Mark Rylance sat quietly and alone, his black-capped head bowed, his eyes closed. Nearby in a grand chamber, Damian Lewis stood resplendent in a huge gold jacket, playing King Henry VIII, as the director Peter Kosminsky rearranged some actors playing courtiers.
It was Shoot Day 77, last spring, at Bishop’s Palace in Wells, England, one of the locations for “The Mirror and the Light,” the second and final television series based on Hilary Mantel’s dazzling trilogy of novels. The books, and the show, chart the rise and fall of the energetic, inscrutable Thomas Cromwell — a blacksmith’s son who became chief minister and all-around fixer to the king before his astonishing career took a tragic turn.
The six-part “Mirror and the Light,” which will air on PBS’s Masterpiece starting Sunday, begins exactly where the last one ended, in 1536, as Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy) is beheaded.
That series, which aired on PBS in 2015, encompassed the trilogy’s first two novels: “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies.” It was a miracle of writerly and filmic compression, giving us Cromwell’s ascent to prominence; his successful negotiation of the king’s first divorce; the break with the Catholic church; and Anne Boleyn’s rise, and her fall, which is engineered by Cromwell at the king’s behest.
“The Mirror and the Light” has a near-identical creative team: written by Peter Straughan (who recently won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for “Conclave”), directed by Kosminsky and starring Rylance and Lewis, with British acting royalty, including Alex Jennings, Timothy Spall and Harriet Walter, in small roles. (This time, though, there is no comparably meaty female role to equal Foy’s turn as Anne Boleyn.)
When the show was first broadcast on the BBC in Britain last fall, it won reviews as rapturous as those of 2015. It opens with Anne’s execution, juxtaposed against scenes of Henry being groomed and magnificently outfitted for his wedding with Jane Seymour (Kate Phillips). Cromwell is at the peak of his power, but the opening shot of Anne on her way to her death prefigures his own fall at the hands of the capricious royal.
“A character is always inside you,” Rylance said. “Cromwell was there, but heavier, darker this time.” In “Wolf Hall,” Cromwell took revenge for the banishment and death of his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, Rylance explained, but in “The Mirror and the Light,” “he comes to own a little more what he projected onto these people: his own feelings of guilt.”
It was always his intention to adapt Mantel’s final novel, said Colin Callender, one of the show’s executive producers, who secured the rights to the novels in 2010. But a host of factors — the coronavirus pandemic, Mantel’s death in 2022 and the difficulty of reassembling the high-profile cast of actors — delayed the project, which, he added, had become “considerably more expensive this time around.”
Kosminsky, the director, said they had “the enormous luxury of seeing the material evolve and thinking about the mechanics,” as well as discussing them with Mantel while she was working on the final novel. “I pled the case for certain things the adaptation was likely to need.” Kosminsky said, as well as plying the author with questions about character and motivation. Mantel responded with copious notes, Kosminsky said.
In turning the nearly 900-page novel into a script, Straughan said he had been “anxious to find continuity with the first series,” and its theme of Cromwell’s revenge on his mentor’s enemies. “Our thought,” he said, “was that perhaps he has defeated all the traitors to Wolsey and comes to understand there is one last one: himself.”
This idea is seeded in an early episode, and it’s from this point that things begin to go wrong for the previously invincible Cromwell.
“There were just a thousand moments where you asked yourself, ‘Could this be true, or this other thing be true?’” said Lilit Lesser, who plays Mary, the king’s eldest daughter, whose close relationship with Cromwell spawns a dangerous rumor that he plans to marry her. “And then you think, ‘They are all true at once.’”
Cromwell, Rylance said, is lonely, has lost his wife and two daughters, and is frustrated by “the viciousness of the people he is working with, and conscious of the enormous suffering of the people.” All these frustrations “eventually burst,” Rylance said. “He makes rash choices, antagonizes the nobles; he gets weary of accommodating these people. And he is caught up with a man, Henry, behaving increasingly psychopathically.”
Henry, Lewis said, “was far from being the roister-doistering, toss your chicken-leg over your shoulder, slap the wench’s bottom that he has become in popular tradition. He was a very devout, rather prurient man, who believed in courtly etiquette, was a poet, a composer, spoke many languages and knew the Bible inside out.”
At the point dramatized in the show, Lewis added, Henry was in intense pain after a riding accident, “and, I think, insecure about his sexual performance.” All this, Lewis said, “contributed to this irate, paranoid, increasingly short-tempered man.”
As Cromwell’s previously magisterial command of the court begins to falter, he must manage a rebellion in the north of England, supervise the dissolution of the monasteries, and somehow neutralize Henry’s troublesome cousin Reginald Pole, who has written a book denouncing the king.
And when Jane Seymour dies after producing the longed-for son, it falls to Cromwell to find another bride for the increasingly irascible monarch. His choice of Anne of Cleves, who he hopes can help secure an English alliance with the German states, is a failure.
“The beautiful, tragic arc of the series is that, by about Episode 3, you see that Henry is no longer in thrall to this man,” Lewis said.
Whereas “Wolf Hall” was “about Cromwell getting inside the inner circle,” Straughan said, “in ‘Mirror and the Light,’ he goes back to being the outsider, the blacksmith’s son.” As Mantel writes at the end of the final novel: “He has vanished. He is the slippery stones underfoot, he is the last faint ripple in the wake of himself.”
