Andrea Mandell

USA TODAY

TORONTO — Tom Hardy is not really a festival guy, despite possessing one of the most electric résumés in town.

"I don't really go to film festivals," says the actor, who brought The Drop, his new gangster drama opposite the late James Gandolfini to the Toronto International Film Festival (it hits theaters this weekend). "I went to Cannes for about five minutes. I went to Venice for about five minutes just to see a film I was in."

The promotional side of the movie business is, to be kind, not really Hardy's forte. His specialty is a scorched-earth style of palpable intensity on screen. In the past year Hardy has left critics in awe at his performance in the one-man show Locke, playing a man fielding frantic phone calls as he drives toward his fate in the middle of the night. Verbal standing ovations similarly came after The Dark Knight Rises (he was Bane), Inception, Warrior and his breakout, Bronson.

The acclaim, this "Monopoly money" kind of fame, is new, and the English actor is not entirely comfortable with it. "When we were doing Bronson I was making $15,000 a year. We were pushing (it) up a hill," says Hardy. "I was thinking, 'I'm going to give up if this doesn't break somehow or I to get into a place where I start making some real money.' " His current status "is kind of unreal right now."

Speaking of status, Hardy stars in George Miller's hotly anticipated reboot Mad Max: Fury Road which required seven months of complete detachment while shooting in the Namibian desert. Hardy says he had "no previous experience," with Mad Max. "I knew the imagery – like I know who John Wayne is. Like I know lines from Casablanca. But it doesn't mean I know it. There's enough iconography around to go, oh yeah!"

The blockbuster hits theaters next summer. Hardy compares the film's non-stop action to "the first 10 minutes of Saving Private Ryan or Black Hawk Down … a huge barrage and orchestration of violence. It's huge. That's what Fury Road is doing right now, today but with George Miller's vision."