It is a treacherous landscape, the set of Wolf Hall, which sits under grey clouds beside Wells Cathedral. Outside in the field, production vans spin their wheels and horses kick up mud. Inside, the Bishop’s Palace is mined with cables, scaffold and lighting rigs. Visitors are advised to tread carefully. Danger lurks at every turn. “You watch yourself there,” cautions Timothy Spall. “You won’t lose your head, but you might lose your balance.”
For three months, Wolf Hall’s cast and crew have shuttled between England’s heritage sites. They’ve shot at Hampton Court (where the planes were a nuisance) and Haddon Hall, Lacock Abbey and Montacute House. Now at last they’re in the final straight. Cooling his heels in his trailer with a flask of hot tea, Spall explains that he has only one scene left to film – performing opposite lead player Mark Rylance inside the columned hall. Spall has been acting for decades. He knows his work back to front. “But you know what?” he says. “I still have the same sick feeling in my stomach. Every time I step out it’s as though it’s the first job again.”
If there still exists such a thing as prestige television in this age of un-curated, on-demand content, Wolf Hall fits the bill. The BBC’s gilded Tudor drama is at once opulent and restrained, savage and soft-spoken; a gangster thriller in ermine and velvet, painted in shades of grey and occasional splashes of blood. The original 2015 series covered the first two novels in Hilary Mantel’s Booker prize-winning trilogy (Wolf Hall; Bring Up the Bodies), shadowing low-born, high-flying Thomas Cromwell through the court of King Henry VIII. The upcoming six-parter tackles the third, The Mirror and the Light, in which Cromwell – nominally at the peak of his powers – finds himself friendless and under threat. No doubt that’s the logic of every successful career: stick your head above the parapet and sooner or later someone will try to chop it off.
Spall has an hour to kill before he needs to get into costume and might as well spend it drinking tea in his trailer. Acting jobs, he says, are a bit like fishing trips. “A lot of sitting around on the riverbank, then suddenly it happens and you’ve got to pull in your fish.”
He’s playing Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, one of the courtiers who perpetually circle the king. (The late Bernard Hill played Norfolk in the first series.) History tells us that Howard was Cromwell’s great nemesis, a player in his own right, though Spall prefers to think of the role as a small piece in a jigsaw. That’s what film and TV actors are, he says: a set of moving pieces. “The job is about taking five pages of dialogue – and usually no more than two – and turning it into something that looks real, like it’s happening and that fits with everything else. All that concentration on one little sliver that helps to make sense of the rest of the picture.” He chuckles. “That’s basically it, that’s acting for you. You stand there with your lines and try to make it sound like you are saying them for the very first time.”
Wolf Hall’s second series picks right up from the first, in the immediate aftermath of Anne Boleyn’s execution, with Damian Lewis’s tyrannical king demanding total fealty from his subjects. Off screen, nine torrid years have gone by. We’ve had Brexit, Trump and Boris Johnson, war in Europe and a global pandemic. And if it’s true that all futuristic sci-fi is a veiled commentary on modern times, then it’s probably the case with historical fiction, too. It’s unavoidable, Spall says. You don’t work in a bubble. “The biggest thing we’ve had these past nine years is a terrifying move away from democracy, or towards some sort of alternative to it. And this, Wolf Hall, is the biggest advert for democracy you can get, because what it shows in great detail is the system of rule inside a dictatorship. The volatile ego. The bloodline, the politics. That might be where we’re all heading. So be careful what you wish for.”
In the chapel at the Bishop’s Palace, the first scene of the day is under way. I take the pew beside director Peter Kosminsky and watch as choirboys in white ruffs sing The Western Wynde Mass. Seated nearby, wearing Cromwell’s black coat and cap, Rylance dips his head to speak to his costumed co-star; his voice pitched so low that the singing all but drowns it out. Ellie de Lange is playing the role of Jenneke, Cromwell’s daughter. She is leaving for Antwerp and implores him to join her. By this point in the drama, Cromwell’s position is precarious. His enemies are emboldened and the king has turned his back. Here is his off-ramp; a possible means of escape. One worries it might be the only chance he gets.
By both accident and design, Wolf Hall’s closing stretch feels particularly death-haunted, with Cromwell’s end somehow echoed by Mantel’s sudden death in September 2022. Kosminsky, for one, is still processing the loss. The director became close to Mantel while shooting the first series. Their working relationship blossomed into a proper friendship. The author would send The Mirror and the Light to him as she was writing it – every couple of months, in 100-page instalments – and he would mail back queries and suggestions. Mantel was an invaluable resource on the first series, he says. He missed her on the second but felt that the bulk of the work had been done. “By the time we came to film I had no outstanding questions. Before she so sadly, unbearably died, we had already covered a lot of the ground. The only question I’d like to ask her is the obvious one: what do you reckon to what we’ve done?”
I suspect she’d approve. It’s a fabulous adaptation: a drama that continues the trilogy’s stealthy line of travel; a tale of the past that implicitly speaks to the present. “Well, we are all living through very turbulent times,” says Kosminsky. “So was Hilary, albeit a little earlier. The world was darkening around when she was writing The Mirror and the Light, and we are all thoroughly benighted now.”
Outside factors might partially explain Wolf Hall’s journey towards darkness. But the story itself has its own natural arc. “The first six episodes were about ascent,” he says. “They were about Cromwell scrambling from a poor, ill-educated background to the top of the power structure. They had a mood of optimist chutzpah. This is the story of a descent. By its nature it’s going to be much darker.”
Executive producer Colin Callender agrees. Nonetheless, he feels that amid all the talk of darkness, we shouldn’t forget about the light. “At its core, it’s about a man reflecting on his life,” he says. “Cromwell’s looking back – that’s the mirror. But he’s also looking forward – that’s the light.”
Self-reflection to illumination: that’s the real narrative arc. “So of course it reflects the world we’re living in now and the questions we all ask ourselves. How the hell did this happen? Did I do the right thing? What sort of world do we want this to be? But these are also the sort of questions we ask at various milestones in our lives. When we hit 40, 50, 60 or whatever. When we face our own mortality and look back on the journey. What could I have done better? What did I do wrong?” Callender shrugs. “I never asked Hilary why she called the book The Mirror and the Light, but that’s what it means to me. And watching Cromwell ask those questions of himself is exhilarating.” It is a descent, he says, but it is also a leap towards a kind of freedom.
Back at the trailer, Spall has just about drained his flask. Soon, an assistant will escort him to the set. He’ll be put into his costume, led before the cameras for his scene. The film set, it occurs, is the modern-day equivalent of the old Tudor court. It has a similar rigid hierarchy. It’s defined by jockeying egos, pomp and pageantry, and by a boss on the throne who might at any second call “Cut”.
Actually, says Spall, it doesn’t feel that way at all. “Yes, the director is in charge. But this is collaboration, not dictation. There’s very little willy-waving going on and, contrary to popular belief, very few power games from people who are of a higher status than others. In Hollywood it’s different. It’s money, money, money. But you don’t smell the money on something like this. You don’t feel the studio breathing down your neck.”
In practice, he says, the working day sets the tone – and if there’s anything breathing down your neck, it’s time. There is a schedule to meet and scenes to be shot, and there are never quite enough hours in the day. Everyone is rushing to get Wolf Hall in the can. They’re too busy, therefore, to plot, gossip or backstab.
The process of film-making: that’s the ultimate tyrant. “You know what it’s like?’ Spall says. “It’s like trying to get an ostrich inside a Thermos flask. Films blow up and then implode. Think about it. The script for Wolf Hall is the size of a piece of A4. Then all of a sudden it’s as big as all this.” He waves his hand. “What have we got today, about five acres here? Then the implosion is about pulling it all back so you can stick it on a TV screen that isn’t much bigger than the original script. Or even smaller than that – a file on somebody’s computer. That’s the process of making pictures. It’s remarkable, isn’t it?”
Spall hands over his flask. “Look, here’s your ostrich,” he says. “I do hope you enjoy it.”
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light is coming soon to BBC One and iPlayer.
