Have you been watching Taboo on BBC1" Oh my lord. It’s very good – very good. It’s sort of a cross between an incredibly dark and violent Dickens story and something bleak and hopeless and beautiful, like, I don’t know, The Piano. The art direction is amazing, the plot is weird-but-interesting, the costumes and the sets completely capture everything that London in the year 1814 would have been. Stinking, dangerous, dimly-lit…
And then there’s Tom Hardy. Now look. I do happen to think – and I say this without any hint of irony – that Hardy is one of the best, most immensely talented actors of our time. I’d like to point that out first, because the following list reduces him to something of a nightshirt-wearing tattooed Sex God. All tongue-in-cheek, of course, but I’d hate for anyone to think that I’d ignored his actual skills…
In Taboo, Hardy plays the disturbed James Delaney who returns from a long spell in Africa to inherit his father’s shipping empire. Now this man, Delaney, is everything unsexy that you could possibly think of. He’s always covered in horse poo or blood or weird magical powders – he looks dirty, I mean really dirty, and he has previously had many sessions of sexytime with his own sister. So, y’know, by all rights this is not a character we should be even remotely attracted to. But then it’s Tom Hardy, and Tom Hardy was even sexy as Bane,...