– Rebellion, Diplomacy, and Intrigue –
by Taylor Antrim | Vogue | March 20, 2025
I still remember when the advanced copy of Hilary Mantel’s 2020 novel The Mirror and the Light hit my desk. I was eager to read the final book in Mantel’s titanic Thomas Cromwell trilogy, a series that began with Wolf Hall in 2009 and continued with Bring Up the Bodies in 2012. But its length (more than 800 pages) was intimidating, and as I plowed through, I found myself only as intermittently gripped as I’d been by Mantel’s preceding volumes.
What a strange memory to consider on the back of watching the six-episode marvel that is PBS Masterpiece’s Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, a thrillingly tense run of television that begins airing on March 23 and transforms Mantel’s doorstop of a novel into a fleet-footed depiction of unease and panic in the court of an English king.
That would be Henry VIII, a monarch who has had his share of televised impersonations, but none as good as this one by Damian Lewis, an actor I remember best as the terrorist mole Sargent Nicholas Brody on Homeland. As villains go, Brody was a teddy bear compared to the gout-stricken, carnal-minded, capricious psychopath Lewis plays here on the English throne.
And Lewis is not even the lead. That would be Mark Rylance as Henry’s Lord Privy Seal, Thomas Cromwell, an endlessly fascinating and ambiguous figure—brilliant, scheming, moral—whom Rylance animates with gravity and kaleidoscopic skill. His story begins, of course, with the first season of Wolf Hall (which is more or less a prerequisite to watching these new episodes; you can stream its six episodes on PBS). Cromwell is the son of a blacksmith who has become, by the start of The Mirror and the Light, to the most powerful man in England, in many respects more important to the future of the realm than Henry himself.
That is because Cromwell was instrumental in the events that led to Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn (played in the first season by Claire Foy), the king’s concomitant break with Rome, and, when Boleyn would not produce a male heir, her subsequent beheading. The Mirror and the Light opens with that profoundly disturbing execution, Foy a pale rictus of fear and vulnerability as she is led to the block, where she is blindfolded and positioned before the executioner’s sword. Rylance as Cromwell winces at the spectacle, a premonition of his own future.
The series speeds us through the next four years. Henry is besotted with Jane Seymour, who will become his third wife, and at long last bear him that male heir. Seymour (Kate Phillips) is a delicate thing, wary of Cromwell—as she should be—but as the season goes on, and as she eventually becomes pregnant, she sees Cromwell as an ally in the face of Henry’s caprices. Her death is a tragedy, and there are more tragedies to come.
The episodes are busy with rebellion, diplomacy, intrigue, but the action rarely leaves the darkened rooms of the Tudor court and the camera rarely leaves Cromwell. Rylance is one of our greatest living actors, and the emotions he holds in his face are manifold. His delivery of Mantel’s dialogue—modern, intelligent, bristling with implication and subterfuge—is mesmerizingly clear. As Cromwell’s power increases, so too do his enemies, and his acceptance that a figure so close to an embattled king is unlikely to survive is a marvel of nuance. He won’t survive—but he’ll go down swinging. It all makes for essential television.
Read the rest of the original article at Vogue