Acting superstar Tom Hiddleston, whose family has lived in Suffolk for decades, takes us behind the scenes of the much-anticipated second series of The Night Manager and reveals his reality TV guilty pleasures
Actor Tom Hiddleston may be better known for his work in Hollywood as Loki in Marvel’s Thor and Avengers films, but his links with Suffolk run much deeper.
The Hiddleston family has lived in Aldeburgh for decades. His parents, Diana and James Hiddleston, married in Suffolk in 1978, and Diana has worked for Britten Pears Arts on and off since the 1970s.
Tom Hiddleston and fiancée Zawe Ashton, with whom he shares two children (Image: Ian West/PA Wire.)
Tom has made many a quiet trip to visit his family in Aldeburgh. Quiet, that is, until he brought his megastar then-girlfriend Taylor Swift for a walk along both Aldeburgh and Covehithe beaches. Pictures of them were splashed everywhere, giving that little corner of Suffolk its moment in the limelight.
Alongside his blockbuster roles, the classically trained actor has worked on stage, with performances ranging from Shakespeare to his Tony-nominated turn in Betrayal. But, his most long-awaited role was as Jonathan Pine in The Night Manager series two, which came out earlier this year – almost 10 years after the first series. Based on John le Carré’s iconic novel, the series once again plunges Jonathan Pine into a high-stakes world of espionage, shifting allegiances and moral risk. Tom tells us more.
Playing Jonathan Pine in The Night Manager. (Image: moviestillsdb.com)
The Night Manager is back! Why do you think it took so long? Because there was a will from the beginning…
We made the first one knowing full well that John le Carré had written a novel called The Night Manager in 1993. And he had granted his consent for us to adapt it and it would be complete.
And as we were making it, there were no plans to develop a second season. We opened The Night Manager at the Berlin Film Festival in 2016, and it was an extraordinary night. All of us were there, Susanne Bier, the director, Hugh Laurie, Elizabeth Debicki, Olivia Colman, Stephen Garrett, plus Simon Cornwell and Stephen Cornwell, who are le Carré’s sons, who produced The Night Manager, and le Carré himself. And we went back to the hotel afterwards excited and thrilled with how it had been received.
Then, le Carré himself lent across the table with a twinkle in his eye and said, perhaps we might make some more. And he had many ideas.
John le Carré – David Cornwell is his real name – and his wife got ill and sadly died in 2020. But le Carré had communicated his profound trust in his sons and a committed belief that there should be more Night Manager before he died.
I was at the memorial service with his sons, Simon and Stephen, and they said: ‘You know, Dad loved the show and he would love for us to do more. So let’s keep talking.’ And it was an amazing legacy for him to leave all of us.
Not long after, David Farr, our great screenwriter, had a dream. Genuinely. And it was a dream about where the story would go. And we started to develop it and he went away and worked on it. We set a high standard for ourselves; if we’re going to go again, it had to be better. It had to be bigger, braver, bolder, deeper. We had to risk more.
And we’re not going to have to wait another 10 years for the next series?
No, no, that’s going to come sooner. Ten years have passed in the show and real life.
The Night Manager series two all-star cast at a London screening (Image: Ian West/PA Wire.)
Who has changed more – Jonathan Pine or Tom Hiddleston?
Probably Tom Hiddleston. I would think. But then that’s the great thing about the 10 years ‒ the more we realised it would be 10 years, the more we lent into it. They’ve been 10 extraordinarily complex years in the world.
There have been so many political changes, cultural changes, environmental changes, untold international conflict, a pandemic. And we kept imagining if you work at the centre of the intelligence community, those 10 years are going to have been complex.
And I love the idea that at the end of season one, a fire has been ignited in his heart by Angela Burr, played by Olivia Colman. And that fire will not be extinguished until the end of his lifetime. He’s seen behind the curtain. He’s a field agent now for the intelligence services, for MI6. And there’s no going back. So there’s a desire to understand the world as it really is, not the world as it appears to be. Pine wants to know the truth, and that’s a great thing I admire about him – many of us probably would be happy not knowing all the truth.
Ignorance can be bliss?
Yeah. So the fact that it’s been 10 years, he’s older, he’s wiser. He’s curious. He’s got this sharp desire, a keen curiosity to understand. But also trauma from the first season. He nearly died several times. People he trusted and loved died and nearly died. That trauma haunts his nightmares.
Georgi Banks-Davies, our amazing director, and I used to talk about how at the end of season one, Richard Roper, played by the great Hugh Laurie, is delivered to his captors. The dragon has been slain. But the dragon slayer can’t go back. And the dragon slayer is only defined by the presence of dragons. And in a way, Pine needs the dragon. Otherwise, who is he?
I want to be honest about what The Night Manager is about. Really, it’s about arms dealing, and always was. And that Roper is selling standard and chemical weapons under the counter to the highest bidder, and profiting in the millions and the billions, and lives a lovely, charmed life that is paid for in blood and death. And le Carré calls him the worst man in the world. Of course, he’s Hugh Laurie, so he’s the most charming man in the world.
A blockbuster turn in Kong: Skull Island. (Image: moviestillsdb.com)
Tell us about your relationship with John le Carré
It was very meaningful to me that he approved of what we had done. It was really all I cared about. One night before we started filming the first series, I went up to him and said: ‘Is there anything you’d like me to know before I start?’ And he lent in with this kind of conspiratorial mischief: ‘Of course, Tom, by now you will have guessed Jonathan Pine is me. And now he must be you.’
And then when I saw him afterwards, to know that he had loved it, that he approved of what we’d made was major. We lived not far from each other in London. I used to run into him in the local park, training my puppy, and we would have these extraordinary conversations about world events. I’d get these hot takes from John le Carré.
You’re often on the list for the next James Bond. Did you think playing this character would help or hinder your chances?
Honestly, at the time, I read the script and I was like: ‘I’ve never played a part like this before.’ And it sounds crazy, but I was like: ‘I know how to do this.’
The way le Carré described him was that he was: ‘The son of a cancer-ridden German beauty and a British Sergeant killed in one of his country’s many post-colonial wars. A graduate of a rainy archipelago of orphanages, foster homes and cadet units. A sometime army wolf child with an even rainier unit in Northern Ireland. A caterer, chef, hotelier, itinerant, collector of other people’s languages, perpetual escapee from emotional entanglement, self-exiled creature of the night and sailor without a destination.’ Who doesn’t want to play that guy? What an extraordinary description! That’s chapter three of the novel.
Tom has acted across TV, film and stage (Image: Jas Lehal/PA)
Do you prefer TV, film or stage acting?
All three. There’s no preference. Honestly, I feel so grateful that I’ve been allowed to do all three. I think they all keep me honest as an actor. You know, the camera captures the truth. And it has an extraordinary acuity. It’s so sharp. You can’t lie in front of the camera. And so that keeps you honest.
But also, you can’t lie in front of a live audience. Vanessa Redgrave, who I had worked with many years ago in The Gathering Storm, a film about Winston Churchill and his relationship with his wife, Clementine, she told a story that an interviewer was trying to make her draw a comparison that film was an inferior art form. And she said: ‘I need both. They feed each other. Because they’re both a different discipline.’ And I feel the same.
I love the precision of acting for camera. And the spontaneity that actually it’s more important to be alive than it is to perform. But I also deeply love the craft of playing the entire story from beginning to end, night after night, and the iterative process of refinement that happens.
We did 270 performances of Betrayal by Harold Pinter. And the reason I know it’s a great play is at performance 270, I was still discovering things about the play, that it was still revealing itself to me.
Would you ever consider doing Strictly Come Dancing or The Traitors?
Yes, absolutely. Massive, massive fans of Strictly in our house! And The Celebrity Traitors was massive.
In a world where people generally tend to watch what they want to watch, it united the entire nation. I think the entire country watched the finale ‒ 11 million people, which is a lot in the UK, watched the finale live. It was like a kind of a sporting event, like a World Cup final or a Super Bowl or something. It was really unusual for a piece of entertainment to do that.
As Loki in Thor. (Image: moviestillsdb.com)
Do you ever adopt a character out in the real world? Would you go for a coffee as Jonathan Pine or Loki?
Yeah, I don’t know if I’d get away with it. Sometimes I’m filling up the car and then pay for it and the guy behind the counter will go: ‘Has anyone ever told you you look just like Tom Hiddleston?’ And I go: ‘Yeah, I get that all the time.’ And they’re like: ‘Am I not the first person to say that?’ And I go: ‘Yeah, people do say that.’ And then eventually they go: ‘Are you?’ And I go: ‘No, but people say I do.’ It’s a ridiculous game.
But to be serious, I think that’s probably the privilege I feel I’m afforded as an actor, is that I get to play all of these people. And that I get to explore myself in all of them. But it’s an imagined reality. So the boundaries feel very safe.
Of course, there are aspects of myself in all these characters, otherwise I couldn’t do it. Or if they’re not aspects of myself, I’m stretching myself with imagination to get there. And I find it such an interesting thing to reflect on occasionally, which is that, you know, there’s that phrase, ‘the body keeps the score,’ you know? And sometimes it’s a discipline to remind myself that the tears I shed belong to me, they’re my tears, but they are the characters’ imagined tears, if that makes sense.
Or if a character is charming, or open-hearted or generous ‒ that’s my heart, that’s my generosity, that’s my charm. If a character is angry, that’s my anger. It’s not real, it’s not based in reality, it’s a response to something imagined. Or if a character like Pine, for example, I find his curiosity is mine. His desire to understand the world as it really is, not the world as it appears to be, is something I share with him, but I don’t have his resources or his competence. And I find his courage inspiring.
So to give yourself fully to a character and yet still be able to go home and live your life – that’s the ultimate dream?
Yes. I go home to my real life with my real responsibilities and my real attachments, which I hold dear. That’s who I really am. Like any artist, you know, a composer, a writer or a painter, the work is about playing with an idea. It’s about giving an idea shape or clarity and seeing how it lands..
