on Thursday, March 27, 2025, in London. (Photo by Millie Turner/Invision/AP)
Tom Hardy attends the Paramount+ television series premiere of "MobLand" at the SVA Theatre on Monday, March 31, 2025, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
