– Spectacular Showdowns at Court –
by Joe Molander | Royal Television Society | April 1, 2025
We’ll never know for sure what Thomas Cromwell wants. Well, wanted, ever since Henry VIII relieved the statesman of his head nearly 500 years ago.
Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of novels offered up several theories. Maybe the son of a blacksmith became Cardinal Wolsey’s right-hand man, and then a leading political figure in his own right, because he coveted power. Perhaps Cromwell wanted a better standard of living, to push through religious reform, or to triumph over aristocrats who sneered at his low birth. Maybe a quiet life would have bored him.
The TV adaptation carries over the mystery masterfully, offering insight without beating the viewer over the head with a definite answer. It’s a drama that manages both to be subtle and end with a beheading. That chiaroscuro-like approach to contrast is present throughout both Wolf Hall and its second series, subtitled The Mirror and the Light (the name of the final novel). There are the spectacular showdowns at court, yes, but also long pauses, often after someone has made a mistake.
For all the King’s fury, “one of the qualities of Wolf Hall and The Mirror and the Light are the silences,” executive producer Colin Callender tells me. “They’re very, very powerful.”
In the absence of dialogue, the viewer is invited to read more into the actors’ expression and body language, enriching performances that are already electric.
“We shot lots of scenes in very long takes to let the scene unfold, almost at times like a stage play,” Callender explains.
Claire Foy’s Anne Boleyn – Cromwell’s enemy right up until he orchestrates her execution – is so expressive that you could watch the first series on mute. With the slightest widening of the eyes or curl of the lips, her status, sadism and, later, desperation still come through. Mark Rylance is harder to read as Thomas Cromwell, but every twitch of his brow makes you determined to try. This is a person who spends his life burying contempt for the people that ousted Wolsey, his friend and mentor. Even a glimpse at that fury is thrilling.
“When you’re doing a costume drama, lots of money has been spent on the costumes, and sets and so forth, so you tend to be drawn to shooting them,” director Peter Kosminsky says. “I didn’t do that: I shot it like a contemporary drama, as if it was happening today.”
As such, the cinematography focussed on character, rather than setting.
“We needed to be able to protect our ability to get into the faces,” Callender explains, “however glorious the landscape was, the interiors of the Tudor building and so on.”
“I can’t stand with period shows or fantasy shows when you’ll have the CGI cityscape shot that they spent money on,” writer Peter Straughan concurs. “The minute I see that, my heart sinks.”
A no-frills approach might not suit most novelists, who often want to see every detail from their books appear in the on-screen adaptations. Mantel, though, was not most novelists.
“She was extremely relaxed,” Straughan says. “She never made [the book trilogy] feel like it was a sacred text that mustn’t be tampered with: she was open to the inevitability of change.”
“She had conceived it, even at the novel writing stage, as something that had a very contemporary feel,” Kosminsky says. “She said to me that she had always imagined it shot with a handheld camera and with the boom dropping into shot every so often.”
More important than faithfulness to the source material was that Cromwell felt familiar to the audience, rather than some dusty old historical figure, Kosminsky explains. That’s where those long looks at his face, rippling with vivid, relatable emotion, earn their keep.
What results is a Wolf Hall that’s light on its feet, as entertaining as it is prestigious. The finer points of the English Reformation may not exactly appeal to the masses, but the more accessible themes of influence, ambition and survival transform it into something utterly magnetic.
By series two, just when Cromwell has finally accrued a degree of power, cracks are starting to show. He begins to display the arrogance he once detested in courtiers, and used to bring them down. Anne Boleyn’s death weighs heavy. Wolsey’s ghost keeps turning up.
“This second season is about a man reflecting on his life and the decisions he’s made,” Callender says. “Mark Rylance’s performance reveals an emotional inner turmoil.”
“The Mirror and the Light is the story of Cromwell’s fall and eventual execution, and that required Mark Rylance to go on quite a dark journey,” Kosminsky says. “When you’re working with an actor who’s having to really go down the dark tunnel, then the only thing you can say is ‘well, I’ll go down the tunnel with you. You won’t go alone.’”
“Directors I know of tend to be a bit more [focussed on] working with the camera crew, but I stand right next to the actors when we’re shooting. We talk all the time between takes, about what’s going through the character’s mind, those dark thoughts and panicking as he feels his grip slipping.”
“[Cromwell’s] not able to describe what he’s feeling to the other characters around him, because he’s protecting himself, but [Rylance] needs to talk about that with someone, and I have to make sure that person is me.”
In The Mirror and the Light, we also meet Wolsey’s daughter, a nun called Dorothea who is convinced that Cromwell betrayed her father. A horrified Cromwell insists this isn’t true, but for one of the first times in the show, isn’t entirely convinced he’s right.
“Peter and I had what we thought was our great secret idea, which was essentially that Cromwell becomes self-destructive because of being accused of betraying the Cardinal,” Straughan explains. “On some probably unconscious level, he starts to bring himself down.”
“I don’t think Peter ever talked to Mark about that,” Straughan continues. “I remember Hilary saying there’s a limit to how much Cromwell understands himself, and so in a way, you probably want the actor to go through that same process of not necessarily fully understanding all their motivation.”
Those determined to understand what makes Cromwell tick should look to his relationship with women, Callender suggests. In the editing room, for example, Kosminsky found that the politician’s scenes with Anne Boleyn were what made the show shine.
“[In post-production] people imagine there’s a lot of editing going on – and, of course, there is – but most of my time in the cutting room is just spent talking,” Kosminsky says. “Sometimes [editor David Blackmore and I] make lists of scenes in different orders, and in the case of that first series, what we realised was the most compelling story was the relationship between Cromwell and Anne Boleyn, so we focused in on that. We let a lot of material go that wasn’t focused on that dynamic.”
In The Mirror and the Light, “there is no one female character that is as prominent as Claire Foy’s Anne Boleyn was in season one,” Callender says.
Instead, he tells me, series two features a range of women with whom Cromwell can show a rare honesty and compassion. If his interactions with Dorothea are anything to go by, they’re also the people most able to hurt him. Like Cromwell, the women of The Mirror and the Light – such as Jane Seymour or Henry’s daughter Mary – have been disadvantaged by their birth. Their sex and Cromwell’s class force them to pander to well-born men – and a decidedly male monarch – perhaps creating a solidarity that becomes more prominent in series two. Callender and Straughan both point to a scene in the Mirror and the Light where Mary trusts Cromwell enough to undo her hair in front of him, and break down in tears.
“Whether I’m conscious of it or not, I’m [always] prowling around a story that’s to do with loyalty and betrayal,” he explains. “That felt very much, for me, the heart that I could work with in Wolf Hall, which is about those who maintain loyalty to others, and those who betray them.”
When I ask what draws him to betrayal, Straughan draws a blank, except for one theory:
“I was brought up Catholic,” he says. “I remember as a boy being in the garden by myself, acting out the crucifixion. I wonder if Judas looms large in my head.”
Unfortunately, all the loyalty in the world wasn’t enough to stop Cromwell’s execution. His exact motivation is left a mystery, one we’re still puzzling over half a millennium later.
Few applied more thought or more care to that enigma than Mantel. Her own death, in 2022, made The Mirror and the Light her last novel. Did that put any pressure on bringing it to the screen?
“Only to the extent that Hilary was a friend of mine,” Kosminsky says. “I liked her and admired her hugely, and I didn’t want to let her down.”
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light was nominated in the Drama Series category at the RTS Programme Awards 2025.
Read the rest of the original article at RTS.org