Tom Hiddleston and Olivia Colman Discuss the Anticipated Comeback of The Night Manager | Vanity Fair

David Farr had a dream in 2020 that gave him the inspiration for the second season of The Night Manager. The show, based on John le Carré’s novel and starring Tom Hiddleston, recounts the story of a hotel manager working undercover for MI6. The next morning, Farr woke up to the news of le Carré’s passing at the age of 89. According to le Carré’s son, Simon Cornwell, Farr outlined his plan for the new season, which will premiere on Prime Video worldwide and on BBC and BBC iPlayer in the UK. Vanity Fair has an exclusive look at the series, although the release date is still under wraps.

Despite his sadness over his father’s death, Cornwell wanted to delve into the world of le Carré’s characters to explore contemporary issues. The new season, set eight years after the first, continues to follow the story of Jonathan Pine and Angela Burr, played by Hiddleston and Olivia Colman respectively, as they work to stop an illegal arms-dealing operation.

While the original novel was published in 1993, the show takes inspiration from le Carré’s work rather than following it directly. The creators aim to address modern-day questions about patriotism and government allegiance. The series showcases the moral outrage felt by Pine and Burr towards characters like Richard Roper, played by Hugh Laurie, who symbolizes cynicism and corruption.

In season two, Pine, living under the alias Alex Goodwin, becomes embroiled in a new mission involving Colombian businessman Teddy Dos Santos. Along the way, he meets Roxana Bolaños, played by Camila Morrone, a businesswoman who aids Pine in his mission. The show aims to portray complex female characters who are integral to the storyline.

Childcare-related issues slightly delay Hiddleston in speaking about his return to The Night Manager. He shares two children with his fiancée, fellow actor Zawe Ashton, whom he met while starring in Betrayal on Broadway in 2019. That’s not all that’s changed in the near-decade since he last headlined. “I’m honestly excited that it’s taken 10 years—the last 10 years in the world have been interesting,” says Hiddleston. “Jonathan Pine is 10 years older, a few more scars on the outside, a few more on the inside.”

That’s also true of Angela Burr. After the perilous events of season one, “she hid away somewhere in the mountains for a nice, quiet life to keep her family safe,” says Colman, “but she can’t help but get drawn back in.” Angela—gender-swapped from the book’s Leonard Burr—is visibly pregnant (as Colman was expecting her third child at the time of filming) throughout the first season’s increasingly tense investigation. “Spies do get pregnant, so they went with it,” Colman, who also played a working mother in the form of a detective on BBC’s Broadchurch, told Vanity Fair at the time.

Colman’s daughter was born in August 2015 and is now 10 years old—a physical reminder of just how much time has passed between seasons one and two. Other milestones include Colman winning an Emmy in 2021 for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II on The Crown and then an Oscar in 2019 for playing Queen Anne in The Favourite. “If you win something, you can be pretty pleased with yourself for a couple of days, and then you have to pretend it never happened,” Colman tells me from the set of Netflix’s upcoming Pride & Prejudice adaptation. “Winning an award is the most obviously lovely feeling, but it doesn’t change how you should work. I’m older, got more lines, but that’s about it.”

Le Carré dedicated a signed copy of The Night Manager to the child Colman carried while she was playing one of his characters. He also gave Hiddleston his blessing ahead of production on the first series. “I saddled up to him and said, ‘Is there anything you’d like me to know before we begin?’” Hiddleston recalls. “And he said, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘Well, of course, Tom, you would have guessed by now that Jonathan Pine is me and now he must be you.’ It was just a beautiful passing of the torch.”

For the posthumous documentary The Pigeon Tunnel (2023), Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris spent five days interviewing le Carré, “exhuming every corner of his—I mean,” Cornwell pauses, “exhuming is the wrong word, because my dad was obviously alive at that point.” He chuckles. “But exploring every corner of my dad’s obsessions” across his oeuvre, from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to The Constant Gardener. “My dad would call his protagonists ‘lonely deciders’—people who have their own moral compass, and act on that. And Pine acts. It’s not actually about governments; it’s seeing things that aren’t right and feeling a personal obligation to fix them. Maybe that’s the only way the world becomes a better place at the moment.”

Elsewhere in that AppleTV documentary, le Carré says, “It’s the joy of self-imposed schizophrenia that the secret agent loves,” a quote that’s stuck with Hiddleston in thinking about Pine. “The closer his feet are to the fire, the more alive he feels,” says the actor. “Aspects of himself come alive in the act of wearing the masks of other people.” In that way, using an alias in espionage is not dissimilar to le Carré (born David John Moore Cornwell) writing under a nom de plume or Hiddleston playing a character.

“I feel at this point in my life that I really know who I am,” says the 44-year-old. “I know where I end and my characters begin. I can step off-stage and the illusion fades immediately.” Boundaries are far blurrier for Pine, which is complicated given that this game of make-believe has life-or-death stakes. “One slip and he’s a dead man—that’s the difference between a field agent in the intelligence services and an actor,” Hiddleston decides with a laugh, “is that we get to go home back to our lives, thank goodness.”

Although he doesn’t mind taking some time out of his life to consider The Night Manager’s larger political inquiries. It all comes back to a line uttered in the show’s season two premiere: “A nation’s intelligence service is the truest expression of itself,” says Douglas Hodge’s British intelligence bureau boss Rex Mayhew, “know thyself.” Any country’s future is a little like a car speeding down the road, says Hiddleston, “You can only be in control of the destination if you really know how the engine’s been put together—and where you want to go.”

The show itself is full speed ahead; a third season of The Night Manager was greenlit alongside season two last spring. “Great stories often come in threes, right?” says Cornwell with a sly grin over Zoom. “It has a ways to go, but you can see my face lighting up. If you liked season one and you were really drawn to season two, you are going to be blown away by season three. We’ve got to take our audience on that progression,” he continues. “And the reason I’m smiling is I know we can.”