“I would have sold my mother for a rock of crack,” Tom Hardy has admitted in a recent interview discussing his turbulent younger years.

The Mad Max: Fury Road star may be on the straight and narrow today, but he has opened up about a past fraught with drug addiction and misplaced aggression.

Speaking to Essentials magazine, the 37-year-old said he’s lucky to be alive after spending many years addicted to cocaine.

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“I am f***ing lucky to be here,” Hardy admitted of his drug abuse.

“I was told very clearly, ‘you go down that road, Tom, you won’t come back. That’s it. All you need to know.’”

The British actor sobered up in 2003 after spending years being what he described as “a shameful statistic”.

While Hardy now has a reputation as an action star and Hollywood bad boy, he claimed he wasn’t always a rebel.

“People didn’t sit up and take any notice of me until I started putting on weight, kicking people and being aggressive,” Hardy said.

“The trouble with Hollywood is that they want you to be something, then they think you’re who they wanted you to be.”

The London-born star, who is married to British actress Charlotte Riley and has a seven-year-old son with an ex-girlfriend, has also been open in the past about his criminal history, including a prison stint for car theft and gun possession.

“I was a lot naughty,” he told The National in 2012.

“I hit a brick wall of behaviour. There were the options of institution, death, prison or insanity, and I could tick the boxes on three of those so I was very lucky that I had a moment of clarity.

“Something happened and I did something so heinous that I saw myself and I didn’t want to be that person. So from that moment on I ceased to be that person and started to grow towards the person I wanted to be.

“I never want to go back to that again. It’s craziness.”