It’s been ten years since Wolf Hall aired on BBC 2, starring the late Dame Hilary Mantel‘s imagination of the life and times of Thomas Cromwell to our screens.
Season 1 included the first two books in Mantel’s doorstop trilogy, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, and season 2 will adapt the final book in the series, The Mirror and the Light.
Many familiar faces will return to play the characters everyone knows from their school lessons at the Tudors. But some parts have been rearranged to fit actors’ schedules in the intervening decade, while some new characters will join the fray.
The BBC has decided to move with the times and adopt color-blind casting for the second season, in line with popular historical dramas such as Netflix’s smash hit Bridgerton and Hulu cult favorite The Great. “There are a number of roles played by people of color and this is not something we did in the first series. I am very happy that we were able to do this,” said Wolf Hall director Peter Kosminsky. However, most of the main cast still seems to be played by white actors
Mantel gave the decision her blessing and said, “we have to adopt the new thinking.” Sadly, the Booker Prize-winning author who died in 2022 won’t be here to see the final act of her beloved Cromwell’s life change on prime time television.
Mark Rylance plays Thomas Cromwell
BBC/Playground Entertainment/Nick Briggs
Oscar winner Mark Rylance returns as Thomas Cromwell, the lawyer from humble beginnings who rose to become Henry VIII’s right-hand man. “I was quite impressed by the fact that (Cromwell) was a runaway at the age of 14 and someone who learned to survive on the streets,” Rylance said of his character in a BBC interview. Mantel was also fascinated by Cromwell. ‘It wasn’t that I wanted to rehabilitate him. I am not running a Priory clinic for the dead,” she wrote in her 2012 memoir. “Rather, I was driven by a powerful curiosity. If it’s a bad guy, an interesting bad guy, yeah?”
Cromwell has certainly become one of the villains by the time The Mirror and the Light picks up in 1536, following the execution of Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn (played by Claire Foy). He has reached the height of his power and fortune, but his relationship with the marriage monarch is under strain. Spoiler alert: it won’t end well for the king’s chief secretary. Cromwell was the architect of England’s break with the Church of Rome, which allowed Henry to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and marry Boleyn in the first place. By 1540 his many enemies had finally caught up with him and Rylance’s Cromwell will be on his way to his own execution on Tower Hill.
Rylance scored a Bafta with Wolf Hall. Will the sequel add to his trophy collection that he keeps above his television set?
Damien Lewis is Henry VIII
BBC/Playground Entertainment/Nick Briggs
Damien Lewis will also return as Henry VIII, the king perhaps best known for divorcing, beheading and otherwise tormenting his six wives. But gone is the handsome, charismatic young king of the first season, and in his place is the arthritic and irritable tyrant he became.
“I have changed a lot in the last ten years,” Lewis’s Henry VIII says in the trailer for The Mirror and the Light. Fortunately, Lewis didn’t have to undergo too radical a physical transformation to reprise the role. Instead, the show’s patrons put him in “a fantastic foam suit, which was actually a blessing because it was quite cold this time,” Lewis told Hello! magazine.
The actor has said that he found playing a character as nasty as King Henry VIII quite liberating. “There’s a freedom, there’s something therapeutic about being able to behave in any way you want,” he told the Radio Times. With his second wife dead on his orders, Henry VIII married Jane Seymour that same year. After her death in 1537, he remarried three years later to Anne of Cleves – at Cromwell’s suggestion. Dissatisfied with the match, the 49-year-old king had the marriage annulled and set his sights on 17-year-old Catherine Howard. He married her on the same day he had Cromwell executed.
Kate Philips plays Jane Seymour
BBC/Playground Entertainment/Nick Briggs
Kate Phillips reprises her breakthrough role as Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s third queen. She served as Boleyn’s lady-in-waiting, but now that her boss is dead, there is little in the way of her budding relationship with the king.
In Mantel’s fiction she implies that Cromwell himself has fallen for Seymour’s innocent charms. Yet he facilitates their wedding, which will be seen in The Mirror and the Light. Seymour also has a tragic end in store: he dies two weeks after the birth of Henry VIII’s first (legitimate) son.
Timothy Spall is the Duke of Norfolk
BBC/Playground Entertainment/Nick Briggs
The Duke of Norfolk is back again, but this time he looks a little different. Bernard Hill played Anne Boleyn’s uncle – and Cardinal Wolsey’s enemy – in Wolf Hall. Now Timothy Spall has been cast in the role, and the Duke is unlikely to be enthusiastic about the role Cromwell played in the death of his favorite niece.
Harriet Walter is Lady Margaret Pole
BBC/Playground Entertainment/Nick Briggs
Harriet Walter joins the cast as Lady Margaret Pole, one of the last surviving Plantagenets and a peer in her own right. She was one of the nobles who opposed the king’s attempts to divorce Catherine of Aragon, and is therefore on the list of Cromwell’s enemies.
One of the major events covered in The Mirror and the Light is the Exeter Conspiracy, a plot to overthrow Henry VIII due to his break with the Catholic Church. The Poles are at the center of the alleged plot, and Cromwell has Lady Pole’s son, Geoffrey, arrested and interrogated in the Tower of London. His confession led to Lady Pole’s capture and her eventual execution.
Harry Melling plays Thomas Wriothesley
BBC/Playground Entertainment/Nick Briggs
It’s another recast for the role of Thomas Wriothesley, previously played by Joel MacCormack. Wriothesley plays a major role in Cromwell’s downfall.
Despite spending years in his service, it is the ambitious Wriothesley who betrays Cromwell by betraying the king. He told Henry VIII that Cromwell had been indiscreet, suggesting that the annulment of his marriage to Anne of Cleves was due to his inability to perform on the wedding night. It’s a cunning move, but one that allows Wriothesley to ingratiate himself with the monarch.
Lydia Leonard does Dame Jane Rochford
BBC/Playground Entertainment/Nick Briggs
Lady Jane Rochford has also been recast for the second season. Jessica Raine, who played Boleyn’s sister-in-law, is currently starring in The Devil’s Hour on Prime opposite Peter Capaldi, so may have been unavailable. Lydia Leonard, however, is more than aware of the source material, as she played the role of Boleyn in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage adaptation of Bringing Up the Bodies.
Lady Rochford still has a major role to play in the action from The Mirror and the Light. After testifying that her husband, George Boleyn, slept with his own sister the queen, she remains a big name in the king’s court, serving as lady of the bedchamber for King Henry VIII’s next three queens. She may have had Cromwell to thank, having written to him following her damning testimony.
Amir El-Masry as Thomas Wyatt
Amir El-Masry has been cast as Thomas Wyatt, the protégé of Cromwell’s poet, previously played by Jack Lowden. The casting of an Egyptian-British actor in the role of a famous poet is one of the moves that has confused some misguided columnists.
Early in Mantel’s novel, Cromwell saves Wyatt’s life by making him testify against his friends. Wyatt was imprisoned in the Tower of London along with Ann Boleyn and her friends after possibly writing amorous poetry about her. The two remain close and Wyatt attends Cromwell’s eventual execution.
Lilit Lesser is Lady Mary
BBC/Playground Entertainment/Nick Briggs
Lady Mary, Henry VIII’s daughter from his first marriage, is another player in The Mirror and the Light. Lilit Lesser has been cast in the role. Fun fact: her father Anton Lesser played Thomas More in Wolf Hall.
Cromwell must get Lady Mary to take the oath of supremacy, denying the legitimacy of her parents’ union and denouncing the Pope. It’s something that will prove difficult considering she is her mother’s daughter and a devout Catholic. But by getting her to sign the oath, Cromwell gains favor with his master, Henry VIII.
Maisie Richardson-Sellers is Lady Bess Oughtred
BBC/Playground Entertainment/Nick Briggs
Lady Bess Oughtred, Jane Seymour’s sister, is played by Maisie Richardson-Sellers. Born Elizabeth Seymour, she was married off at the age of 13 and became a widow in 1534. Cromwell favors her as a potential match for his own son, Gregory, but according to Mantel, there is an embarrassing confusion when Bess assumes that Cromwell himself wants to marry her.
Jonathan Pryce is Cardinal Wolsey
Jonathan Pryce returns as Cardinal Wolsey, Cromwell’s former mentor. By the time The Mirror and the Light picks up, Wolsey has been dead for six years. The cardinal fell from grace after failing to secure the annulment of King Henry VIII’s first marriage, and was stripped of his office and palace. Pryce’s recasting suggests there will be more flashbacks – and he does indeed get to see a split second in the trailer.
Although he was a big fan of the first season, Pryce admitted that he was even surprised by the positive reception Wolf Hall received. “I thought it would be well received but the level of response was a shock to all of us,” he told the Liverpool Echo.
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light premieres BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Sunday 10 November 2024.