Mark Rylance sat quietly alone, his black hat head bowing and his eyes closed. Near the magnificent room, Damien Lewis gleamed on a huge gold jacket featuring King Henry VIII as the king.
Last spring, it was the 77th day of filming, one of the “Mirrors and Light” locations at Bishop's Palace in Wells, England. Book and Show are the son of a blacksmith who became the king's prime minister and fixer before his surprising career reached a tragic turn.
The six-part “Mirror and the Light,” which will air on PBS masterpieces from Sunday, begins in 1536 where the final one ended, with Amboline (Clairfoy) beheaded.
The series, aired on PBS in 2015, covered the first two novels of the trilogy, “Wolf Hall” and “Bring the Bodies.” It was a miracle of writers and film compression, and gave Cromwell the rise to excellence. His successful negotiations for the King's first divorce. A break with the Catholic Church. And then the rise of Anne Bolin and her fall. This was designed by Cromwell at the request of the King.
“The Mirror and the Light” has a nearly identical creative team. Peter Straughan (he recently won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for “Conclave.” (However, this time there is no relatively flesh female role in Foy's turn, comparable to Anne Bolin).
When the show first aired on the BBC in the UK last fall, it won as enthusiastic reviews as it was in 2015. It begins with Anne's execution, alongside a scene where Henry is groomed and stunnedly equipped for his wedding to Jane Seymour (Kate Phillips). Cromwell is at the peak of his power, but Anne's opening shot on the way to her death expects his own fall with the whimsical royal hand.
“The characters are always within you,” Rylance said. “Cromwell was there, but this time it was heavy and dark.” In “Wolf Hall,” Cromwell was revenge for the expulsion and death of his leader, Cardinal Walsey, explained Rylance, but in “Mirror and Light,” “he comes to own a little more of what he projected on these people: his own guilt.”
Colin Calendar, one of the show's executive producers who secured the rights to the novel in 2010, has always been his intention to adapt Mantrul's final novel.
Director Kosminsky said “there is a huge luxury to see the material evolve and think about mechanics,” and said he had discussed it with Mantel while working on the final novel. “I told the incident about certain things that adaptation is likely to require,” Kosminsky told the author in a question about personality and motivation. Mantel responded with a wealth of notes, Kosminsky said.
In turning the nearly 900-page novel into a script, Strafan said he was “desire to find continuity in the first series,” and that he was on the theme of revenge against Cromwell's mentor's enemy. “Our idea was that he would probably beat all the traitors to Walsey and come to understand that there was one last thing.
The idea was sown in early episodes, and from this point on, things are beginning to go bad for the formerly invincible Cromwell.
“There were 1,000 moments where I asked myself, 'Maybe this be true, and is this other thing true?'” said Lillit Lesser, who plays the king's eldest son, Mary. “And you think, 'They're all true at once.' ”
Rylance said Cromwell is lonely, losing his wife and two daughters and is dissatisfied with the “malicious intentions of the people he works with and being aware of the enormous suffering of people.” All of these frustrations “eventually burst,” Rylance said. “He makes rash choices and becomes hostile to the nobility. He gets tired of dealing with these people. And he catches up to Henry and behaves more and more psychotic.”
Henry, Lewis, “far from falling into a roaster, threw chicken on his shoulder and slapped the bottom of Wench, which became a popular tradition. He was very honoured, rather famous man, poet, poet, composer, speaking many languages, and knowing the Bible.”
At the time it was made into a drama on the show, Lewis added, and Henry was in severe pain after the horseback riding accident. All of this, Lewis said, “contributed to this anger, delusion, an increasingly tempered man.”
When Cromwell's previous court magic command began to intensify, he must somehow neutralize Henry's nasty cousin Reginald Paul, who managed the rebellion in northern England, oversees the disbandment of the monastery, and wrote a book that denounces the king.
And when Jane Seymour dies after giving birth to her coveted son, it falls in Cromwell and finds another bride for the increasingly difficult monarch. His choice of Anne of Cleaves, hoping to help him secure an English alliance with the German state, is a failure.
“The beautiful, tragic arc of the series is about seeing Henry not being attacked by this guy anymore, as for episode 3,” Lewis said.
“Wolf Hall” was “about Cromwell entering the inner circle,” but he said, “In the mirror and the light, he returns to the outsider, the son of the blacksmith.” As Mantle writes at the end of his final novel, “He has disappeared. He is a slippery stone at his feet, and he is the last faint ripple in the wake of himself.”
