A decade in the making, the second and final instalment of Masterpiece’s historical drama returns to culminate the clash between Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII
It’s been a while since Masterpiece’s Wolf Hall debuted on PBS — a full decade, in fact, given that the first season of the critically acclaimed BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novels — Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies — appeared way back in 2015.
The six-part first season introduced viewers to Sir Thomas Cromwell (played by Oscar winner Mark Rylance), a lawyer who has risen from humble beginnings, during a particularly fraught moment in his career. His master, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce), is on the outs with King Henry VIII (Homeland alum Damian Lewis), his failure to convince the Pope to annul the king’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon (Joanne Whalley) so he could marry Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy) leading to his arrest and imprisonment.
The new season is based on the third instalment in Mantel’s trilogy, 2020’s The Mirror and the Light. “The TV sequel picks up in May 1536 after the beheading of Anne Boleyn and follows the last four years of Thomas Cromwell’s life, completing his journey from self-made man to the most feared and influential figure of his time,” notes the PBS logline. “These are years when Henry’s regime is severely tested by religious rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion. Cromwell must deftly navigate the moral complexities that accompany the exercise of power in this bloody time; he’s caught between his desire to do what’s right and his instinct to survive. The question is: how long can anyone survive under Henry’s brutally mercurial gaze?”
The Mirror and the Light does justice to its predecessor’s massive scale, which included 102 characters and filming taking place at 28 different historic locations throughout England.
“Cromwell is a guard dog and becomes increasingly required to be a brutal guard dog for his master, but he never really loses his compassion and empathy for other human beings,” Rylance told Tripwire of how he envisioned his character. “Cromwell was a very early activist in trying to get English translations of the Bible into every man and woman’s hand. This sounds natural now, but this was a very dangerous thing at the time, and people are being burnt left, right and centre. It’s quite a thing to act in this story and to come into touch with just how very violent our society was 500 years ago. We’re still pretty violent now, but this was intense. Cromwell is walking the line, very close to that being his fate. I don’t know how you would prepare yourself for that.”
As Lewis points out, the paradox of Henry VIII was his god-like megalomania coupled with deep insecurity. “He believed he possessed this magnificence,” Lewis said in an interview conducted on the set. “He believed he was next to God on Earth. But I think deep down there was an insecurity about him not being able to provide male heirs and his children not surviving . . . There were great families around — the Poles, the Courtenays —and they stoke Henry’s paranoia all through his reign. In fact, it’s one of the central reasons that Thomas Cromwell loses his head in the end.”
Peter Kosminsky, Wolf Hall’s director and executive producer, understandably faced some challenges presented by the decade-long gap between seasons, but took solace in the fact that he could always lean into the source material within Mantel’s novels. “It is a complex, multifaceted piece of writing,” he said. “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 of the journey: ‘Remember that these characters don’t know that they’re characters in history. To them, they are living their lives just as you or I, in what is, for them, the present day.’”
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light on Masterpiece premieres Sunday, March 23 on KCTS and WTVS