Tom Hardy To Star In BBC Drama Series ‘Taboo,’ Produced By Ridley Scott, Penned By Steven Knight

With “Locke” coming to theaters later this month, and with a role booked for the second season of “Peaky Blinders,” it looks Tom Hardy and writer/director Steven Knight are getting along smashingly. And they are now set to expand their working relationship.

Hardy has signed up to star in the eight-episode drama series “Taboo,” penned by Knight, and produced by Ridley Scott‘s Scott Free and Hardy’s Son & Baker, with the project set up at BBC One and Sonar Entertainment. Set in 1813, the story follows James Keziah Delaney (Hardy), a rogue adventurer who returns from Africa with 14 ill-gotten diamonds to seek vengeance after the death of his father. Refusing to sell the family business to the East India Company, he sets out to build his own trade and shipping empire and finds himself playing a dangerous game with two warring nations, Britain and America.

Power, ego, ambition, hubris? Sounds like the makings of a tantalizing lead character. “This man, James Delaney, is a deeply flawed and deeply troubled human being.  His greatest struggle will be against the East India Company which, throughout the nineteenth century, was the equivalent of the CIA, the NSA and the biggest, baddest multi-national corporation on earth, all rolled into one self righteous, religiously motivated monolith,” Knight stated in a press release.

And as if we don’t have enough to look forward to next year, production on “Taboo” will start in January 2015.