Back to work
As The Night Manager returns for its long-anticipated second season, writer David Farr, director Georgi Banks-Davies and cinematographer Tim Siddell pull back the curtain on how they made this thrilling spy drama.
Even by today’s standards, nine years is a long time to wait between seasons of a television drama. That there wasn’t an immediate follow-up to The Night Manager is all the more surprising given the critical and popular acclaim the Tom Hiddleston-led spy thriller received when it debuted on the BBC and AMC in 2016.
Based on John le Carré’s novel of the same name, the drama’s first season introduced former British soldier Jonathan Pine (Hiddleston), a hotel night manager who is recruited by government agent Angela Burr (Olivia Colman) to infiltrate the inner circle of ruthless arms dealer Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie).
But creator David Farr, Hiddleston and others shared the view that they didn’t want to do a follow-up unless they had a good idea to continue the story beyond the pages of le Carré’s original 1993 novel.
“It hit a chord with us all, and it hit a chord with people in Britain and abroad as well, so it felt like unless we really felt we were taking the character and the world into something that was going beyond it in a way that was interesting, we didn’t want to do it,” Farr tells DQ.
In the intervening years, Farr led series such as Hanna, Troy: Fall of a City and The Midwich Cuckoos, with no plans to return to The Night Manager. That was until about four years ago, when he struck upon an idea for a second season that “reawakened” the whole project for him. He then took it to le Carré’s son, executive producer Simon Cornwell, who shared Farr’s excitement, as did Hiddleston. “So suddenly, a bit of energy starts to happen,” says Farr. “That’s how it happened. It’s a very simple, quite human process.”
That initial spark, the idea of a blacked-out car driving towards a young boy (which appears as a small flashback in episode two), then became the “seed” for the new story. “It just distilled for me an idea I suddenly had, and ever since then it’s been a very enjoyable, quite rigorous journey,” Farr notes, “because we all felt we didn’t want to do this unless there was something substantial to do, because it’s le Carré. You don’t do a spin-off, you don’t do a glossy season two. You just can’t do that.”
Instead, S2 is a continuation of the story that first introduced Hiddleston’s Pine. Launching on the BBC on January 1 ahead of its release on new partner Prime Video on January 11, the story opens with Pine living under the identity of low-level MI6 officer Alex Goodwin, who is running a quiet surveillance unit in London. Then when he identifies an old Roper mercenary, he is drawn towards a violent encounter with Colombian businessman Teddy Dos Santos.
Along the way, under the alias Matthew Ellis, he meets Roxana Bolaños, a businesswoman who reluctantly helps Pine infiltrate Teddy’s Colombian arms operation, with the aim of exposing a conspiracy to destabilise a nation.
Joining the cast are Diego Calva (who plays Teddy), Camila Morrone (Roxana), Indira Varma (Mayra), Paul Chahidi (Basil) and Hayley Squires (Sally), who star alongside the returning Olivia Colman (Angela Burr), Alistair Petrie (Sandy Langbourne), Douglas Hodge (Rex Mayhew), Michael Nardone (Frisky) and Noah Jupe (Daniel Roper).
From the outset, S2 is filled with ghosts, as Pine is still haunted by the events of S1. “I got very interested in the notion that Pine had almost deliberately forgotten himself in the intervening period, and that he’d become a very different person, a person who doesn’t take risks, doesn’t gamble, doesn’t existentially commit, and is living a kind of half-life,” Farr explains. “But of course, what he’s really doing is suppressing a whole part of himself.
“In episode two, you very clearly see the explosion of that suppressed Pine in the shape of Matthew Ellis, who is like Pine on steroids. Pine is a very British character – he is a very internal, non-communicative, private individual who then suddenly explodes into extraordinary manifestations of the opposite. That’s what makes him interesting.”
A key theme of the season then becomes identity, with Pine living under a number of false personas. The series also returns in a different political climate from S1 – one filled with “crippling anxiety” and “this strange attraction to the margins of things,” the writer observes. “There was something almost innocent in the first season, in some weird way, about [Pine] hitching up with that strange rogues’ gallery of a family that he goes to in Mallorca. There was almost a sense of the ‘Brits abroad’ about it, which we completely deliberately exploited. But we’re in a world that is just less innocent than that now, there’s no question, and the show does have to reflect that.”
Pine then finds something of a new family in Colombia after he is drawn into a tangled relationship between Teddy and Roxana. “It’s a very different family,” Farr says. “He’s beginning to tiptoe his way in at the end of episode two, and he’ll go further, quite a lot further. That triangle gets very sexy. It gets very hot, it gets very fun.”
Pine’s ultimate mission is to bring down the Colombian cartel – but his goal is complicated when the full scale of British interests is revealed. “Spy shows being spy shows, there are surprises to come and twists in the tail, but that is his mission,” Farr says. “On a personal level, he’s also seeking to lay some ghosts to rest in order to live a more fully balanced life. And there’s a definitely a foiling of a genuinely quite unpleasant malign conspiracy between certain British elements and certain Colombian elements. All will be revealed.”
Enthralled by the world of spies and espionage since he was a young boy, Farr quickly found his way back into writing Pine. But he is very clear that the spy should never become James Bond or Jack Ryan. “We try to create a creative tension between a very internal narrative and yet give it some escapist colour and some beautiful locations. You want moments of adrenaline… but you can be quite clever about that. I prefer to use suspense and intrigue and dread.”
Behind the scenes, S2 was developed under the working title Steelworks, with a creative team led by The Ink Factory (The Little Drummer Girl), which produces the series in association with Character 7, Demarest Films and 127 Wall, and in coproduction with Spanish collaborator Nostromo Pictures.
Director Georgi Banks-Davies and cinematographer Tim Siddell were also among the newcomers for S2, taking the chance to reunite after previously working together on Sky drama I Hate Suzie.
A meeting request to discuss the project was met with an “instant yes” from Banks-Davies, who spoke with Farr and then Hiddleston about elevating the journey of Pine 10 years on and pushing into the trauma he is still holding from S1. Drawing on influences such as 1970s thrillers The Parallax View, Klute and A Conversation, as well as more recent films including Sicario and The Hurt Locker, she then set about creating a visual language for the series that spoke to Pine’s first-person perspective, subjectivity, truth and immediacy.
“When a character is trying to define themselves and their identity, and using multiple identities to do that, visually you have to live that with the character,” she says. “This show is talking about the notion of morality and what is good, what is bad. If they’re told in a very binary way, they’re almost impossible to tell. You’ve got to tell them from the first-person perspective, and then they become really complicated.”
Siddell loved S1 when it first came out and was immediately intrigued by Banks-Davies’ invitation to join her on a second season. “I knew Georgie would have her own way of developing things and responding to the text, so I was there to just dive in and support that,” he says. “Identity was a very interesting point for me, and we tried to give a bit of an inflection to each of Jonathan Pine’s characters with the way we shot it, just changing the camera movement or the lensing and so on, to make Matthew Ellis feel a bit more slick and elevated, and Alex Goodwin a little bit more demure and reserved – just subtle changes, but it gave us a rationale for how to go about things.”
Hiddleston understands every part of playing Pine, so rehearsing with him meant exploring how the character might react to different situations, rather than simply running lines for a particular scene. Banks-Davies also likes to keep an element of surprise on set, remaining in the dark about some of the choices her cast will make once the camera is rolling.
“Filmmaking just becomes really alive and authentic and visceral when the actors, in a sense, they know their characters, but within the scene they don’t know [everything],” she says. “They’re just literally in that scene and reacting to one another.”
Siddell says: “Georgie doesn’t want to miss any nugget of performance that might come out in rehearsal, so we go straight in and start shooting. But then there are the bigger sequences, which did need storyboarding and did need specific shots planned when there were stunts and big VFX moments. So that required a different approach, which was more traditional.”
The Night Manager isn’t just a character study, however. It’s also an ambitious, globe-trotting production that moved location almost every day during filming and was largely shot for real, with actors driving cars rigged with cameras, sitting in helicopters and racing motorcycles through the streets of Colombia.
“It was all real. To move a unit that size across what became five countries, and to be inheriting new crews, it’s quite a feat of production,” Banks-Davies says. “For the producers to support me in that vision and to really pull that off is incredible, because there is a reason why people use studios, why people don’t let actors drive and why you never fly a real helicopter – it’s easier, it’s more manageable.”
The constant movement between approximately 70 locations meant the cast and crew were under constant pressure to secure all the material they needed before moving on, knowing they wouldn’t return.
“We were in the jungle. We were in Cartagena in 45-degree heat, trying to figure out how to get through the day. We were really in the trenches,” the director says. “Beyond the gun fights and the explosions, as a filmmaker, you have your references. You understand how you want to tell the story. But the feat of the production was always being on location, always moving. I still don’t know how we did it.”
Siddell remembers the challenge of finding a jungle to shoot a sequence from episode six, which was ultimately created in Tenerife with some VFX support. He also employed drones on occasion to capture a number of aerial shots, but found restrictions and regulations in the UK and Spain to be a far cry from those in Colombia.
“In Colombia, it’s entirely different. You just do what you like,” he says. “There was one scenario where we were shooting high up near the mountain ridge at the top of the bowl of Medellín and needed to get a drone shot of the cable car, which was over two kilometres away.
“Normally you’d have to move nearer the location. We just flew the drone from our location, and [the pilot] was doing corkscrews around the live cable car, without any planning. The interesting thing was, he could do that because he gets to do it all the time, so he’s very well practiced and it makes it safer, but it’s a result of less regulation. At times, we really took advantage of that.”
“It was such a huge undertaking and it was so over ambitious, as it should be,” Banks-Davies adds. “When you embark on something like The Night Manager, if it’s not over-ambitious, then don’t even try. I feel very proud of the work.”
Farr is now starting to write the third and final season of The Night Manager, which was announced alongside S2 back in April 2024. “I’m just excited about being able to go on and finish the thing in its full glory,” he says. “Once I had the idea [for S2], there were enough legs in it to make it work in a very particular way.
“I still think S2 has a very satisfactory ending. I don’t think it’s one of those shows where we go, ‘Oh God, it’s just stopped.’ I promise everyone that’s not the case but, nonetheless, it leaves a very clear space for the final instalment.”
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tagged in: 127 Wall, BBC, Character 7, David Farr, Demarest Films, Georgi Banks-Davies, Nostromo Pictures, Prime Video, Simon Cornwell, The Ink Factory, The Night Manager, Tim Siddell, Tom Hiddlestone