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Peter Straughan breaks down the power plays and personal tragedy in ‘Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light'
Few screenwriters working today are as adept at exploring the ins and outs of power—who has it, who wants it, and who will do anything to get it — as Conclave Oscar winner Peter Straughan. After picking up the Academy Award, he returned with another twisty, intricate tale of men plotting behind one another's backs with Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, the second and final adaptation of Hilary Mantel's historical novels that just finished airing on PBS Masterpiece.
"Hilary's very accurate," Straughan tells Gold Derby over Zoom. "All the externals are accurate. And then, her great gift was to make the internals come to life."
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Mantel's beloved novels cast a fresh look upon the court of Henry VIII, in particular his advisor and confidant, Thomas Cromwell. And though Straughan had to condense Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies into a single season, The Mirror and the Light gets a full six episodes. And Straughan relished the challenge of distilling a nearly 800-page book into six hours of TV.
"It's a huge novel, but I would give anything, any day, to have books like that to adapt," he says. "The material is so great. It's full of things you can use for drama: incredible scenes, great dialogue. The task was, of all the TV dramas you could make out of this, which one do you want to make?"Ultimately, Straughan focused on the ways in which Cromwell is unable to extricate himself from Henry VIII's seductive — and dangerous — inner circle, despite more than a few opportunities. And one of the great gifts of The Mirror and the Light is getting to see Damian Lewis and Mark Rylance return as Henry and Cromwell, playing their sometimes fraternal, sometimes fractious relationship for all its worth.
"It gives you tremendous confidence when you're working with actors of that caliber," Straughan says. 'It makes you feel like you can do a lot of things that might make you nervous otherwise. When you're nervous about a scene, you put a lot more scaffolding in to make sure everything's clear. When you've got someone like Mark or Damian, you can [write] it with fewer touches, because you know they're gonna fill it all in with their faces, with their eyes."
Those moments are among the most memorable — not just because of the performances, but because of Straughan's unerring eye for the telling detail and his pitch-perfect selection of what will work onscreen from Mantel's book. Think of Henry VIII's disappointed eagerness with Cromwell's reaction to his fancy dress costume, or Anne Boleyn's heartbreaking trembling in the moments before her execution, which opens the series.
In this version, the executioner makes a noise behind Anne, which she turns towards, still blindfolded. And in the span of that moment, he steps back to her other side and slices off her head. The moment is unnerving, a stark reminder of the very real life-and-death stakes at play in Henry's court. There's another remarkable moment in that scene that Straughan also pulled from the book and singles out: 'She puts her hand up, and Cromwell says, 'Put your hand down. Put your hand down, because he'll cut through the hand.' Which is a horrible detail, but it always gets to me.'
And though casual history buffs know that Cromwell, too, will end up on the executioner's block, Straughan's scripts have a level of immediacy that allows us to forget. 'We all know death's at the end of the journey. Always. The important thing is how does it happen?' Straughan says. 'And the thing that was so interesting with Cromwell's story was it's not very linear. It wasn't a slow decline. It was more like he was holding onto a balloon, then he goes higher and higher and you get scared for him. But I do think it's amazing that I felt myself, when I was watching it, that even though you know how it's gonna end, there's a bit of, like, Anne in the end of the first season, who still hopes somehow she's gonna be saved.'
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