If anyone was going to make a period drama with a difference it was Esquire’s current cover star Tom Hardy, soon to reprise his role as Marvel anti-hero Venom – and his human host, Eddie Brock – in Venom: Let There Be Carnage. In the interview he revealed that his current commitments to the Venom franchise – plans for a third movie are already under discussion – mean he hasn’t yet had time to make the second series of Taboo, the 2017 BBC prime-time drama that followed the adventures of the mysterious James Keziah Delaney in the grime and corruption of early 19th-century London, and which Hardy co-created with his father, Chips Hardy, and Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight. But, as these exclusive extra comments reveal, when it does, it’s going to be just as bananas as you’d hope.

“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,” Hardy told Esquire, in an interview that took place in Cardiff, where he is currently filming Nathan Evans’ new martial arts movie Havoc for Netflix. “We’re still playing with ideas: you could go linear, a continuation of time, or we could drop prior to London [the first series starts with Delaney’s reappearance in the capital after a decade missing in Africa], 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.”

In fact, Hardy, continued, he was prepared to let his imagination run riot: “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 Sixties. 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.”

We’re sure that when Tom Hardy does find the Taboo idea that really grabs him, it will be as eccentric and exciting as the man himself.