When Christopher Nolan was finished writing Dunkirk, there was only one actor he had in mind to play the unflappable Spitfire pilot Farrier: Tom Hardy.

The director has said he knew that Hardy would make the most of the part with few words or physical movement while in the Spitfire cockpit, engaged in dogfights with German Messerschmitt Bf 109 planes. And often it’s not easy to recognise Hardy. The actor is known for playing roles that cover his face — as Farrier in Dunkirk, Bane in The Dark Knight Rises or the grizzly mountain man John Fitzgerald in The Revenant, for which he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

It’s no wonder then that Hardy is barely recognisable as prohibition-era crime boss Al Capone in Josh Trank’s upcoming Fonzo.

Trank’s film will take a dark look at gangster tales, following a 47-year-old Capone who has already spent 10 years in prison and is suffering from dementia and experiencing flashbacks from his violent past.

Fonzo was announced in October 2016 but was stuck in the development stage for a while, according to reports. Filming was initially scheduled to start in the summer of 2017, but Hardy instead went on to shoot Venom for Sony, which is set for an October 5 release.

According to the production notes, the story will see Capone’s dementia setting in and the “past becomes present as harrowing memories of his violent and brutal origins melt into his waking life”.

Capone, the most infamous and feared gangster of American lore, spent the last years of his life in seclusion at his house in Florida. He fished from his boat, doted on his grandchildren, dined on his wife Mae’s spaghetti — and had imaginary conversations with long-dead mobsters, some of whom, he’d had killed.

His brain ravaged by a syphilis infection that had gone untreated, he had the mental capacity of a 12-year-old.

The man who had once ruled the Chicago Outfit, a multimillion-dollar bootlegging and racketeering empire that spanned North America, was just happy to be taken to the drugstore to buy a pack of Dentyne gum.

In the 1920s, his yearly income was estimated at $40 million. But he ran the Outfit for only six years. He spent most of the 1930s in jail for tax evasion.

When Capone was released in 1940, the Outfit gave him a salary of $600 a week, hardly enough to support his family, house and staff, the New York Post reported.

Capone died in bed on the morning of January 25, 1947, aged 48. The cause was bronchial pneumonia. His death made front pages around the world, but the funeral was a modest affair because the Outfit allowed only a few of Capone’s old friends to attend.