Tom Hiddleston Talks The Night Manager Series Two

Did you always think you’d one day return to the role of Jonathan Pine?

I think I felt I had unfinished business with this role. I found making the first series incredibly fulfilling, I found it really stimulating. It was about the world as we find it, but it was also about fascinating, mysterious characters with very deep, complex inner lives. John le Carré is the great specialist at combining those two things – political reality and personal complexity – within a great spy story, a sense of thrill and mystery.

Through the course of the first series Pine changes: he begins as a night manager at a luxury hotel, and he closes as a field agent for the Security and Intelligence Services. He’s been activated. Some fire has been lit in his heart and in his soul, which will not be extinguished until the end of his lifetime. What does he do with that fire? Where does he go now?

For those coming into this second series completely fresh, what is The Night Manager all about?

The Night Manager is an espionage thriller; it’s about secrets and betrayal; about trust and loss. It’s about a former soldier turned hotelier turned spy, Jonathan Pine, who is enlisted as a field agent for MI6 to infiltrate the operation of a British arms dealer, who is charming, sophisticated and appealing. But his enormous wealth is attained through illegal arms dealing with bad people, and Pine must take this man down. They are two sides of the same coin: Jonathan Pine and Richard Roper are such similar men; they’re English, and brought up in a similar world, but they exist on opposite sides of a very thin line of moral clarity.

Where do we pick up with Pine at the beginning of season two?

Eight years have passed, the world has changed. Roper is dead, and Pine has been living another life, under another name: ‘Alex Goodwin’. In that half-waking sleep of Alex Goodwin, a scent of familiar dragon smoke glides into Pine’s sphere and the old dragon-slayer in Pine is reactivated. There is a strain of something he recognises, and that impels him to Colombia, into another dance with danger.

Can you introduce the new personas that Pine takes on?

In the intervening years Jonathan Pine has been living under an alias of Alex Goodwin. Alex Goodwin runs a unit for MI6 called The Night Owls. They are a collection of lost souls who run a surveillance operation collecting information on luxury hotels in London and on anyone that MI6 might want to keep track of. It is quiet, passive work, but it keeps him busy. Goodwin is quiet and self-contained, his job is to look and listen. His job is not to act, it’s to pass information up the chain and move on. After the chaos and trauma of the first series, there is some peace in it, he’s found people he belongs to, a family of disparate individuals he can connect to, who he looks after and leads. Pine as Goodwin is still nocturnal – still not fully integrated into normal society because he’s still working for MI6 – but he’s as close to content as it’s possible for him to get. Then one night he sees a familiar face, and he can’t help but follow the scent.

Pine then sheds Alex Goodwin and becomes Matthew Ellis, who is a high-flying, reckless financier. He lives hard and plays hard. He has money to burn, money to lose, money to win, and money to waste. All great le Carré characters wear masks, the personae of other lives – as le Carré himself called it, ‘the imprint of personality’ – where there’s a tension between the exterior and the interior. The outward self is projecting one thing, whilst the inner self is experiencing another. But somehow through the mask, some inner truth is articulated that can’t be articulated as Pine.

That’s what I find interesting. Le Carré once wondered: “there is no centre to a human being”. Where is the centre of Jonathan Pine? There is one – I believe – but how are different aspects of him expressed through these different personae? Each persona expresses different dimensions of Pine’s inner life. Somewhere, underneath all the masks, is his true character.

Let’s discuss the new members of the ensemble cast, what do Diego Calva and Camila Morrone bring to this world?

I have been blown away by their work in this. They’ve taken what’s on the page and given it an extra dimension in every conceivable aspect. Diego Calva plays Teddy Dos Santos, who, on the face of it, is Pine’s antagonist, trading illegal weapons under the counter to create political and civic instability in Colombia. Opposite to Pine and me, Diego is majestic, thoughtful and sensitive. Roxana Bolaños is played by Camila Morrone, who comes into the series as a woman of mystery and intrigue.

Pine has a complex history of guilt and shame after two women he got close to were put at great peril because of their proximity to him, and he worries that Roxana is going to follow the same pattern. It turns out Roxana’s much more complicated than that. She’s got her own fire, pain, and her own mission. The dance that Pine and Roxana must do is one of trust and betrayal, which really is the theme between them. Camila has just thrown her whole soul at this character. Camila’s performance is so instinctive and has a magnetism; it’s very fiery and unpredictable.

Can you talk to the talents of David Farr and his scripts?

David Farr has achieved the impossible. The Night Manager was based on a novel by John le Carré, there was no second novel, no sequel. David has written it with all the sophistication and complexity that le Carré would approve of and admire. Teddy, Roxana, Colombia, Alex Goodwin and Matthew Ellis have all emerged from David’s imagination. This is where he chose to go, and we all followed him there. He’s forensic about detail, and brilliant at the plotting of a complex spy thriller. It feels like a roller-coaster. David’s scripts are exciting, dangerous, edgy, mythic and complex. It’s about shame, guilt, and redemption.

Has it been exciting to bring a new story to life on screen, knowing audiences and fans will not be familiar with all the various twists to come?

Over the last decade people have often asked me if there will ever be more from The Night Manager, and I’ve never been able to confirm or deny. So, it’s very exciting to have arrived at this juncture where we have made something new, which has the familiar flavours, spices and strains of what we did the first time. But this is something completely fresh and original. This second series has a depth, a resonance and a rawness of emotion. We’ve been very brave about that, and committed to pull the masks away from these characters, to let you see their innermost truths, in all their passion and complexity. I’m excited for audiences to see it.

What has it been like collaborating with director Georgi Banks-Davies?

Her passion, vision and connection to the project has been the most inspiring thing. It’s like there was a flame lit within her: she understood the story, she understood what David Farr had written, she connected to it very deeply and has elevated everything that all of us have done. Georgi has a particular taste, which I admire. She’s passionately interested in vulnerability, and in seeing the truth of these characters as human beings. She’s forensic about making sure we see that on screen. I think it’s made the entire season feel emotionally raw in a very different way.

The Night Manager is elegant and sophisticated, and Georgi has retained that. But she has been brave enough to pull the layers away so that you see the intensity of feeling that these characters are driven by. You see their passion, their pain, their regret, their suffering, their solitude, and their needs. I will always be immensely grateful to her for that, because she’s always trying to chase something more truthful.