Tom Hardy and the Welsh director Gareth Evans presented Havoc, a crime thriller shot in Wales as an American city, at its world premiere at the BFI IMAX.
Gareth Evans’s Havoc held its world premiere at the BFI IMAX in Waterloo on Tuesday 15 April 2025, ten days before it began streaming on Netflix. Tom Hardy, its star and one of its producers, led the carpet with Evans.
Evans was born in Hirwaun, in the Cynon Valley, in 1980, and made his name in Indonesia, where The Raid and The Raid 2 set a new standard for martial arts filmmaking. He returned to Britain for the horror film Apostle and created the series Gangs of London. Havoc, which he wrote as well as directed, was his first feature since Apostle in 2018.
Hardy plays Walker, a compromised detective who goes looking for a politician’s estranged son after a drug deal ends in bloodshed and finds a city’s corruption closing in around him. Hardy, born in Hammersmith and trained at the Drama Centre London, broke through in Bronson in 2008 and carried Locke almost alone on screen; Havoc gave him a part built around Evans’s set pieces.
The film was shot in Wales in 2021, with its streets and sets built to stand in for an American city over a sixteen-week shoot. Forest Whitaker, Timothy Olyphant and Jessie Mei Li appear alongside Hardy, and Luis Guzmán and Justin Cornwell were among the cast who joined him at the premiere.