Sorry to say it, but Tom Hiddleston would make a terrible spy. It’s just past Monday lunchtime on Sloane Square, and the British actor is beginning to turn heads. He should blend right in, dressed in a sharp, West London–appropriate Ralph Lauren suit, his clean-cut good looks lightly disguised by a hint of a beard. Even Vogue’s photographer is hidden from view, positioned several floors up in a nearby hotel room, from where he is snapping the 44-year-old in the street below, sniper-like, with a long lens. But such is his fame that it takes just a matter of minutes—seconds?—before the first passerby pulls a phone from a pocket. In Hiddleston’s defense, he is posing alfresco at a restaurant table with a drop-dead Camila Morrone (looking a world away from her hippy-ish breakout role in Daisy Jones the Six) draped in a lush coat, a flash of a candyfloss-pink satin slip shimmering through this otherwise dreary, autumnal afternoon. Rounding out the trio? Babylon star Diego Calva, jetted in from his home in Mexico City, whose cheekbones alone could have an eye out. A crowd forms. Hiddleston’s cover is very much blown.
As Jonathan Pine, though—the ex-soldier turned hotelier turned MI6 asset—in the BBC’s 2016 adaptation of John le Carré’s The Night Manager, Hiddleston made an utterly convincing spook (among the best since Bond—he has the Golden Globe to prove it). Come this January, a decade on from its culture- and career-shaping first series, The Night Manager is back for a thrilling second outing, with Hiddleston returning as star and executive producer, alongside Morrone and Calva as gorgeous, global crims Roxana Bolaños and Teddy dos Santos.
“More scars on the inside, more scars on the outside” is how Hiddleston describes 2020s Pine to me later, sitting in a dimly lit basement speakeasy, which Vogue is using as a base during the shoot, beneath the Sloane Square Hotel, a former hangout of young royals back in the day, apparently. I’m struggling to see the “outside scars” to which Hiddleston refers: he looks largely unchanged, the sandy hair still generous, the eyes still a glittering blue, even though he’s likely been kept awake by the arrival, just a couple of weeks earlier, of his second baby with his wife, actor Zawe Ashton (which might explain his late-afternoon black coffee). “It’s unlike any character I’ve ever played,” he continues, that endearingly earnest charm, well known to chat show hosts and stage door groupies, kicking in. Pine, you see, is a part that Hiddleston had never really left behind. “If somebody stops me in the street, or I find myself at a social gathering, people will bring up The Night Manager,” he says. “The association is really strong.”
I can believe it. Even if you can’t quite recall the twists and turns of its debut, which opened in Cairo against the backdrop of the 2011 Arab Spring before moving to the sweep of the Swiss Alps, and then to a sun-bleached Mallorca (it looked expensive—and was, costing the Beeb £20 million to make, a high price in those days), it’s a show that has lodged in collective televisual memory, largely down to its career-defining performances. Hugh Laurie’s billionaire wannabe-warlord Richard Roper—a master class in depravity; Tom Hollander, borderline terrifying as Corky, his Iago-esque right-hand; Olivia Colman—pre-Oscar—heaven as Angela Burr, Pine’s heavily pregnant intelligence officer. It didn’t hurt that the show also looked deeply stylish. Hiddleston wore a suit like no one before or since, but it was then–24-year-old Elizabeth Debicki who really brought the glamour, wafting about in a series of barely-there gowns and bank-breaking caftans, accessorized with her fantasy, money-can’t-buy blonde crop. The cash might have come from the worst means possible, but boy, did it make you want to shop. No surprise that it sent Debicki to the top of global casting lists.
Morrone surely hopes for similar. “I watch a lot of TV. I love TV,” says the Los Angeles–born actor, 28, in her hotel room post-shoot. She was still a teenager, not even acting yet (“I was in the womb almost,” she jokes), when the first series aired, but watched it in one sitting when her chance to audition came up. “I’m supposed to be doing my lines, and instead I’m binge-watching all six episodes, which ended up paying off in the long run,” she says with a grin. “I was taken aback. It’s few and far between that you get that level of sophistication in a TV show.”
Which is to say, there are sky-high expectations for the sequel. “Ignore everything that’s come before” is how the new director Georgi Banks-Davies (who won a BAFTA for Sky Atlantic’s I Hate Suzie) has dealt with the pressure. She knows her creation will invite comparison, which is “why you can’t try to reproduce,” she says. “You can’t try to recreate magic. You just have to follow your instincts. It’s like, I don’t want to copy a great Picasso, because it’s going to look shit.”
We pick up the action 10 years on: Roper is gone, in body at least; Burr is allegedly retired; and Pine—now going by the name Alex Goodwin—is in London, haunted by the events of a decade ago, living alone with a cat. He is still, as Hiddleston puts it, “hiding behind a toolkit of manners, politeness, and charm,” still working a graveyard shift, though now as part of MI6’s unglamorous Night Owl Unit, providing nocturnal surveillance of the city’s top hotels, looking for high-powered crooks. But despite his calm protestations otherwise, Pine is a bomb ready to explode. When a cohort from Roper’s old gang resurfaces, the touchpaper is lit. He goes back undercover, heading to Colombia, into the orbit of Morrone’s mysterious Miamian shipping broker Roxana, and Calva’s Colombian arms dealer Teddy dos Santos—Roper’s “true disciple.”
“You lie to survive, but only the truth can save you” is the strapline 33-year-old Calva would give the show. He pauses, looks around the bar for a pen. “I should write that down. That’s good,” he says with a smile. With dos Santos, Calva is keen that he “is more than a nasty villain.” “I’m from Mexico, so I played several bad guys in my career,” he says, listing parts in drug cartel shows such as Narcos: Mexico. “There’s something really cool about playing the bad guy, but there’s also something that can get really close to being offensive.” To crush the stereotype, he wanted to “try to put humanity and vulnerability into Teddy.”
It’s an approach that drives the series. From the opening scene—in which we find Pine in the therapist’s chair—it is as smitten with the interior lives of its characters as it is with high-octane gloss (though there’s plenty of that too). “It’s about PTSD,” says Banks-Davies. “It’s about generational trauma. It’s about all the things that make us who we are, but how they then either bring us together, or divide us. The espionage, the action, the glamour, the beauty, the thriller, that all kind of takes care of itself. But to really hit, you’ve got to excavate that.”
The show’s writer, David Farr—a “connoisseur of le Carré,” according to executive producer Stephen Garrett—has also returned. Le Carré never permitted new works to be created from his books in his lifetime, but he was thrilled and entertained by the success of The Night Manager and, before he died in 2020, had given his blessing for a sequel of sorts to be explored—his sons, Stephen and Simon Cornwell, are both executive producers. One of the ideas Farr wanted to investigate was “the existential and psychological discussions about what it is to be a spy, what it is to be someone who is infiltrating worlds and losing themselves in the process,” he says over a call. “And that seems to me to be more and more relevant in our world where, morally, we are so lost. Young people feel completely bewildered and confused, and I think a character like Pine speaks to that deeply.”
Hiddleston was thrilled by being able to “investigate” being “10 years older, and the world [being] 10 years stranger, and more polarized, more unsettled. John le Carré was an extraordinary analyst of the British psyche, and there are live debates [happening] about the definitions of patriotism and national character,” he says. “I think nationalism is dangerous… Movements start to emerge, which are not creative or imaginative. There’s nothing constructive, they just want to destroy.” Patriotism, he continues passionately, “is a much deeper instinct, it’s just believing in basic decency and defending basic freedoms. I do believe in the basic decency of people, but I know that’s an optimistic viewpoint. There’s a lot of noise coming from forces who wish to divide us, a lot of noise, and it’s mobilizing.”
Who—and what—is “good” or “bad” are further blurred this time around. Perhaps nowhere more evidently than in Morrone’s character. From the outset, you don’t know which side she’s playing for. “Ultimately, Roxana is a survivor, and to her that means: ‘How am I going to make it out of any situation alive and OK?’” says Morrone. “She’s a woman who does whatever she needs to do in order to make that happen.” As a “hyper-emotional” person whose “highs and lows are very dramatic,” Morrone used her costume choices as a way to channel some of her character’s steeliness. Think “glamorous, high-end realtor”—oversized hoop earrings, push-up bras, and plunging necklines. All too often, women’s parts in the male-dominated world of espionage are reduced to mistresses, or victims, frequently both. “Even if they have a great role, and they’re given a great acting opportunity, it’s rare that you see the woman driving the story. There is no part of Roxana that is a hopeless romantic. She’s a real player among—and an equal to—these very powerful men.”
From the wardrobe to the locations, it is, inevitably, difficult to ignore a distinct air of Bond about the series. “Even critics said it was the closest le Carré got to Fleming,” says Garrett. “I’m not sure he liked that very much.” Hiddleston has long been dogged by Bond rumors—will this reprisal in a similar role put them to bed, or reignite them? “I just…” Hiddleston puts his head in his hands—it’s momentarily unclear whether he’s laughing or crying (thankfully, the former, though through exasperation). “I actually just can’t answer that question,” he says, resignedly. “It’s nothing to do with me.” (Banks-Davies, though, is unequivocal where she stands: “Just putting it out there that I am available to be the first woman to direct a Bond movie.”)
Outside on Sloane Square, the sun has long set. Calva has departed for the airport, back to Mexico; Morrone to Prague, where she is filming an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1870s-set The Age of Innocence. (“All I’m looking for as an actor is for every role to just feel so different from the last thing I did, physically.”) Hiddleston, though, isn’t quite done. “The nature of Pine’s burning zeal, his curiosity to understand, I really connect to that sense of—with the short time I have on this planet—wanting to really understand the experience of being alive,” he says, back in his hotel room, perched dangerously close to the edge of an open window, the cold night air whipping up the curtains. “He’s the old dragon slayer who gets a scent of smoke—and has to chase it.”
Styling: Ola Ebiti.
The new season of The Night Manager airs on Prime Video in January 2026.