In 2002, after Star Trek: Nemesis, Tom Hardy was hailed as the Next Big Thing. But it never happened and he hit the bottle. Now he's bouncing back. By Gareth McLean

By his own admission, Tom Hardy's favourite subject is himself. "I make no bones about it," he says, his pillowy lips split wide in a grin. "Actors, like all artists, are deeply self-interested. But I'm also aware of how unimportant I am. In the majority of actors, there are battles between massive egos and low self-esteem. Look at me! No, don't look at me! Love me but don't touch me!"

Hardy is certainly a man of grand statements and unusual frankness. He explains that he's never felt comfortable in his own skin and that his good looks have felt more of a hindrance than a help. (I know, your heart bleeds.)

"If anything, it was an impediment being a pretty boy. When I was a kid, people thought I was a girl but I wanted to be strong, to be a man. My vulnerabilities were permanently on show when I was young. I had no skin as a kid. Now I'm covered in tattoos."

This discomfort in his own skin may go some way to explain Hardy's capacity for transformation. For the part of Stuart Shorter in BBC2's adaptation of Alexander Masters's Stuart: A Life Backwards, he lost two stone, inhabiting the role of the homeless alcoholic "sociopathic street raconteur" with alarming aplomb. When he played Charles Bronson, one of the UK's most notorious prisoners, in the recent film Bronson, he bulked up, putting on three stone by doing 2,500 press-ups a day for five weeks.

For his latest role, in The Take for Sky1, Hardy plays Freddie Jackson, a seductive monster released from prison who, with his cousin, sets about building a criminal empire and shagging his way around the less salubrious parts of 80s London. Based on Martina Cole's thriller, The Take swaggers on to the screen, eschewing subtlety for broad strokes, bursts of sex and violence, and clunky but historically accurate mentions of aerobics. It's The Godfather meets Life On Mars.

With a streetwise swagger of his own, Hardy comes across as someone raised on the wrong side of the tracks. In truth, he's a nice middle-class boarding-school boy from East Sheen. "I always had a sense of shame about being privileged," he admits. "It's taken me a long time to realise that it's OK to be from Sheen, that it's OK to be a public school boy. It's not where you're from, it's where you're at."

Partly, this increased acceptance of himself has come from becoming a father. Hardy has a one-year-old son Louis with girlfriend Rachael Speed, an assistant director he met on the set of BBC1's The Virgin Queen. "It's no longer about just you. You have to get on with things. I may be working away a lot but I'm working damned hard to make sure my boy is getting everything he needs." And partly, it's because Hardy has, for someone of 31, lived quite a life.

After supporting roles in the Steven Spielberg-produced mini-series Band of Brothers and Ridley Scott's film Black Hawk Down, Hardy hit the big time in 2002, when he played the villain in Star Trek: Nemesis. Unfortunately, the film flopped. Heralded as the Next Big Thing and then promptly stripped of that imprimatur, Hardy became an alcoholic and a crack addict. His addictions cost him his marriage.

"I went entirely off the rails and I'm lucky I didn't have some terrible accident or end up in prison or dead - because that's where I was going. Now I know my beast and I know how to manage it. It's like living with a 400lb orang-utan that wants to kill me. It's much more powerful than me, doesn't speak the same language and it runs around the darkness of my soul. I would sell my mother for a rock of crack."

Hardy is candid about his own damage ("The drink is a symptom of a problem - an inability to accept life on its own terms") and about what, initially at least, seems to be the paradox of the entertainment industry: it is a business based on rejection and yet it attracts an awful lot of insecure individuals. "It's a brutal business but it's masochism, isn't it? If you have a capacity for damage and you live with damage, then you seek damage."

Hardy's talent for divining damage serves him well as an actor. Whether as Bill Sikes in BBC1's 2007 Oliver Twist or as Jack Donnelly in Channel 4's demented thriller Cape Wrath, Hardy oozes charming menace. Later this year, he'll play Heathcliff in a new adaptation of Wuthering Heights by Peter Bowker, writer of BBC1's recent Occupation. "Tom is the first Heathcliff I've ever seen who you honestly feel could beat the living daylights out of you," Bowker says. "He brings great pain to the role. What Tom instinctively understood was that Heathcliff knows power because he's been abused by those in power. Even at his most bullying, you sense what's driving him."

So what drives Tom Hardy? "I want everyone to love me."

And has he got what he wanted? "You get to the point where you can't please everyone. I don't want constructive criticism, I want adulation," he beams. "That's immature but it's totally there. King Baby."

• The Take is on Wednesday at 9pm on Sky1.