The two scenes featuring Tamzin Merchant naked bring us to the end of our journey of covering all of the nudity in the first season of Carnival Row and getting us ready for the second and final season. This second season will begin to air on February 17, 2023, so only a week and a half from time of me writing this. The release schedule is going to be a bit different. As I’ve said in each of the other posts for the series, Season 1 released all in one go, which meant that the show staggering Cara Delevingne’s two nude scenes to the third and fourth episodes did nothing to dampen any spotlight monopolization that may – and definitely did – occur.
Mind you, the Tamzin Merchant nude scenes – which appear in the penultimate and final episodes of the first season – fared a bit better. They don’t get nearly as much mention as Cara’s, but they certainly get a lot more press than Orlandlo Bloom ploughing his landlady played by Maeve Dermody or the fantastical fae brothel scene featuring Karla Crome. All that said, Season 2 is unlikely to suffer from the same problem because it has now been confirmed that the new episodes of Carnival Row will release two at a time over a five week period between February 17 and March 17. Well, 29 days, technically, but you know what I mean.
The question on everyone’s lips is obviously whether we will see Tamzin Merchant nude again in the new season, and since this will be the end of the show, for the last time as Imogen Spurnrose. I will obviously be monitoring the situation and reporting on it as it goes in the same way that I did for House of the Dragon and (less fruitfully) for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Tamzin is certainly no stranger to nudity, but at the same time, she doesn’t exactly have that Eva Green or post-Twilight Kristen Stewart energy of being naked in absolutely everything she’s in.
We first saw Tamzin Merchant topless in The Tudors, which I suppose wasn’t unusual for that show. My most evergreen celebrity crush Natalie Dormer notably also had her nude debut in that show. The only other time we’ve gotten to enjoy Tamzin Merchant naked was in the French film The Dancer / La Danseuse. We could have seen her naked a whole lot more over the past decade and a bit since Tamzin Merchant was the original actress to play Daenerys Targaryen. Seriously, they filmed a whole pilot and everything, including the infamous wedding scenes with Khal Drogo. The original pilot was almost completely scrapped for being crap, and part of the rework involved significant recasting, one expression of which was replacing Tamzin with Emilia Clarke. I can’t tell you how often I hope to wake up and find out that the original Game of Thrones pilot has leaked.
I also feel like we could have gotten a Tamzin Merchant sex scene or 20 in her debut-ish role as Margo Durrell in BBC’s 2005 adaptation of My Family and Other Animals, given the character’s proclivities. In spite of its image, the network is no stranger to that kind of thing, as we have seen time and time again, and yet, no luck. Nor was there when ITV adapted the same books as The Durrells with Daisy Waterstone as Margo Durrell. The good news there is that Daisy had a certain very early role that will now scratch that itch for us forever. Bless independent short films.
For all the speculation we’ve been through, I do believe there actually is a good chance that we’ll be blessed with Tamzin Merchant’s tits again in Season 2 of Carnival Row. Why do I say this? Well, information has been scant until now, but our English rose did say in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that Imogen Spurnrose stops wearing a corset partway through the second season. Make of that what you will, but in the meantime, enjoy all of the Tamzin Merchant nude scenes from Carnival Row Season 1 below.
