It came to David Farr in a dream. While asleep at his UK home in 2020, the creator and executive producer conceived a way forward for The Night Manager, his 2016 adaptation of John le Carré’s novel, starring Tom Hiddleston as a luxury-hotel manager who goes undercover for MI6 to infiltrate a criminal arms-dealing enterprise. When he woke up the next morning, still foggy with visions for the second installment, Farr turned on the morning news to discover that le Carré had died in the night at age 89.
That’s the inception tale, according to le Carré’s son, Simon Cornwell, who, alongside his younger brother, Stephen, runs the Ink Factory, which owns and produces all of their father’s intellectual property. Sitting socially distanced in Cornwell’s garden, Farr outlined his plan for season two of the Emmy Award–winning series, all six episodes of which premiere exclusively on Prime Video worldwide, but on BBC and BBC iPlayer in the UK. Vanity Fair has the exclusive first-look images of the series’ return, although the release date is still top-secret intel.
Despite his grief, or perhaps because of it, the elder Cornwell wanted to explore the current state of affairs through le Carré’s morally searching characters. “Not a day passes that I don’t think about my dad with sadness,” he tells VF. “But at the same time, it can be liberating. When a lot of writers pass, their estates contain all kinds of strict rules. Thou shalt not change this, or that. And my dad’s letter said, ‘You know what I stand for, respect what I stand for, but only you can figure out where to go next.’ And that is sort of the invitation.”
There is no sequel to the original novel; le Carré’s work serves as inspiration, rather than the basis for the series’ second season, which picks up in the present day, eight years after the events of season one. Hiddleston reprises his role as British intelligence informant Jonathan Pine, and Olivia Colman returns as MI6 intelligence officer Angela Burr, who recruits Pine into espionage against an illegal arms-dealing operation.
The original Night Manager was published in 1993, marking le Carré’s first post–Cold War book. But its questions surrounding patriotism endure—and evolve. “Maybe 50, 75 years ago, we felt our government stood for something: a moral, ethical code expressed in the way that our governments behaved on our behalf,” says Cornwell. “We subscribed to our government’s causes. We went to war for them. Today, there probably isn’t a government in the world to whom you feel unequivocal allegiance.”
The same can be said for the entertainment that stems from such a politically fraught era. “Forty years ago, people would write movies where the punchline was, ‘and the corruption goes all the way to the top!’” says Cornwell. “Today, that’s the starting point.”
Everything that Hugh Laurie’s devious billionaire Richard Roper (who is arrested at the end of the first season for illegally selling British weapons) came to represent, “the cynicism and the complicity, ignites Pine’s moral fury, and it’s something that Angela Burr recognizes, it’s something they share,” Hiddleston tells VF. “They believe that people like Roper shouldn’t win. At the beginning of season two, that fury has been buried and suppressed, alongside his real name, his past, his trauma. And all of that is like an unexploded bomb.”
Filmed in the UK, Spain, Colombia, and France, and directed by Georgi Banks-Davies, season two finds Pine living under an alias as Alex Goodwin—a low-level MI6 officer running a quiet surveillance unit in London. But a chance encounter with an old Roper mercenary thrusts Pine into a high-intensity new mission involving Colombian businessman Teddy Dos Santos (Babylon’s Diego Calva). On this new assignment, Pine meets Roxana Bolaños (Daisy Jones & the Six’s Emmy-nominated Camila Morrone), a businesswoman who reluctantly helps Pine permeate Teddy’s Colombian arms outfit. “Female characters in thrillers often get a bad rap, particularly in a male-dominated world,” says lead executive producer Stephen Garrett. “There are all sorts of clichés and tropes that tend to attach themselves. We wanted the female characters in this be every bit as complex as the men. Elizabeth Debicki’s character (Jed, who entertains relationships with both Roper and Pine in season one) was unbelievably captivating, but she was, to some extent, the wife of our worst man in the world, and needed to be liberated by another man in Tom Hiddleston’s Jonathan Pine. Cammie Morrone’s Roxy is a creature of her own destiny.”
Childcare-related issues slightly delay Hiddleston in speaking about his return to The Night Manager. He shares one child 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.”
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