Ten years after the first installment came to screens, Mark Rylance (Thomas Cromwell, left) and Damian Lewis (King Henry VIII) return in MASTERPIECE’s Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light. The long-awaited adaptation of the final novel of Hilary Mantel’s award-winning trilogy chronicles the cruel and capricious King Henry VIII and his chief minister Thomas Cromwell. The story picks up in May 1536 after the beheading of Henry’s wife Anne Boleyn, as Cromwell enters the last four years of his life. Rylance and Lewis are joined by Academy Award®-nominee Jonathan Pryce (The Crown) as Cardinal Wolsey and Kate Phillips (Miss Scarlet, Peaky Blinders) as Jane Seymour in this six-part series.
Susanne Simpson, head of scripted content and executive producer for MASTERPIECE, shares, “I am incredibly proud to bring Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light to our audience. The level of excellence on and off the screen in this eagerly awaited series is incomparable. Fans of historical drama will be enthralled.”
Director and Executive Producer Peter Kosminsky shared thoughts on the upcoming series.
What was it like returning to this project?
PK: For most people, this will have felt like returning to something after a significant number of years, but not for me. Hilary Mantel was sending me the novel as she was writing it in 100-page installments. We were having a dialogue before she submitted the novel to the publisher. So, I have been working on this pretty much since we delivered and transmitted the original Wolf Hall series back in 2015. I have never left the show.
What is it that appeals to you about this rich, treacherous, captivating story?
PK: It is a complex, multi-faceted piece of writing. But if I were to ask myself what is it about Wolf Hall that inspires me the most, it’s something that Hilary said to me right at the very beginning. ”Remember that these characters don’t know they’re characters in history. To them, they are living their lives.” I’ve focused on that by shooting it in a very contemporary, documentary style with handheld cameras and a sense of discovering this world with Thomas Cromwell. In a very real sense, The Mirror and the Light is a portrait of what it is like to be at the beck and call of a despot, a man whose ego is completely out of control.
Where do we rejoin the story in The Mirror and the Light?
PK: The Mirror and the Light is based on the last novel that Hilary Mantel wrote before she died in 2022. It picks up directly from the moment when the earlier books end: the day of Anne Boleyn’s execution. It was a challenge for us having around a decade between when we finished shooting the original Wolf Hall series and when we started filming The Mirror and the Light, yet the story was carrying on as if uninterrupted.
What would you like viewers to keep in mind from Wolf Hall when they start watching The Mirror and the Light?
PK: The original series, Wolf Hall, is a story of Cromwell’s rise from the position of blacksmith’s son to being the second most powerful man in England. It’s a story of bravery, of gall, of almost the first time in British history a man rises to a position of enormous power purely because of his gifts, intellect, and prowess, rather than who he’s descended from, his wealth, or his position in the church. The first series had a sense of climbing and rising, but when you reach the summit, the only way is down with people snapping at your heels. The second series is a story of Cromwell struggling to maintain his position.
Read more about the upcoming season and watch episodes of the previous Wolf Hall series on the MASTERPIECE website.
MASTERPIECE/Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light
Sun (3/23, 3/30) at 9pm on GBH 2 and on the PBS app
Repeat:
Sat (3/29) at 9pm on GBH 44
Watch the trailer below.
