It’s been a long and winding road for Taboo season 2. Though certainly not due to a lack of interest (from either fans or the creatives behind the scenes).
Six years after receiving its official renewal order from the BBC – which occurred all the way back in 2017 – producer Dean Baker seemingly confirmed the greatest piece of media starring Tom Hardy was finally receiving a follow-up.
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“Currently we are working on a second season of Taboo, and hopefully we will get to explore more Dickens [like Great Expectations] with Steve, Ridley, and Tom.”
Dean Baker, 2023 (via Radio Times)
But obviously, not much in the way of progress in the two years since that update. And for a while, it felt as though the BBC period drama, which the Venom actor co-created with his father Chips Hardy and regular collaborator Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders, Locke), would never provide another episode.
That is, until recently.
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The ship hasn’t sailed: Tom Hardy posts (and speaks)
Like most announcements in this day and age, it all started with a social media post. Specifically Tom Hardy’s and on Instagram.
The star of Guy Ritchie’s MobLand shared a highly stylised painting of a ship flocked by crows sailing towards the horizon, a thinly-veiled reference to his character and the trail of death that follows him, along with a not-so-thinly-veiled reference: the song ‘The Inexorable Advance of Mr Delaney’ by Max Richter, composed for and prominently featured in Taboo season 1.
Eagle-eyed Redditors even noted that Hardy initially posted a version of the image with the text “Taboo season 2” accompanied by a hat, two ace of spade emojis, as well as the tongue-in-cheek tag @sonofhorace1814, before deleting this original and throwing up the current image (which has been disabled for comments).
Tenuous? Perhaps, though practically solidified in stone shortly thereafter during an interview with LADBible, wherein Tom Hardy revealed fans can “absolutely” expect a sequel to Taboo.
“We’re writing that at the moment.”
Tom Hardy, 2025 (via LadBible)
Prior to this, Steven Knight had revealed “six of the eight” episodes had already been written.
“We are trying to get stars aligned so that we can get our star back on set. He’s busier than me,” he joked to GQ; though in truth, both have effectively become victims of their own success.
Adding elsewhere: “Tom and I have been talking about this for I don’t know how many years now. But we’ve always known we’ve got to do it. And we’ve got the idea, we know what we’re doing, we know what the story is.”
What could the second season of Taboo be about?
The question of “where it goes next,” of course, will be quite a fascinating one.
Set in 1814, during the tail-end of Great Britain’s war against the nascent United States, the first season of Taboo followed the exploits of former soldier, adventurer, and businessman James Keziah Delaney (Hardy).
A grizzled Delaney returns to England – and “back from the dead” – after spending twelve years in Africa following the passing of his father Horace (Edward Fox). Shortly after his arrival, he inherits the daddy dearest’s shipping empire… in addition to a piece of strategically-placed land both the East India Company and the Crown are apparently willing to kill for, dubbed Nookta Sound.
After the bombshell finale, however, much like the New World, the sophomore instalment offers a wealth of opportunity in terms of storytelling.
“The second season of Taboo is really, really important to me, and it’s taken a lot of thinking, because I really enjoyed the first one and I want to be really fulfilled by the second one,” Tom Hardy told Esquire in 2021.
“We’re still playing with ideas: you could go linear, a continuation of time, or we could drop prior to London, or we could quantum-leap through time! I don’t know whether to go orthodox – there’s a series of that already written – but I don’t know if that’s the right way to go.”
Hardy added: “In my head I was thinking, ‘Let’s say they get to America, they get to Canada, fast-forward to 1968, the Tet Offensive, the Vietnam War, look at the CIA, the Viet Cong, the French in Saigon…'”
“Take the Delaney family tree out in the jungle, and recreate the same family dynamics that were happening in London but with new people, thinking about how history and corruption repeats itself. It’s still Taboo, it’s still period, but it’s the 60s. There’s something fun about that.”
“Or do we go back to the 1800s? The Napoleonic Wars? The American War of Independence?’ But nothing’s crossed my heart and mind and desk where I’ve gone ‘That’s it!’ so I’m hanging fire.”
Guess everyone outside of the production will simply have to wait and see.
Do we know the Taboo season 2 cast members?
Beyond the involvement of Tom Hardy himself as James Delaney or any Delaney descendant, and considering the question mark that is the second season’s story, we do not know who will appear in Taboo going forward.
Taboo season 1 starred the following:
- Leo Bill as Benjamin Wilton, a records officer with the East India Company
- Jessie Buckley as Lorna Delaney (née Bow), Horace’s widow
- Oona Chaplin as Zilpha Geary (née Delaney), James Delaney’s half-sister and lover
- Stephen Graham as Atticus, an underworld informant to Delaney
- Jefferson Hall as Thorne Geary, Zilpha’s husband and an insurance broker
- David Hayman as Brace, Horace Delaney’s loyal servant
- Edward Hogg as Michael Godfrey, minute taker with the East India Company
- Franka Potente as Helga von Hinten, a brothel madam
- Michael Kelly as Edgar Dumbarton, an American physician at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and spy
- Tom Hollander as George Cholmondeley, a chemist and scientist
- Marina Hands as Countess Musgrove/Carlsbad, an American spymaster in London
- Jonathan Pryce as Sir Stuart Strange, Chairman of the East India Company
- Jason Watkins as Solomon Coop, Private Secretary to the Sovereign
- Mark Gatiss as Prince George, Prince Regent during the King’s mental illness
- Nicholas Woodeson as Robert Thoyt, Delaney’s solicitor
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When is the Taboo season 2 release date (Australia or otherwise)?
Currently, neither BBC nor FX (or any other credible source) has any indication of when the Taboo season 2 release date will fall. Assuming this isn’t a false alarm and production actually gets underway within the year, we could hypothetically expect it towards the end of 2026 to early 2027.
Is there a Taboo season 2 trailer?
Hard no. But we’ll keep you abreast on all things Taboo season 2 right here.
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