Mark Rylance sat quietly and alone, his black-capped head bowed, his eyes closed. Close by in a grand chamber, Damian Lewis stood resplendent in an enormous gold jacket, taking part in King Henry VIII, because the director Peter Kosminsky rearranged some actors taking part in courtiers.
It was Shoot Day 77, final spring, at Bishop’s Palace in Wells, England, one of many areas for “The Mirror and the Gentle,” the second and closing tv collection based mostly on Hilary Mantel’s dazzling trilogy of novels. The books, and the present, chart the rise and fall of the energetic, inscrutable Thomas Cromwell — a blacksmith’s son who turned chief minister and all-around fixer to the king earlier than his astonishing profession took a tragic flip.
The six-part “Mirror and the Gentle,” which is able to air on PBS’s Masterpiece beginning Sunday, begins precisely the place the final one ended, in 1536, as Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy) is beheaded.
That collection, which aired on PBS in 2015, encompassed the trilogy’s first two novels: “Wolf Corridor” and “Deliver Up the Our bodies.” It was a miracle of writerly and filmic compression, giving us Cromwell’s ascent to prominence; his profitable negotiation of the king’s first divorce; the break with the Catholic church; and Anne Boleyn’s rise, and her fall, which is engineered by Cromwell on the king’s behest.
“The Mirror and the Gentle” has a near-identical artistic workforce: written by Peter Straughan (who not too long ago gained an Academy Award for finest tailored screenplay for “Conclave”), directed by Kosminsky and starring Rylance and Lewis, with British performing royalty, together with Alex Jennings, Timothy Spall and Harriet Walter, in small roles. (This time, although, there isn’t a comparably meaty feminine position to equal Foy’s flip as Anne Boleyn.)
When the present was first broadcast on the BBC in Britain final fall, it gained evaluations as rapturous as these of 2015. It opens with Anne’s execution, juxtaposed in opposition to scenes of Henry being groomed and magnificently outfitted for his wedding ceremony with Jane Seymour (Kate Phillips). Cromwell is on the peak of his energy, however the opening shot of Anne on her strategy to her demise prefigures his personal fall by the hands of the capricious royal.
“A personality is at all times inside you,” Rylance mentioned. “Cromwell was there, however heavier, darker this time.” In “Wolf Corridor,” Cromwell took revenge for the banishment and demise of his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, Rylance defined, however in “The Mirror and the Gentle,” “he involves personal somewhat extra what he projected onto these individuals: his personal emotions of guilt.”
It was at all times his intention to adapt Mantel’s closing novel, mentioned Colin Callender, one of many present’s govt producers, who secured the rights to the novels in 2010. However a bunch of things — the coronavirus pandemic, Mantel’s demise in 2022 and the problem of reassembling the high-profile solid of actors — delayed the challenge, which, he added, had turn out to be “significantly dearer this time round.”
Kosminsky, the director, mentioned that they had “the large luxurious of seeing the fabric evolve and interested by the mechanics,” in addition to discussing them with Mantel whereas she was engaged on the ultimate novel. “I pled the case for sure issues the difference was prone to want.” Kosminsky mentioned, in addition to plying the writer with questions on character and motivation. Mantel responded with copious notes, Kosminsky mentioned.
In turning the practically 900-page novel right into a script, Straughan mentioned he had been “anxious to search out continuity with the primary collection,” and its theme of Cromwell’s revenge on his mentor’s enemies. “Our thought,” he mentioned, “was that maybe he has defeated all of the traitors to Wolsey and comes to know there may be one final one: himself.”
This concept is seeded in an early episode, and it’s from this level that issues start to go unsuitable for the beforehand invincible Cromwell.
“There have been only a thousand moments the place you requested your self, ‘May this be true, or this different factor be true?’” mentioned Lilit Lesser, who performs Mary, the king’s eldest daughter, whose shut relationship with Cromwell spawns a harmful rumor that he plans to marry her. “And then you definately suppose, ‘They’re all true directly.’”
Cromwell, Rylance mentioned, is lonely, has misplaced his spouse and two daughters, and is pissed off by “the viciousness of the individuals he’s working with, and acutely aware of the large struggling of the individuals.” All these frustrations “finally burst,” Rylance mentioned. “He makes rash selections, antagonizes the nobles; he will get weary of accommodating these individuals. And he’s caught up with a person, Henry, behaving more and more psychopathically.”
Henry, Lewis mentioned, “was removed from being the roister-doistering, toss your chicken-leg over your shoulder, slap the wench’s backside that he has turn out to be in well-liked custom. He was a really religious, somewhat prurient man, who believed in courtly etiquette, was a poet, a composer, spoke many languages and knew the Bible inside out.”
On the level dramatized within the present, Lewis added, Henry was in intense ache after a driving accident, “and, I believe, insecure about his sexual efficiency.” All this, Lewis mentioned, “contributed to this irate, paranoid, more and more short-tempered man.”
As Cromwell’s beforehand magisterial command of the court docket begins to falter, he should handle a riot within the north of England, supervise the dissolution of the monasteries, and someway neutralize Henry’s troublesome cousin Reginald Pole, who has written a e book denouncing the king.
And when Jane Seymour dies after producing the longed-for son, it falls to Cromwell to search out one other bride for the more and more irascible monarch. His selection of Anne of Cleves, who he hopes can assist safe an English alliance with the German states, is a failure.
“The gorgeous, tragic arc of the collection is that, by about Episode 3, you see that Henry is not in thrall to this man,” Lewis mentioned.
Whereas “Wolf Corridor” was “about Cromwell getting contained in the inside circle,” Straughan mentioned, “in “Mirror and the Gentle,’ he goes again to being the outsider, the blacksmith’s son.” As Mantel writes on the finish of the ultimate novel: “He has vanished. He’s the slippery stones underfoot, he’s the final faint ripple within the wake of himself.”
