Photograph: Nick Briggs/BBC/Playground Entertainment
It has been nine years since the first blockbuster run of Wolf Hall shot complete unknown “Mark Rylance” to critical and commercial acclaim, and a smarter TV columnist who pays more attention to geopolitics would draw out a doomed attempt at a metaphor here. One about how the world has so drastically changed since 2015 – all those prime ministers and monarchs and presidents, and also Brexit and Bake Off going to Channel 4 – and I’d nod at the returning treacle-moving drama of court intrigue and everyone caring slightly too much about blood and go: “See? It’s like that, isn’t it. It’s all sort of like that.” That’s the kind of thing writers who get tie-in TV podcasts say in their opening paragraphs, and I would quite like one of those.
Sadly, I think Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (Sunday 10 November, 9pm, BBC One) might be cleverer than that. A moment for the cast, which – because they all fit so perfectly and believably into this rich world – it’s oddly easy to take for granted, but I mean, come on: Damian Lewis as Henry VIII on a delirious quest for a son before the gout really sets in; Kate Phillips as the doomed Jane Seymour, always staring nervously at her stomach and navigating the etiquette of royal court about as elegantly as I might get a big table through a small doorway; Jonathan Pryce’s Cardinal Wolsey creaks into rooms with that wry Prycean smile, always knowing more than you do by two or three magnitudes; Timothy Spall’s Duke of Norfolk does the same thing but in reverse, stumbling round marble columns and looking as confused as a dog does when you pretend to throw a stick but don’t actually throw it.
You’ll be in a scene and then a two-pages-of-script-and-five-weeks-of-work role will be played by an incredible performer for absolutely no reason: Harriet Walter purrs out four lines of dialogue in a low-lit room; Harry Melling wears a bizarre wide beard and looks astonished that people can talk about such things in a nice garden; Thomas Brodie-Sangster is always being sent on a weird chore 160 miles away. I won’t name them – there’s the harrowing risk that I might turn out to be wrong – but in 10 years we’ll marvel at the lesser-known actors in this who donned furs and stood by windows and dared not read letters handed to them for they may contain ominous news. There are too many people called Mary and, honestly, I don’t really know what’s going on ever.
Obviously, Mark Rylance at the centre of all this is titanic. He is constantly taking his hat on and off, and often wears that Rylance resting expression (“man drinking alone in a quiet pub during the day is saddened by how loudly you and your mates are swearing”), before turning on a sixpence and suddenly transforming. His Thomas Cromwell has a great line in wrestling men out of his way by their shoulders, but he’s just as adept at gently talking a lady out of making a decision that might cause her execution, or arranging a marriage in an ornate hedge maze.
His tortured-soul late-night conversations with Pryce are some of the best you’ll see on screen this year, and Peter Straughan’s script is smart to keep his scenes with Lewis’s Henry to a minimum. It seems fairly redundant to say “Damian Lewis is a good actor”, but, well, here we are: his Henry is outstanding, the biggest guy in the room in name and stature if not ever actual presence, something flawed in the hull and he knows it. There’s something of the high-school jock about him; the soul of a car salesman in the body of a king. He keeps whispering boasts about his new wife to Rylance’s Cromwell; Rylance turns to the room, turns back, takes his hat on and off about 15 more times, then reminds His Majesty that he is but a blacksmith’s son from Putney.
We live in bombastic times for historical fiction and period drama and period drama-adjacent fantasy – you need to see a head caved in, once every 55 minutes, to know there’s something worth coming back for next week – but Wolf Hall does well not to succumb to all that. When you really zoom out, it’s actually just six hours of Mark Rylance having chats and you more often hear about the huge results of these whispers than see them. But when the source material, acting and script is this rich, it doesn’t really matter. There are only six episodes, but I recommend turning every possible distraction off and just rolling around in it.
