This blogger is over 18 and the content is 18+ 🔸Tom Hiddleston is my favourite (Twitter: @hiddlethings)🔸(If you're not into Hiddles then I likely followed you from my Side Blog for my other fave.)
The idea of returning for a second season of The Night Manager was challenging, if not downright impossible, the stars and creators say.
Of all the things Tom Hiddleston remembers about the 2016 release of The Night Manager, a moment with Joe Biden immediately comes to mind.
The actor, who played Jonathan Pine in the original BBC One/AMC production and its subsequent season on Prime Video, remembers how the 46th president approached him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to say how much he loved the John Le Carré adaptation about an undercover night porter who spies on Hugh Laurie’s arms-dealing Richard Roper.
“All sorts of extraordinary people would approach me to say how much they loved it, like President Joe Biden,” remembered Hiddleston. “It’s an extraordinary privilege to make something that has an impact like that, that the audience really took the show to their hearts, and it seemed to reflect something honest about the state of the world at the time.”
Hiddleston was joined by his The Night Manager co-star Diego Calva, director/executive producer Georgi Banks-Davies, executive producer Stephen Garrett and creator/executive producer David Carr for a conversation at Deadline Studio @ Prime Experience. Watch their conversation below and scroll down for photos from the event.
As compelling (and Emmy-winning) as the first season was, Farr unwittingly “painted ourselves rightly into a narrative corner,” admitted Garrett. That made the idea of returning for a second season challenging, if not downright impossible, because “we’d actually ended the story.”
“We’d done what so many shows now that come back don’t do, leaving audiences frustrated because they’re setting up a second season,” he added. “We had no intention of setting up a second season. It’s a difficult story to tell and all credit to David and everyone else involved that [Season 2] turned out the way it did.”
Credit for the success of Season 2 – which launched on Prime in January – goes to the “fresh ignition” that is Calva (Babylon, Bird Box: Barcelona). He plays Teddy Dos Santos, Roper’s illegitimate son who has taken up the family business.
“I had a thought about Teddy as a character, this very strange, lonely, other son who’s sexually fluid, odd,” says Farr. “Then the next piece of the jigsaw, just to kind of keep the momentum, was to find an actor who could take that on. Suddenly the show had its own color and feel. It was an exciting moment for all of us.”
What transpires in Season 2 is an extraordinary journey of two men who become unwitting partners in a quest to destroy Roper once and for all. Now living under the alias Alex Goodwin in London, Hiddleston’s former intelligence officer character finds out that Roper is not only alive and kicking but backing a military coup in Colombia and using an illegal charity to train kid soldiers. Teddy wants to please his absentee father but learns through Pine that daddy will never love him the way he adores his blue-blooded white son back in the UK.
One of the more provocative moments of the six-episode second season is when Pine and Teddy perform a seductive dance with Camila Morrone’s Roxana, who ends up looking like a bit of a third wheel.
“It’s about power,” explained Banks-Davies. “It’s about using sex as power. Roxana is using it against Pine in the first instance and then bringing Teddy in to weaponize the moment. Those shields kind of slip. The connections start to truly come together. Some of that is sexual chemistry, and some of it is just friendship and camaraderie and danger. For one simple dance, it’s quite complicated.”
“It’s really dangerous,” continued Hiddleston. “So much of what Diego and I talked about with Teddy and Pine wasn’t necessarily about their physicality. It was about their spiritual bond that they connected through so many shared experiences, even though they’ve had very different lives. They both recognize each other. They’re both orphans and perhaps not literally, but they feel as though they are. They’re alone in the world. They have deep wells of private pain and deep wells of complex interior life. They understand the tension between the external and the internal and they recognize each other very quickly. We had a phrase which Diego translated from it takes one to know one…”
“Como el que sabe sabe,” says Calva.
“There’s almost a brotherhood between them,” continues Hiddleston, to which Calvo responds, “and a common enemy.”
The Night Manager, which also marked the return of Laurie and Olivia Colman as Angela Burr, will return for a third season.
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