British actor Tom Hardy has hit out at beefy modern action hero film roles, which he said he find "boring" to play.

In an interview with the Sunday Times magazine (£), The Max Max: Fury Road star blasted the "homogenised sort of eight-pack, tanned, straight-teeth, physicalised, action-hero leading male"

He also drew a distinction between Harrison Ford's 1980s Indiana Jones and Australian actor Chris Hemsworth's more recent portrayal of Thor in several Marvel Universe films.

"One was allowed to express personal characteristics ... Now you've got to look like you've just come off a vegan diet, gone to the gym, part Navy Seal, really clean-valued, clean-living, moralistic - and then you go out and save the world from an impending danger that isn't really dangerous at all."

"And it becomes not committed to any sense of the gubbins of reality: I don't recognise this man," he told the magazine

The Dark Knight Rises actor is currently on television screens in period drama Taboo which he created with his writer father, Edward "Chips" Hardy,

Hardy plays a rogue adventurer long believed to be dead in the drama which is set in 1814, and executive produced by Ridley Scott.

His character, James Keziah Delaney, returns to London to inherit what is left of his father's shipping empire.