After a staggering 10-year development process, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light will finally make its way to Masterpiece PBS on Sunday.
The final chapter of the adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novels brings back Mark Rylance as Thomas Crowell and Damian Lewis as King Henry VII for the six-part series written by Oscar winner Peter Straughan (Conclave) and produced by Colin Callender’s Playground and Company Pictures.
The Tudor drama is set in 1535.
“We begin exactly where we left off with the death of Anne Boleyn, and we follow Cromwell as he continues to rise and rise to unprecedented heights,” Straughan tells Deadline. “There’s an increasing sense throughout the season of the job of keeping more and more plates spinning at the same time chaos is lurking, and in the end, danger is lurking, as well.”
Given limitations on the budget — Wolf Hall director Peter Kosminsky revealed in January that Rylance, as well as the producer, writer and director all gave up a significant proportion of their fees after streamers declined to co-produce Season 2 with the BBC — some stories and characters had to remain on the cutting room floor.
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“I’m kind of used to it,” admits Straughan. “It happens all the time to varying degrees, and I’m okay with working within practical parameters. If someone says, we just can’t afford that scene, then you either think of a cheaper way of doing the scene or you cut the scene. You work out how to get around the problem of that scene having to be removed. It was the same with [the first] Wolf Hall to some extent. There were some scenes that we just couldn’t afford to do. There was a great scene with them on on board a ship sailing. It was just hugely expensive to do for one scene.”
“There were more with the Mirror and the Light, partly because it’s a bigger canvas. There were more characters,” continued Straughan. “There were more storylines. For example, there’s a character, Wyatt, who is in Wolf Hall. He’s sort of the poet who Cromwell is very fond of, and there was a storyline that was to do with Wyatt, and there were several scenes that got cut before we could even shoot because it just couldn’t be done.”
But Callender promises the plot didn’t suffer as a result of tighter purse strings. Job one was to still chronicle the emotional journey of Cromwell who — multiple century spoiler alert! — was ultimately beheaded by the king.
“What’s interesting is he doesn’t know whether he’s going to die or not,” explains Callender. “And that’s the drama he doesn’t know. I mean, we may know, but he doesn’t know. And we are watching him grapple with decisions that he made in the past and decisions he has to make in the present. He doesn’t know the consequences of what his decisions are. He doesn’t know where this is going to take him, and that’s really at the heart of the drama. Because we telling the story through his eyes, we’re watching him grapple with how to navigate the world he finds himself in to try and keep himself alive.”
In spite of the amount of time that passed since the last iteration, Callender always knew they would complete the saga — shot over 84 days in the U.K. — for the small screen.
“Why didn’t I give up? Because I’m an obstinate bastard,” Callender tells Deadline. “The first series was so wonderfully received. It would’ve seemed crazy not to actually complete the season. And we wanted to honor Hillary Mantel, particularly after she passed in 2022. It was absolutely the right thing to do, and we all wanted to do it. The challenge was when we finished the first series, she hadn’t yet written the Mirror and the Light, so we had to wait for her to write the book.”
“Then of course, we had to adapt the book, which was not inconsequential, given the size of the book,” he continues. “And then of course Covid struck, and then we could only shoot the series in the beginning of a year or at the end of the year because we shot everything on location. So we had to shoot it at Tudor houses in England and castles and so on and so forth, which are big tourist attractions. So we had to shoot in the off season around the tourists. Then on top of that, we had to juggle everybody’s availability. We wanted to bring back the whole cast. So it was a bit of a four- dimensional chess game to try and pull all the pieces together. It took time.”
The Mirror and the Light, which premieres March 23 at 9 p.m ET, also stars Kate Phillips, Lilit Lesser and Thomas Brodie-Sangster in returning roles and welcomes Harriet Walter, Timothy Spall and Harry Melling to the king’s court. It was directed by Peter Kosminsky. Lisa Osborne is the producer, and Noëlette Buckley, Kosminsky and Callender are exec producers, along with Lucy Richer for the BBC and Susanne Simpson for Masterpiece.
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