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.
Collider Exclusive · Action Hero Quiz Which Action Hero Would Be Your Perfect Partner? Rambo · James Bond · Indiana Jones · John McClane · Ethan Hunt
Five legends. Five completely different ways of getting out alive — with style, with muscle, with charm, with luck, or with a plan so intricate it probably shouldn’t work. Ten questions will reveal which action hero was built to have your back.
🎖️Rambo
🍸James Bond
🏺Indiana Jones
🔧John McClane
🎭Ethan Hunt
01
You’re dropped into a dangerous situation with no warning. What do you need most from a partner? The first few seconds tell you everything about who belongs beside you.
02
You have to get somewhere dangerous, fast. How do you travel? How you get there is half the mission.
03
You’re pinned down and outnumbered. What does your ideal partner do? This is when you find out what someone is really made of.
04
The mission is paused. You have one evening to decompress. What does your partner suggest? Who someone is when the pressure drops is who they actually are.
05
How do you prefer your partner to communicate mid-mission? Good communication is the difference between partners and a liability.
06
Your enemy is powerful, well-resourced, and has the upper hand. How should your partner approach them? The approach to the enemy defines the partnership.
07
Things go badly wrong and you’re captured. What do you trust your partner to do? Who someone is when you need them most is the only thing that matters.
08
What does your ideal partner bring to the table that you couldn’t replace? A great partner fills the gap you didn’t know you had.
09
Every partnership has a cost. Which of these can you live with? No one comes without baggage. The question is whether you can carry it together.
10
It’s the final moment. Everything is on the line. What do you need from your partner right now? The last question is the most honest one.
Your Partner Has Been Assigned Your Perfect Partner Is…
Your answers have pointed to one action hero above all others. This is the person built to have your back — for better or considerably, spectacularly worse.
Rambo
Your partner doesn’t talk much, doesn’t need to, and will have assessed every threat in your immediate environment before you’ve finished your first sentence. John Rambo is not a man of plans or politics — he is a force of nature shaped by survival, loyalty, and a capacity for endurance that goes beyond anything training can produce. He will not leave you behind. He has never left anyone behind who deserved to come home. What you get with Rambo is the most capable, most quietly ferocious partner imaginable — one who has been through things that would have broken anyone else, and who chose to keep going anyway. You’ll never need to ask if he has your back. You’ll just know.
James Bond
Your partner will arrive perfectly dressed, perfectly briefed, and with a cover story so convincing it’ll take you a moment to remember what’s actually true. James Bond is the most professionally dangerous person in any room he enters — and the most disarmingly charming, which is the point. He operates in a world of layers, where nothing is what it appears and every advantage is used without apology. You’ll never be bored. You’ll occasionally be furious. But when it matters — when the mission is genuinely on the line and the margin for error has collapsed to nothing — Bond is exactly the partner you want. He has survived things that have no business being survivable. He does it with style. That is not nothing.
Indiana Jones
Your partner will know the history, the language, the cultural context, and exactly why the thing everyone else is ignoring is actually the most important thing in the room. Indiana Jones is brilliant, reckless, and occasionally impossible — but he is also one of the most resourceful, most genuinely knowledgeable partners you could find yourself beside. He approaches every situation with a scholar’s eye and a brawler’s instinct, which is an unusual combination and a remarkably effective one. He hates snakes and gets personally attached to objects of historical significance, both of which will slow you down at least once. It doesn’t matter. What Indy brings is irreplaceable — and the adventures you’ll have together will be the kind people write books about. Assuming you survive them.
John McClane
Your partner was not supposed to be here. He does not have the right equipment, the right information, or anything approaching the right odds. He has a sarcastic remark and an absolute refusal to accept that the situation is as bad as it looks. John McClane is the greatest accidental hero in the history of action cinema — a man whose superpower is stubbornness, whose contingency plan is improvisation, and whose capacity to absorb punishment and keep moving would be alarming if it weren’t so useful. He will complain the entire time. He will make it significantly more chaotic than it needed to be. And he will absolutely, unconditionally, without question come through when it counts. Yippee-ki-yay.
Ethan Hunt
Your partner has already run seventeen scenarios by the time you’ve finished reading the briefing, and the plan he’s settled on involves at least two things that should be physically impossible. Ethan Hunt operates at the absolute edge of human capability — technically, physically, and intellectually — and he brings the same relentless precision to protecting his partners that he brings to dismantling organisations that shouldn’t exist. He is not easy to know and he will never fully tell you everything. But he will carry the weight of the mission so completely, so absolutely, that your job is simply to trust him — and the remarkable thing is that trusting him always turns out to be the right call. The mission will be impossible. He will complete it anyway.
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’s 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.
‘Taboo’s Action Is Far More Brutal Than ‘MobLand’
James Delaney talking to someone off-camera in Taboo.Image via FX
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.
