Tom Hardy's Bill Sikes Anchors BBC's Gritty Oliver Twist

Before he became a major film star, Tom Hardy built his craft on television, with roles such as Robert Dudley in The Virgin Queen and Heathcliff in ITV’s Wuthering Heights. He made a particularly strong impression as Bill Sikes in BBC One’s Oliver Twist, a five-episode miniseries now available in the U.S.

on Prime Video and Hulu and for free via Roku. Created by Sarah Phelps, the adaptation moves between melodrama and bleak realism while often privileging lyrical, slow-moving visuals. Much of it was filmed at The Historic Dockyard Chatham, a choice that resonates: Charles Dickens’s father worked there as a clerk in the Naval Pay Office from 1817 to 1822, a detail that ties the production back to the novel’s world.

Phelps alters several elements of the original story in ways that sharpen the series’ focus on the criminal underworld. Fagin is treated sympathetically, framed as someone who escaped persecution and turned to crime to survive.

United States, Chatham

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