When Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light premiered in the U.K. last year, it enjoyed a rapturous reception, with critics lauding it as “so beautifully made it’s breathtaking” and “a complete triumph.” But to hear director Peter Kosminsky tell it, the sequel to 2015’s Wolf Hall nearly didn’t get made at all.
“Six weeks from production, we were shutting down. There was no way around,” remembers Kosminsky of the second season, which adapts the final novel in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Henry VIII advisor and fixer Thomas Cromwell. “We were so far adrift on the money and we had cut and cut and cut.” At a late-night production meeting, the director and an executive producer made a dramatic pact: To save the project, they would give up major parts of their fees. Writer Peter Straughan (who recently won an Oscar for Conclave) and star Mark Rylance (Dunkirk) later joined in, also taking significant salary cuts.
The arrangement allowed them to begin shooting, and starting Sunday night, U.S. audiences will be able to begin viewing the result on Masterpiece on PBS, nearly 10 years after the first season. The six-part series is a big period drama, filmed by candlelight in real Tudor-era (and older) locations, with intricate costumes and finely tuned performances from British acting stalwarts — just some of the features that helped Wolf Hall pick up a Golden Globe, a Peabody and eight Emmy nominations in 2015 and 2016. Still, series creatives say the sequel was nearly bested by its funding issues, a story that reflects how high-end British dramas produced outside the streaming ecosystem are increasingly challenged.
When Wolf Hall premiered in 2015, combining the first two books in Mantel’s trilogy, The Mirror & the Light book hadn’t yet been finished. Mantel was open about the fact that she found writing about this final stage of Cromwell’s life difficult: Though the lawyer remains a controversial historical figure, her novels paint him in a sympathetic light, charting his rise from a battered blacksmith’s son to a canny mover and shaker in the royal court. Still, the production team generally believed that they would be embarking on a sequel once the source material was published, given that executive producer Colin Callender had optioned all the novels and Wolf Hall had been a critical success.
The relationship between Mantel and director Kosminsky had become a close one on Wolf Hall and so, as she worked on her final Cromwell novel, Mantel turned her role as adviser to the TV series on its head. She began sending 100-page excerpts of her unfinished manuscript to the director, “asking me to comment, insisting that I comment, can you imagine?” Kosminsky remembers. “I don’t have any literary pretensions. So I did my best. And she changed things.”
He reveals for the first time publicly that he asked whether there were any further scenes charting the deterioration of Cromwell’s relationship with the character William FitzWilliam — and the author subsequently wrote some. Once The Mirror & the Light was published in 2020, returning screenwriter Straughan began wrestling with adapting the book’s 700-plus pages.
But then tragedy struck. The writing process was nearly two-thirds complete, with casting and location scouting underway, when in September 2022, Mantel unexpectedly died after suffering a stroke. According to Kosminsky, at that point, the production seriously discussed canceling the second season out of respect for the author. Eventually, though, the creatives agreed they wanted to make the show as a memorial to Mantel. “If it hadn’t been for the support of the BBC and Masterpiece at that point, when our morale was pretty low, I think there might’ve been a different outcome,” says Kosminsky.
That strong loyalty to Mantel helps explain how the production survived its financing challenges. There were many hurdles to bringing The Mirror and the Light to life — the scheduling of various major stars and shoots at National Trust properties (historic buildings that are open to the public), for instance — but the price tag was paramount. “The costs in England for production over the years have escalated astronomically,” explains producer Colin Callender, whose Playground Entertainment also produces All Creatures Great and Small. Spurred by the entrance of U.S.-based streamers into the local production market, the costs of casts, crews and vendors have skyrocketed, while the money that broadcasters funnel into productions in the U.K. haven’t kept up, he says. General increases in cost of living and interest rates have also complicated matters; and the insurance on this project in particular was “crippling,” describes Kosminsky. “It’s a problem across the whole of the British industry and it’s particularly affecting top-end British drama,” Callender says.
The costs for The Mirror and the Light nearly doubled what was spent on Wolf Hall, according to Callender. The BBC contributed what it could, and Masterpiece “reached very deeply into our pockets,” says the program’s executive producer, Susanne Simpson. But it still wasn’t enough, prompting the late-night emergency meeting of creatives weeks before production began. As to why so many of the project’s filmmakers were ultimately open to taking a financial hit in order to see the project through, writer Straughan points to their fealty for Mantel: “I think there was a tremendous loyalty to her, to the project, from all of us,” he says.
Even so, the series had to pinch pennies to make its budget. The second-season shoot “was five times harder [than the first] because the money was so tight,” says Kosminsky. He recalls once doing 40 setups in a day, as opposed to his usual rate of doing around half that amount. One day, he remembers having six actors around a table, barely moving, as 14 pages of “solid dialogue” was shot in the day. “It was insane stuff. I’ve never done anything like it and I don’t ever want to do anything like it again,” he adds.
The team made it work: The Mirror and the Light picks up where Wolf Hall left off, with Rylance’s Cromwell at the peak of his powers following the execution of Anne Boleyn (played in the first season by Claire Foy). But as his king’s new wife Jane Seymour (Kate Phillips) fails to provide him a male heir and an uprising in the north of England threatens the delicate state of the realm, Cromwell’s enemies begin to circle while the king (Damian Lewis) grows ever more unpredictable. Most of the first season’s actors return, with two notable exceptions being Bernard Hill (who died in May 2024 and is replaced as the Duke of Norfolk by Timothy Spall) and Tom Holland (who skyrocketed to stardom as Spider-Man after appearing as Cromwell’s son on Wolf Hall and wasn’t available this time around). Reviews in the U.S. have so far been positive.
Though The Mirror and the Light made it, its struggles are emblematic of the larger hurdles facing producers working on projects for U.K. public service broadcasters like the BBC, ITV or Channel 4, according to its creatives.
Kosminsky submitted written evidence to a U.K. parliamentary committee investigating the state of local film and high-end television, published this past January, that asserted that The Mirror and the Light couldn’t be made today. Streamers had all been pitched and rejected the original Wolf Hall; they generally do not co-produce with public service broadcasters, preferring to own all the intellectual property. Meanwhile, the local inflation that Kosminsky argues they’ve helped to create has made shows like The Mirror and the Light very difficult to fund. Kosminsky and British producer Jane Featherstone (Black Doves, Chernobyl) both have told the committee that there are projects at public service broadcasters that have been greenlit but are in limbo as they wait for adequate funding.
In this high-cost environment, the U.S.-based Masterpiece has joined projects earlier on as a co-producer and, in some cases, a commissioner, rather than a later co-producer or just a distributor, the roles it has historically served for U.K. projects. And even though the U.S. entertainment industry is contracting, prices in the U.K. haven’t declined accordingly, says Masterpiece EP Simpson. The U.K. remains an incredibly attractive option for producers in cost-cutting mode, given its generous tax incentives. “We do have to pay more for shows than we ever have before,” Simpson says.
The Mirror and the Light, then, may be a period piece in more ways than one unless something changes. Says Kosminsky, “The truth is the BBC and Masterpiece moved heaven and earth to get this show made, and some of us made our own contributions, but the world has moved on since. I wouldn’t have said this in front of the House of Commons if I didn’t mean it: It wouldn’t get made now and neither would a number of shows.”
Source: Hollywoodreporter
