10 years after The Night Manager changed his life, Tom Hiddleston returns to Jonathan Pine having resolved his own identity crisis
The meeting of Tom Hiddleston and John Le Carré in the autumn of 2017 could have appeared in one of the British espionage writer’s novels: a chance encounter set in the early morning grandeur of Hampstead Heath, as the nation is gripped by post-Brexit uncertainty. Plus one badly behaved cocker spaniel puppy called Bobby.
The men had met two years earlier, ahead of the making of the first season of The Night Manager, the BBC series based on Le Carré’s book of the same name in which Hiddleston plays the British intelligence agent Jonathan Pine. Back then, Hiddleston had asked if there was anything Le Carré would like him to know. And, in a moment of high drama that has since been woven into the lore of the show, he replied, “‘Well, of course, Tom, you will have guessed by now that Jonathan Pine is me and now he must be you.’”
Suit and shirt by Tom Ford. Tie, vintage from Ebay. Shoe by Christian Louboutin.
And so, at 35, Hiddleston became Pine, and in turn that season of television changed his life. He won a Golden Globe. He became aware of being really known in the world, where everyone confused him and the agent he had played. And because of that confusion, the question of whether he would play James Bond came to follow him around. Meanwhile, having had his big breakthrough moment as Loki in 2011’s Thor, the thirst of Marvel fans was steadily increasing with each release. By the time he and Le Carré crossed paths again, Hiddleston had experienced the disorientating one-two combo of intense fame and a public relationship and subsequent break up with Taylor Swift. And at a fourth of July party in 2016, a private joke between friends snowballed into the most scrutinised vest in history. So he went dark for a while, and, in November 2017, he got a puppy. Before long he was taking Bobby to Hampstead Heath to train.
It was here that he bumped into Le Carré on his morning constitutional, and over the following months and years they had long conversations about the recently-elected Donald Trump; about the intensifying situation in Ukraine; about Brexit. “He would have these extraordinary takes on what was happening in the world,” Hiddleston recalled. “He had been a spy himself and seen behind the curtain. He still really believed in the country and the best things about it. It made him sad that things were being denigrated.
One topic the pair kept returning to was a second season of The Night Manager, the prospect of Hiddleston becoming Pine again hanging in the morning mist. They didn’t manage to get it done before Le Carré died in December 2020, but 10 days after he passed away, his sons Simon and Stephen Cornwell came to Hiddleston with the version of the second season that their father had wanted. The idea had come from a dream which David Farr, the writer of the first season, had after Le Carré became unwell following a fall: a vision of a black car driving through the hills of South America, winding towards a boy with an expectant look in his eyes.
As it has in the real world, 10 years have passed in the world of The Night Manager. In that time Pine’s identity has been buried and erased. Instead, Pine becomes Alex Goodwin, working for a surveillance branch of MI6 called the Night Owls – lonely, nocturnal work befitting a paranoid and fractured nation. “It’s been a long 10 years: Five prime ministers; three presidents, one of them twice; a pandemic; untold international conflict; fragmentation; uncertainty…” Hiddleston says. “We all know spies are out there, patrolling the boundaries of our reality. But what happens if those people have an existential question of, what are we defending? What’s the Britain that the service represents?”
This season is a portrait of many different types of Britishness, but it also returns to the backdrop of the original novel by drawing Pine out to Colombia. There he meets arms dealer Teddy Do Santos (Diego Calva) and his associate Roxana Bolaños (Camila Morrone), entering into a Le Carré-esque triangle of intrigue and deception where he is very soon in over his head.
Hiddleston made a deal with himself that he had to fulfil if he was to become Pine again: “This has to be bigger, braver, deeper, more exposing,” he says, his voice becoming bigger, braver, deeper, more exposing. “You have to risk more. You have to give more. It's going to cost more physically and emotionally, and it's going to be worth it.”
It is early December and in a café near Regent’s Park, Hiddleston arrives for lunch shaking the rain from his jacket. He has more years under his belt than when we last saw Jonathan Pine but he looks good: bright-eyed, handsome in an earthy, clean way. Still, the passing of time was a reality he experienced as a jumpscare when he saw the first episode’s recap of season one. “OK! Definitely in my mid-forties,” he laughs.
He goes in deep as soon as he arrives: my sister’s baby was born this morning – Is everyone well? Isn’t birth the “most beautiful, profound, earth-shattering, life-altering” experience there is? It’s something he experienced just the other day, he says, welcoming his second child into the world.
You might have been expecting this Tom Hiddleston: the one who is relentlessly, sincerely enthusiastic about Bukayo Saka’s inherent goodness and the beauty of Andy Murray’s workmanlike style of play. The one who can quote Nietzsche's famous line that the strength of a person's spirit can be measured by how much truth he could tolerate, almost word perfect. The Tom Hiddleston who does eerily good impressions and viral dance routines on chat show sofas, and is portrayed in interviews as having a labradorish zeal for even the simplest pleasures (see, notably: Bolognese).
But in the time since the first season of The Night Manager, Hiddleston has put the work into his off-screen self. He had a similar reckoning, he says, at 27, when he was only landing small TV parts and kept getting rejected at auditions. As a result, he felt like he wasn’t really in control of his life. “When I was a young man, I was constantly doing what I've been told to do. I got myself twisted in all kinds of knots, both personally and professionally,” he says. “Eventually I was like: Tom, get a grip. Go towards what interests you and motivates you. Get rid of people who don't make you feel good, who embarrass you or make you do things you don't want to do. Try not to be such a people pleaser and see where you end up.”
Shortly after he says this, as if to test the status of his people-pleasing rehabilitation, a diner from another table comes over pretending to ask what the carrots on our plates are in order to get his attention. “These are carrots,” he says happily.
But he knew his work wasn’t over back then, because a year or so after the wave of attention following The Night Manager, Hiddleston felt like his life was getting away from him again. He paused and took stock to work out if he really wanted to keep plugging away on the actor’s journey, and if so, why. “Suddenly you're looking at your choices in a different way and thinking: what do I want to do with my time and my energy? If you're really honest with yourself, some of those questions are quite hard,” he says, speaking with the careful pace of a highwire artist. “I think I had to confront a lot of stuff in my life, and the confrontation was really challenging and painful, but transformative.”
Part of that process was about making peace with himself and “all the mistakes and all the missteps and all of the moments where you said the wrong thing, did the wrong thing, made the wrong choice”. By becoming intimately acquainted with all the parts of his shadow self that he’d buried or just didn’t want to deal with, he realised that you can only change your life if you accept who you really are.
One challenge was keeping the opinions of strangers – good or bad, social media or tabloid headlines – at a safe distance. He avoids talking about anything in particular, but it is hard not to see a connection between this decision and his having to endure months of public analysis over his behaviour during a brief, private relationship, and even questions about whether it was real. “I'm really grateful for that scrutiny in some way because it generated inside me a real self discipline and rigour to [accept that] everyone's entitled to their opinion, but you have to be really disciplined about your own opinion of yourself,” he says. “That will keep you safe in the choppy waters.”
And part of it, he thinks, could just be getting older, having kids and welcoming the shift of perspective that brings. Hiddleston spent most of this year filming Tenzing, the story of the first person to climb Everest, Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay. The initial shoot took place in Nepal, where he trekked through the snow in minus 15 degrees, wearing 100 layers and with his fingertips cracking from the cold. When he returned to London in August he felt so grateful for his soft, gentle life. One night he vividly remembers sitting on the sofa watching the US Open on television with his partner, the actor Zawe Ashton. “I was reading the FT, and I was like, this is great. A perfect night. Dog on my lap. Everyone's here! I was feeling so happy to be together, to be the pack,” he says. “I love my ordinary life and I like the part of myself that’s really ordinary.”
This appreciation for healing and stories that offer some kind of redemption is something Hiddleston has admired since a young age. When he was a boy, he watched The Shawshank Redemption, which set off some internal fireworks. “I still find it incredibly emotional. It's so moving, the idea that you get another chance. I suppose I want that for everyone” he says. He felt it again when he was 14, at a production of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman at the National Theatre, and the way Paul Scofield as Borkman showed the soul of this great man made the teenage Hiddleston burst into tears.
He always wants to show the face behind the mask, because he believes inside all of us is a softness, and watching those stories has always made him feel less alone. This is why he loved playing Marvel supervillain Loki, whom he made sympathetic and fallible over a 15-year arc. That journey culminated at the end of the second season of his spin-off TV show with Loki being given a second chance; to choose not to be the bad guy. “In order to become someone different, whose story had a different ending, he had to make peace with the things he did,” Hiddleston says. “It gave him the power of authorship over his own story.”
When we meet Hiddleston has recently finished filming Avengers: Doomsday, picking up from the “glorious purpose” that Loki found at the end of season two. “My contribution has been contributed,” he says of the forthcoming film. And then, slightly less evasively: “It is monumental. The centre of the story is absolutely brilliant, and was so surprising when I read it. It just has never been done before.”
In his recent production of Much Ado about Nothing, Hiddleston relished the experience of removing the mask as Benedick. In Act II, Benedick overhears his friends saying that he is too proud to be loved by Beatrice and every night on stage Hiddleston would say: “I must not seem proud: happy are they that hear their detractions and can put them to mending”, putting words to Benedick’s realisation that he must make himself vulnerable in order to be loved. And every night he really could hear the audience thinking, Oh shit! Or, to put it in Hiddleston’s English: “what a perfect, crystalline jewel of an idea!”
Redemption is a little harder to come by for Jonathan Pine given the many masks he wears. For Hiddleston, the most enjoyable parts of playing him this season were when he is pulling the strings: like a tennis match that he carefully orchestrates (killer serve, Hiddleston’s own), or stunts like scaling a wall and a motorbike chase, which he diligently trained for and was desperate to take on. So much so that, while filming the latter, he slipped on the post-thunderstorm concrete of Medellín and went flying.
But the most challenging moments were letting the audience occasionally see glimpses of a broken man trying his best. Hiddleston often thinks about when Federer and Nadal used to go to five sets, and the way the camera would cut to a close-up after a double fault. That pain! That dignity! If only he could put that vulnerability into a performance. With Pine he tried to let flashes of it show. “You see it for a moment, the window to his soul is opened and then closed, and this impeccable agent is back behind the wheel.”
In returning to the world of The Night Manager, Hiddleston wanted to keep Le Carré’s voice alive in his head. To help him do so, Le Carré’s son Simon had pointed Hiddleston to a 2023 documentary called The Pigeon Tunnel by director Errol Morris, interviews for which took place a year before Le Carré died. “It really is Le Carré’s last word on himself,” Hiddleston says. “It's almost an interrogation and a confession in the same breath.”
In the documentary, Le Carré talks openly about his painful childhood where his mother walked out when he was very young, leaving him with his father who was a known conman. Throughout his childhood the rug would constantly be pulled: money came in and soon went away. People arrived then were never seen again. They would suddenly have to move house. Nothing was real.
There was one part of the documentary that Hiddleston kept coming back to – a section which he now starts reciting as a dramatic monologue in the restaurant, causing the woman at the next table to look over. Her jaw drops ever so slightly.
“Of truth we didn't speak, of conviction we didn't speak,” says Hiddleston as Le Carré. “The most important thing was the imprint of personality. You learned very quickly early on, that being off stage was boring. You polish your act, you tell funny stories. You learn,” he breaks for a moment, “and this is the line that hit me between the eyes,” he resumes character. “You learn early on, there is no centre to a human being.”
Hiddleston watched the documentary over and over again, searching for the parts of himself that Le Carré had written into Jonathan Pine. “He'd invested Pine with so much of his own complexity and this duality: that young boy who just needs things to be stable, who wants his mother to stay, who wants his father to tell the truth,” he says.
And yet Hiddleston couldn’t help but need to believe in the human heart of the man he was playing. “I think there is a centre to Pine actually, and maybe that's because I believe in his goodness,” he says. “I believe in the goodness of people and things.”
After he says it there’s a moment where I can almost see him cringe, so he backtracks to explain. He doesn’t want to sound Pollyannaish, but he has come to see that you can only appreciate the goodness in people by facing down the bad. He’s confronted the cynicism inside him and the reality that people aren’t always so great. But seeing his kids come into the world with such unvarnished goodness was evidence that we are all born that way and should try to hold onto it. And even though he has now been here for five hours despite only being obliged to stay for two, and it’s dark and rainy outside, and at home his Christmas tree has been up for four days without any decorations, and urgently needs his attention, he keeps asking questions.
And before he finally leaves he asks one more: “Do you think there’s a centre to a human being?” And I say yes because I can’t bear to say no, but also because you could not look at this man and believe that was not true.
“It has taken a long time but I know what the centre of me is,” he says. “At least, I hope so.”
Her Arab contemporaries raved about her being very interested and knowledgeable in the sciences.
She completely reformed the system in Alexandria, and Egypt at large; making it much more of a functional powerhouse.
She did what 300 years of her ancestors couldn’t: Managed to get the support of both the Greek AND Egyptian subjects she ruled.
There is a sculpture that has been identified as her, through comparisons to coins minted under her rule, that proves beyond a doubt that she wasn’t particularly beautiful.
It isn’t that people just happen to believe it by mistake. Rome was fucking terrified of her and painted her as a vapid, scheming, beautiful, sex obsessed queen to discredit her to their people. She was a threat, and that was how they handled it. The unfortunate thing is that that is the most surviving record of her. A smear campaign against one of the smartest, most powerful women in human history.
This is a woman who became her father’s co-ruler at nearly 14 years old in order to train for her actual ascension to the throne, who was forced to marry her own siblings in order to keep her power, and it’s widely believed that she poisoned them so she could rule alone. She’s a Pharaoh who led Egypt into a new era of wealth, who went fearlessly into war to protect her rule and Egypt’s independence from the Roman empire, a woman who took her own life rather than face being raped and tortured by her conquerors, knowing full well that she was leaving her surviving children in their uncertain mercy. Cleopatra is one of the most interesting, morally ambiguous, complexing historical figures we have and the media has turned her into a tantalizing sex object for the male gaze.
Even after Cleopatra died her influence on those around her lived on: her daughter, Cleopatra Selene, was the only child of Cleopatra’s to live to adulthood, and she became queen of Mauretania along with her husband Juba and it’s believed they married for love, which was extremely rare for that time period, especially among nobles/the upper class. Not only did she grow up in the house of her mother’s worst enemy and technical murderer, but she still went on to become a queen who possessed an equal amount of political power as her husband, even having her face minted on coins on the opposite side of his likeness, showing they were equal rulers.
Cleopatra and her influence on history, and her daughter’s legacy, have both been brushed aside in favour of the sexy Cleopatra visage. It’s bullshit. Egyptian mythology is interesting and vivid, and full of powerful women and it’s bullshit that we take some of the most powerful women in Africa’s history and try to turn them into fashion icons or sluts who only ruled through toying with men.
I’d never heard about her daughter before. That’s cool.
They should make another movie about her with an actor who actually looks like she did and mae it obvious in the script how good she was at being pharoah.
So you can put a face to the name. This is what scientists believe she actually looked like. In my opinion she was probably much darker. But those are the coins and busts that were made of her and that’s what you should think of. Curly hair, a hooked nose, a woman who did EXTRAORDINARY things. You don’t have to be beautiful to accomplish greatness.
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