Tom Hardy is an actor who seems to be constantly drawing attention for his performances, as well as his ability to embody any role. He most recently proved his tremendous skill in the Guy Ritchie-produced gangster drama, MobLand, alongside the likes of Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, and Paddy Considine, making the show a powerhouse on Paramount+. However, this is not the first time Hardy has played a criminal mastermind in London looking to use his connections and wits to enforce his will on others. Before MobLand, his 2017 crime drama series Taboo was dreadfully underappreciated at the time.
Taboo follows Hardy’s James Keziah Delaney, a businessperson who has been away in Africa for many years, and returns to claim his father’s inheritance, which includes a small island in North America that is far more important than most realize. Hardy is thrilling to watch because Delaney’s mystifying edge makes him terrifying and unpredictable. However, some of Taboo‘s greatest strengths actually stand in contrast to MobLand, including the former’s focus on the lower classes and arguably higher-stakes politics.
Tom Hardy Brings an Animalistic Energy to His Performance in ‘Taboo’
While Hardy has played many chaotic characters in the past, such as Alfie Solomons in Peaky Blinders, the savagery he carries in every scene of Taboo is something that hasn’t been seen since his critically lauded performance in Bronson. Because Delaney’s head is filled with terrible visions of slaves chained in ships, Hardy has a twitchy body language that’s never scared but always prepared to fight.
His piercing stare reveals him as someone who looks beyond outward appearances, but into someone’s very soul, which adds to his ominous presence and makes the other characters’ fear of him that much more believable. Of course, Harry Da Souza is very active in MobLand as the character continually putting out the Harrigans’ fires, but Delaney’s urgency in Taboo makes him far more of a force of nature, charging to his goal.
‘Taboo’s Setting Allows the Show To Explore a Broader Range of Issues
In MobLand, the politics takes place between individual businessmen and women, but Taboo includes the element of nation states becoming entangled in Delaney’s quest for money and power. The island that Delaney has inherited, Nootka Sound, sits in a key location between British-ruled Canada and America, as negotiations between the two sides are beginning over where the border will be drawn, making it disputed territory. This makes him one of the key players in the most significant war in the world at that time, as whoever he sells the island to will control more land, and the entanglement brings in the East India Trading Company. This inclusion of seriously powerful players and their representatives, such as an American spy named Edgar Dumbarton (Michael Kelly), who is also a cold-blooded killer, and the head of the East India Trading Company, Sir Stuart Strange (Jonathan Pryce), makes the odds feel hopelessly stacked against Delaney.
Furthermore, the period that Taboo is set in allows for concepts that wouldn’t be possible in a more contemporary show like MobLand, one of them being the supernatural. Between using voodoo to have vision-sex with his half-sister, Zilpha Geary (Oona Chaplin), and knowing what his father’s last words were despite not being present, Delaney’s strange abilities, and what he uses them for, are in keeping with Taboo‘s dark version of London. This theme of a superstitious and disturbing setting is also created through the series’ depiction of the poor. People are constantly living in squalor, and children are exploited to feed their families. All of it further helps to make Delaney an unlikely hero who, despite his strangeness, is not as horrific as the world around him.
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‘Taboo’s Action Is Far More Brutal Than ‘MobLand’
One of the obvious takeaways from watching Taboo is its visceral nature, and the gore on screen makes the world of the showfeel far more merciless than even MobLand‘s. In one episode, Delaney is attacked by an assassin from the East India Trading Company, who severely wounds him. In a fit of rage and delirium, Delaney tears out a piece of the man’s neck with his own teeth, killing him instantly and covering himself in blood in the process. The series boasts guts being sliced into and severed heads, but this is not violence for violence’s sake. The brutality of the kills is an immediate sign of which mistakes will be punished in the narrative. While MobLand‘s bullets and explosions are definitive ends to characters’ lives, there is something far more anxiety-inducing about a knife slowly cutting into someone or the piercing of flesh that takes its time in killing.
Overall, Taboo deserves far more praise than it gets, and you have the opportunity to change that by binging the series, especially with Hardy himself recently commenting that the possibility of a second season is not lost. Even if we don’t get a follow-up, there is still plenty to enjoy about this dark and twisted tale.From bloodcurdling action to a more dystopian version of London, Taboo stands on its own, with Hardy’s performance serving as a return to a side of him we haven’t seen for a while.
taboo
- Release Date
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2017 – 2016
- Network
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BBC
- Showrunner
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Steven Knight
- Directors
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Anders Engström, Kristoffer Nyholm
