There aren’t many shows that can take a multi-year break between seasons and return with a fresh batch of episodes that are on track with their predecessors — and have possibly even surpassed them. This season, The Comeback with a third and final year that arrived over a decade since Season 2 and a full 20 years since Season 1.
On the drama front, that honor goes to The Night Manager, which successfully returned to Prime Video for Season 2 following a decade-long gap between its freshman year on AMC. That previous run garnered 12 Emmy nominations, including acting nods for stars Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, and Olivia Colman. It also picked up two wins, scoring a directing nod for filmmaker Susanne Bier and a music composition statuette for composer Victor Reyes.
Based on John le Carré’s 1993 novel of the same name, the first season was a cat and mouse game between spy Jonathan Pine (Hiddleston) and villainous arms dealer Richard Roper (Laurie). But the men ended up becoming close, which challenged Pine’s goal of taking Roper down, although the villain did die in the end.
Fast-forward ten years, and Hiddleston is part of The Night Manager‘s new chapter, which strikes out on its own as the author never wrote a second novel. This time, Pine has Colombian arms dealer Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva) in his sights, but once again makes the mistake of becoming too close to his target. The series also springs a major twist that catches both the audience and Pine off guard: not only is Roper still alive, but he’s also Teddy’s father.
Throughout the season, Hiddleston plays the story’s big action moments with as much fervor as he does its quiet moments. In a chat with Gold Derby, the actor talks about his love for this character, the intimacy that develops between Pine and Teddy, and how the upcoming third season will find Pine very much alone.
Gold Derby: Take me back to when you first were having conversations about jumping back into Season 2 after so much time away.
Tom Hiddleston: The very first conversation I had was with David Cornwell — also known as John le Carré — at the Berlin Film Festival in 2016, where we screened the first two episodes [of Season 1]. We all went back to the hotel, and he leaned across with a sort of mischievous twinkle in his eye and said: “Perhaps you might think about doing some more.” That opened the box for me for what I might do if we got a second chance. In a way, it never left me.
Events took over and we all got older and went through the Covid-19 pandemic. But we also didn’t just want to go back into the kitchen and reheat yesterday’s meal. It had to stand alone. I felt like The Night Manager was the creation of several people: Hugh Laurie, [executive producers] Stephen Garrett, Simon Cornwell, [writer] David Farr, and Susanna Bier. It was such a highlight for all of us and if we were going to go back, it had to be bigger and braver. We had to risk more, and it had to cost more.
It didn’t become real until I heard from David Farr in 2021, and he’d had this extraordinary dream about Teddy. In the interim, we had lost John le Carré and we had all seen each other at his extraordinary memorial service. So much of the origins of his stories come from his childhood; his father was a con man and his mother left the home when he was five so objects of trust were unreliable. Later in his life, he talked about how all of his writing found its beginnings in this turbulent childhood. You become very adept and very agile at reading people and trying to find truth in a sea of lies — you’ve actually become a spy, for want of a better word.
I tell that story because David Farr’s dream was about unreliable fathers and the impact on their sons, and the idea that Roper might have had a son we didn’t know about in South America. And, of course, Columbia is the location of The Night Manager novel. It seemed to have a synchronicity that it was just all going in the right direction.
How did you feel about jumping back in to play Pine?
As soon as I heard it might go again, I pulled the book down from the shelf, opened the first page, and it all came flooding back. I felt like I had this old friend that never left me. I poured great chunks of myself into the character, and the experience of making The Night Manager awakened certain ideas and theories about the world we live in that reside in me even now.
I love how courageous the character is. I love that the show talks about Englishness or Britishness in a very specific and very personal way, but it’s also suggesting a bigger conversation about who we are. The fact that it had been so long was something that excited me, because I was older and hopefully wiser. But the jury’s out on that!
Spies are supposed to be in control of the different personas they have to play, but we see Pine getting lost in that a little bit. How do you approach those moments?
What I find so interesting about Pine is that I feel there are aspects of his character — and I use the word character very carefully — as distinct from his personality. There are immutable elements of who he really is that don’t get expressed as Jonathan Pine. They only emerge when he’s pretending to be someone else, and the reason that he’s such a good liar is that he’s not lying. He’s telling the truth, it’s just that that truth is expressed through the mask of another identity.
Across both seasons of The Night Manager, Pine has played Jack Linden, Thomas Quince, Andrew Birch, Alex Goodwin, and Matthew Ellis. I feel like every time he puts on a new identity, there’s a shift in the style, and the way they carry themselves in the world. The reason he’s so adept at playing these roles is because he has a great range within him, and that’s why he makes such a great spy. But of course, for someone who’s so adept at pretending, it’s easy to get lost in the maze, and he has to be very disciplined about holding on to himself.
Le Carré would tell you the act of espionage is an act of seduction. You can only get close to someone and invite them to betray their secrets to you if you gain their trust, and the act of gaining someone’s trust is incredibly intimate. The business of seduction is part of it, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be sexual. Part of the thrill of playing Pine — and I hope part of the thrill of watching it — is that there are moments where if he makes one false move, he’s a dead man. The stakes are so high.
I love the chemistry between Pine and Teddy because they both feel lonely and need something emotionally from each other. Am I onto something there?
One hundred percent. They’ve both grown up as orphans — although Teddy’s not an orphan because his father’s still living — but their emotional experience has been isolated from a very young age. They’ve also had to live double lives and have deep wells of private pain where they had to muster courage, determination, and motivation to get them through the world.
What’s so interesting about how the show has been received is that we didn’t really talk about sexuality. We talked about intimacy, and I think the two are quite different ideas. They’re like planets who are orbiting the sun of Richard Roper, so they share that kind of gravitational pull towards this human being. They then have to form a bond and ask each other for real trust and real protection.
But again, the thing that happened almost by accident has to do with the way we made the show. I have a fire in my heart about doing things for real, and I believe the audience can smell it. Our director, Georgi Banks-Davies, feels the same. In fact, I said something to her in prep: “There’s no time for unreal.” She put it on a baseball hat and gave it to me!
We were shooting in Colombia in August, and I was with Diego, who is a very physical actor and instinctive actor, and also a very powerful man. When you’re in that environment — the music, the culture, the sound, the weather — all of that is part of the intimacy that I fostered with him. I like to think that John le Carre would have approved. You see that bond between men in some of his other novels.
For Season 3, Pine’s going to be more alone than I think he ever has been. What can you say about what’s to come?
I can’t say too much because we’re all in the kitchen cooking it up. But I do know that he’s absolutely alone, and completely isolated. The last time you see him [in Season 2], he’s bleeding out in the jungle. What happens next? That fascinated me as a place to begin because he’s got more water under the bridge: more trauma, more pain, more loss, more struggle, more courage, and a degree of failure. It feels epic and it feels appropriate. If you go back to the ancient stories, the best and most alive protagonists are the ones who are the most isolated — and to see them find a way home is part of the fun.
