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Before Tom Hardy was the "Bane" of the Batman franchise, he was a thorn in the side of another major big-screen franchise: Star Trek. Watch his first-ever interview with ET from back in 2002, when he played the heavy in Star Trek: Nemesis!

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In Nemesis, Tom plays Shinzon, a young clone of Patrick Stewart's Captain Jean-Luc Picard from the slave planet Remus who is looking to, of course, destroy Earth. Clearly, Tom relished the opportunity to play the villain, telling ET with a smile, "I get to beat [Picard] up! I get my own spaceship and wear tight purple spandex and have at it."

The soft-spoken Brit, who had previously only played soldiers in Band of Brothers and Black Hawk Down, displayed a respectable humility regarding his incredible opportunity to take on the major villain role in a Star Trek film.

"I've never been in this situation before in my life where I've had to do such a thing -- a film of such magnitude, or a role of such magnitude," he said. "If anything, [what I took] from that experience was that it can be done."

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He added, "When I was very nervous and very uncomfortable -- and I still am; it would be wrong to be confident totally, because something will go wrong and you might not be able to deal with it -- but if you're always in a state of alert, it is possible to do something with what you have, the instrument that you are and you use, and I'm just really thankful for the patience people had to allow me to sort of develop within that arena."

Looking forward, the future star of such event films as Inception, The Dark Knight Rises and the upcoming Mad Max: Fury Road was open to all sorts of possibilities: "We'll see. I don't know. Anything. I'd love to work with a lot of different people. I just started. I hope it doesn't end just yet."