A decade after winning acclaim for the authenticity it brought to Tudor dramas, Wolf Hall returns with a series based on the last of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell novels. Director Peter Kosminsky reflects on the landmark period drama.
Before he proved otherwise, Peter Kosminsky was possibly the wrong man for the job of turning Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels into a screen drama.
Firstly, as a director, Kosminsky’s dramas were usually contemporary, political and written by him. Plus, he’d once attempted a period piece based on a novel. It didn’t go well. Back in the early 1990s, he’d directed a film of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights starring Ralph Fiennes as Heathcliff, Juliette Binoche as Catherine and, in a prologue, Sinead O’Connor as Brontë.
It got terrible reviews, left the box office untroubled and briefly derailed Kosminsky’s career.
“It was a disaster for me, and I really shied away from period drama completely since then, essentially, because I’d concluded that I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t my skill set. I was flattered back into it by being asked to do Wolf Hall which is based on two Booker Prize-winning novels by one of the leading then-living writers in the English language. I mean, you couldn’t really say no.
“So, the fact that I was able to do a costume drama, and for it not to be a total pile of poo was a fantastic relief.”
The first series, which charted the rise of low-born lawyer Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII, earned Kosminsky Bafta and Golden Globe awards. The accolades would sit alongside the ones he’d already gathered for his dramas about the dark side of modern Britain.
Among them were four best drama Bafta-winners: No Child of Mine, about sexual abuse; Warriors, about British peacekeepers in Bosnia; The Government Inspector, about the death of bio-warfare expert Dr David Kelly; and Britz, a series about how young British Muslims could be drawn to extremism. Since the initial Cromwell series, he’s also done The State, about young British Muslims joining Isis, and The Undeclared War, a thriller about a cyberattack on Britain. His next production is a drama about the Grenfell Tower fire for the BBC, where he began his career in the 1980s.
Against those, the stately costume drama Wolf Hall might seem an odd fit. But Kosminsky remembers Mantel telling him he was a better choice than he realised.
“She always saw this as a piece with huge contemporary echoes, and I certainly tried to handle it in that way. If Cromwell was a contemporary figure, I would certainly be making a drama about him and, in fact, we tried to shoot the show as if it were happening now, as if the costumes and the locations were very commonplace. We didn’t feature them in the way that they often are in period dramas, because, in my contention, they were ordinary.
“So, I tried to shoot it in exactly the way I would have shot a contemporary drama, and to give it that same feeling of political relevance, which I do think it still has, and immediacy.”
It certainly felt authentically different to almost any Henrician screen drama before it, with a psychopathic or paranoid Henry making Cromwell his enabler-in-chief. These weren’t the sexy Tudors that crowded the small and big screens in the early 2000s.
“We need all different kinds of programmes, and if that’s what audiences want to watch, go for it. But certainly, to have imposed that on Hilary’s really thoughtful, serious writing would have been outrageous.”
Kosminsky has a theory about why the era has consistently figured on screen since the silent era. It involves glass and plumbing.
“Of course, it’s partly because Henry butchered his wives. But it’s also partly because it’s the first point in English history, really, where we start to recognise lives that resemble our own. It’s the point where wealthy people stopped living in baronial halls with open fires in the middle … and moving towards what you might think of as a large house with big windows, where there were separate dining rooms, separate sitting rooms, separate bedrooms, separate toilets. And the shape of life as we know it today started really, pretty much for the first time. I think that’s one of the reasons why we’re drawn to this period – suddenly our modern world starts to be represented in the medieval world.”
The quietly affable Kosminsky, 69, is talking to the Listener while digesting his supper at home in Wiltshire, presumably not far from Stonehenge after which his production company is named. His second and final Wolf Hall series, adapting Mantel’s third Cromwell novel, The Mirror and the Light, screened in the UK late last year and in the US in March. But he’s still happy to chat about the landmark show as it finally arrives in New Zealand.
The first and last of the new season episodes each come with a beheading and a wedding. It begins in mid-1536 and having sent Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy) to her death with Cromwell’s help, Henry is immediately betrothed then married to Jane Seymour (Kate Phillips). A former lady-in-waiting to her predecessor and, as Mantel contends, someone Cromwell was in love with. It’s no spoiler to say Seymour doesn’t last the season either.
At the beginning, Mark Rylance as Cromwell seems to have consolidated his position as the king’s brilliant fixer-in-chief and the second most powerful man in England. But having a good head on his shoulders in the employ of Henry and keeping it there are two different things.
“Henry is extremely capricious and gets bored with people and turns on people with a sort of terrifying regularity. Cromwell places himself in the crosshairs and he spends four years trying to evade the death shot, really, but eveally it gets him.”
The Mirror and the Light was published in 2020 and written after the first season, which had adapted Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012) into one series. But even before it hit bookstores, Kosminsky had already read the concluding novel and was thinking about a second series. He’d become friends with Mantel during the making of the first season. As she wrestled with the final volume’s eventual 800 pages – which made it the lengthiest and most plot-complicated of the three – the author sent the director the book in 100-page instalments.
While the television script for both seasons was written by and solely credited to Peter Straughan, who this year won a best adapted screenplay Oscar for Conclave, Mantel was still happy to be a sounding board.
“She respected alternative mediums. She loved the idea of a stage adaptation and actively took part in the adaptation as stage play and she respected our medium, and she wasn’t defensive or protective as so many novelists, particularly famous novelists, can be.
“She said, ‘Treat me as a resource. I’m here to help.’ Whenever I asked her something ‒ advice, or guidance on some of the more obscure bits of text in what’s a very dense novel ‒ she would reply within 24 hours without exception. Some of her emails would run to 10 or 12 pages. It was invaluable. After she’d gone, these are the things that we used on a daily basis while adapting and then shooting the show.”
Mantel died of a stroke in 2022. Kosminsky misses her still.
“It was tragic in so many different ways. It was sad because she wasn’t able to enjoy the result of the adaptation of her last and arguably finest novel and sad for all of us, because she had a lot more writing in her. She was at the height of her powers.”
When The Mirror and the Light was published, Mantel had said the first season had been an influence on the book. Kosminsky says he saw some signs of it – how the execution of Anne Boleyn was realised on television has similarities to how Mantel revisited it at the beginning of TM&TL. And she told the director that the performance of Damian Lewis as Henry had influenced how she wrote the character in the book.
“I mean, she was hugely respectful of Mark Rylance and his extraordinary bringing to life of Thomas Cromwell. But in terms of helping her see how Henry might evolve in the final four years that are depicted, she found the adaptation useful.”
The third book begins straight after the end of the second. But Kosminsky had to shoot the second series 10 years after the first.
Yes, Rylance still fitted Cromwell’s 16th century lawyer’s robes, which had been kept in storage among other costumes. Henry’s were always going to need to be let out to fit the swelling fat suit Lewis wore beneath his character’s finery.
There had to be a few cast changes – Bernard Hill, who had played Cromwell’s rival, the Duke of Norfolk, in the first series, died last year and his role was taken on by Timothy Spall. A pre-movie-stardom teenage Tom Holland played Cromwell’s son Gregory in the first season but didn’t return for the minor role. Otherwise, Kosminsky says the principals were keen to return “to complete the job we started’’.
They weren’t doing it for the money. As Kosminsky told a UK government inquiry into the British screen industry in January, it was possible to start production only when he, the producer, the writer, and the leading man gave up “a significant proportion” of their fees. All the major streamers had turned the show down as being too British, with only the BBC – which is now undergoing funding cuts – and the US Public Broadcasting Service backing the production.
Neither the first nor second Wolf Hall, he says, could be made now in the UK production climate.
“As things currently stand in the UK, the public service broadcasters, that’s BBC, ITV, Channel 4, can no longer afford to make high-end drama. There’s lots of complex reasons why that is. But the reasons are not obscure. It’s not just costume dramas which are fiendishly expensive but even shows which enjoy great success in the UK, like the ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office.
“It would be impossible to make that programme now. So, we’re in real trouble and unless our government wakes up, because it’s asleep at the wheel at the moment, this kind of thing is going to quietly disappear.”
Still, he made two seasons of Wolf Hall. He agrees that just like the books were in Mantel’s career, it’s been a landmark for him.
“Most of the things I’ve made have been greeted with a sort of respectful silence, really. To finally work on something that was – and is – as well received by the public as this has been, is unusual.”
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light screens on Sky TV’s BBC First from Monday, June 23, 8.30pm, and streams on Neon from June 24. Season one is also available on Neon.
