Latest news with #TheMirrorandtheLight
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Wolf Hall' Director: Why a U.K. Streaming Levy Isn't a Tariff (Guest Column)
On April 15, The Hollywood Reporter published an article, citing observers, that asserted that a U.K. streamers' tax, long advocated by programme-makers in Britain and recently endorsed by a U.K. parliamentary committee, will never in fact come to pass. It would be seen as a tariff by the White House and, with a wider trade deal in the offing, the U.K. government would never risk annoying its long-time ally in that way. This argument would be compelling were it not for one caveat. The streamers' levy is not a tariff. In 2023, I shot The Mirror and the Light for Masterpiece and the BBC, completing the work we began a decade before on Wolf Hall – winner of a Golden Globe, several BAFTAs and 8 Emmy nominations. If we were to attempt to make The Mirror and the Light in 2025, we would not succeed. Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which altered the national debate in the U.K. on a key issue, has left its makers significantly in debt. The producer has said there would be no point trying to develop it for ITV now — because the public service broadcasters can no longer afford to produce high-end drama in the U.K. Attracted by our tax breaks, the streamers now make multiple drama series in Britain. With their deep pockets, they have driven up production costs across the board in our industry, pricing our own, home-grown broadcasters out of their own market. More from The Hollywood Reporter Pope Francis, First Latin American Pontiff, Dies at 88 'The Crown' Actress Olivia Williams Opens Up About Why She'll Never Be Cancer-Free 60 Sheep, 8 Camels, 100 Goats: 'Nawi' Shows Child Marriage Through the Eyes of a Gifted Girl in Kenya PSB high-end drama production fell by 25 percent last year, to its lowest level since 2019. The parliamentary committee believes a streamers' levy would reverse this, providing a production fund which would turn contraction into growth and allow the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 back into the game. Except that no one thinks the U.K. government will be brave enough to poke the Trump tiger. If a U.S. manufacturer attempts to sell its goods in China, it currently attracts a 125 percent tariff. That money goes straight to the Chinese government. It goes without saying that the U.S. importer can't claim any of that money back to offset the cost of manufacture. But a Netflix or Amazon or Disney+ would be able to claim a contribution towards its production costs from the proposed 5 percent levy fund — on one condition, that the programme is a co-production with a U.K. public service broadcaster. When the streamers first appeared in the U.K., they were eager to co-produce. Over time, that appetite has dwindled almost to nothing. As is well known, the streamers want to own the whole IP, contributing to the funding woes of the BBC, ITV and C4. The levy fund would also re-invigorate the co-production market. To access the new pot of money, the streamers would need to work with the local broadcasters, making it a win-win. A new pot of production finance, and a chance for the PSBs to once again collaborate creatively with the planet's leading producers. The streamers are perhaps the ultimate manifestation of a free market in television. They have made some extraordinary, mould-breaking programmes — turning high-end TV drama into the medium of choice for 'A-List' talent, partially usurping the feature film and breaking the unhealthy, snobbish divide been theatrical and television filmmaking. But an unintended consequence of this explosion of creativity has been the 'elbowing aside' of the U.K.'s public service broadcasters, which make programmes that wouldn't necessarily appeal to the streamers' international audience. These broadcasters represent a 100-year tradition of programme-making in the U.K., a tradition the British audience will not thank us for jettisoning. The 5 percent levy would address this market failure at a stroke. It would force the streamers to still further up their game as they are once again required to compete with broadcasters such as the BBC, ITV and C4. And it isn't a tariff – as the streamers' themselves could claim their own funds back when in co-production with a local broadcasters. No other solution put forward adequately addresses the acute problem faced right now in high-end TV in the U.K., most now accept that. The only real question remaining is whether the U.K. government will have the guts to implement it. Writer/Director Peter Kosminsky is a veteran of public service broadcasting in the U.K. — a winner of seven BAFTA Awards, a Peabody and a Golden Globe. Best of The Hollywood Reporter How the Warner Brothers Got Their Film Business Started Meet the World Builders: Hollywood's Top Physical Production Executives of 2023 Men in Blazers, Hollywood's Favorite Soccer Podcast, Aims for a Global Empire
New York Times
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
What It Was Like to Edit the ‘Wolf Hall' Books
Last summer, when The Times released its list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, one of the authors with multiple titles on that list was Hilary Mantel, who died in 2022. Those novels were 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring Up the Bodies,' the first two in a trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell, the all-purpose fixer and adviser to King Henry VIII. Those books were also adapted into a 2015 television series starring Mark Rylance as Cromwell and Damien Lewis as King Henry. It's now a decade later and the third book in Mantel's series, 'The Mirror and the Light,' has also been adapted for the small screen. Its finale airs on Sunday, April 27. Joining the host Gilbert Cruz on this week's episode is Mantel's former editor Nicholas Pearson. Pearson currently serves as the publishing director of John Murray Press in Britain, but he previously worked for more than two decades at the publisher Fourth Estate, where he had the opportunity to work with Mantel on her 'Wolf Hall' trilogy. He describes what it was like to encounter those books for the first time, and to work with a great author on a groundbreaking masterpiece of historical fiction. We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review's podcast in general. You can send them to books@
Forbes
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Mantel's‘Wolf Hall,' With Stars Rylance And Lewis, Returns To PBS
LONDON, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 04: (L to R) Joss Porter, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Kate Phillips, Damian Lewis, Will Tudor and Charlie Rowe attend a photocall for "Wolf Hall: The Mirror And The Light" at BFI Southbank on November 4, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by Alan Chapman/Dave Benett/WireImage) Academy Award winner Mark Rylance is returning in his BAFTA-winning role of Thomas Cromwell, with Emmy Award winner Damian Lewis returning as King Henry VIII, alongside Academy Award nominee Jonathan Pryce as Cardinal Wolsey, Kate Phillips as Henry VIII's third wife, Jane Seymour, and Lilit Lesser as Princess Mary, the daughter of Henry and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. New cast members are Harriet Walter as Lady Margaret Pole and Timothy Spall as the Duke of Norfolk Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light traces the final four years of Cromwell's life, completing his journey from self-made man to the most feared, influential figure of his time. Masterpiece described Cromwell 'as complex as he is unforgettable: a politician and a fixer, a diplomat and a father, a man who both defied and defined his age.' Series director Peter Kosminsky said, 'The Mirror and the Light picks up exactly where Wolf Hall ended, with the execution of Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn. I'm overjoyed to be able to reunite the extraordinary cast we were lucky enough to assemble for Wolf Hall, led by the brilliant Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis, with the original creative team of Gavin Finney (director of photography), Pat Campbell (designer) and Joanna Eatwell (costume designer). We are all determined to complete what we started, and to honor the final novel written by one of the greatest literary figures of our age, Hilary Mantel.' Colin Callender, CEO of Playground Entertainment, a producer of the series, said, 'Following the success of the BAFTA and Golden Globe-winning original television adaptation of the first two books in Hilary Mantel's acclaimed Wolf Hall trilogy, we are thrilled and honored that, nine years later, we have been able reunite Peter Kosminsky and his brilliant team, in front of and behind the camera, to bring Thomas Cromwell 's final chapter to the screen. Intimate, thrilling, and deeply moving, The Mirror and the Light shines a fresh light on the politics of power and the personal price paid by those who wield it. Cromwell's story is as contemporary as ever, a story of loyalty and betrayal that just happens to be about people 500 years ago.' In an interview with Callendar said Kosminsky had collected 'extensive notes' from conversations he had with Mantel about the new series before her death in 2022. 'We are honoring her approach to the story,' he explained. He said the sequel was shot entirely on location, in various Tudor castles and stately homes all over England, where the sequel's story actually really took place. He said the sequel 'is really about a man who's looking back at the decisions he's made, assessing the things he thinks he did right and things he may have done wrong. It's a story that everyone can relate to. It's about where is your life going? That's the sort of emotional journey everyone of us goes through at some point in our lives.'
New York Times
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' Review: No Century for Old Men
'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' picks up where 'Wolf Hall' left off, amid the gruesome beheading of Anne Boleyn in 1536, which we get to see this time in even more gruesome detail. In real life, however, there has been an unusually long gap between series and sequel. It has been 10 years since the release of 'Wolf Hall,' based on the first two novels in Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell series. This means that in 'The Mirror and the Light,' based on the final novel, the actor Mark Rylance is a decade older than the 50-something character he is playing. And it works, because the Cromwell in the new six-episode series (beginning Sunday on PBS's 'Masterpiece') is haunted and beaten down by his work as Henry VIII's political and matrimonial fixer, a job that included fabricating the evidence that led to Boleyn's murder. In that first scene both we and Cromwell are reliving the beheading (necessary, from Henry's point of view, because Anne, his second wife, had not borne a son). 'The Mirror and the Light' is very much of a piece with the earlier 'Wolf Hall,' written and directed by the same men — Peter Straughan and Peter Kosminsky — and with many actors returning to their roles, including Rylance and, as Henry, Damian Lewis. Among relatively recent historical costume dramas, the shows set a standard for polish and seriousness. But as the story of the commoner Cromwell's decline and abrupt fall, 'The Mirror and the Light' has an entirely different feel than the up-by-the-boot-straps, grimly celebratory 'Wolf Hall.' The mood is nervous and ominous, as Cromwell begins to make errors and give in to his emotions. And it habitually casts its eye back in time, as Cromwell reassesses the often dirty work he has done. Picking up on a device from the novel, 'The Mirror and the Light' continually drops in snippets of Cromwell's guilty memories in the form of bits of film we have already seen across the two series. His guilt even has a supporting role in the form of the dead Cardinal Wolsey, the beloved master and mentor whose downfall Cromwell was unable to prevent. Cromwell now has late-night conversations with Wolsey's slightly diaphanous ghost, scenes that are a little cringey but that do us the favor of keeping Jonathan Pryce and his archly disapproving eyebrows in the show. As worthy as 'The Mirror and the Light' is, the uncomfortable truth is that this retrospective, rueful gaze — the first and last shots of Rylance are of Cromwell looking backward — gets a little tedious across six episodes. It doesn't help that the events covered, including Henry's third through fifth marriages, do not have the juicy, morbid force that the deaths of Boleyn and Thomas More gave the first series. One thing Straughan does to compensate is to chart Cromwell's moods through his interactions with a series of women: Boleyn's successor as queen, Jane Seymour (Kate Phillips), who dies needlessly after childbirth; Wolsey's daughter, Dorothea (Hannah Khalique-Brown), who blames Cromwell for her father's death; Henry's daughter Mary (an excellent Lilit Lesser), who becomes a pawn in the machinations of Cromwell's enemies. These plot elements, given equal play with the court politics and battles over religion that actually determined Cromwell's fate, are a way to soften the character — to suggest a compassion and rectitude under the brutal realpolitik (traits that the historical record does not necessarily support). They also supply a melodramatic, emotional charge — especially in Rylance's scenes with Lesser — that the entirely male scenes around council tables and in whispered meetings lack. As Cromwell's enemies marshal against him, Straughan and Kosminsky have trouble animating the court intrigue in any very interesting way — it plays as a shouty, monotonous version of fraternity life in which hazing results in beheading, if you're lucky, or having your intestines pulled out of your body, if you're not. The fine actors Timothy Spall and Alex Jennings, as Cromwell's two main antagonists, are not able to overcome the generic nature of these scenes. 'The Mirror and the Light' kicks into another gear, however, whenever Lewis is onscreen as the narcissistic yet knowing and perceptive Henry. Lewis's contained, preternaturally magnetic performance is as sure an embodiment as you could imagine of the force of a powerful monarch. It has an effect on the show that is both historically authentic and dramatically problematic: When Lewis is offscreen, we, like Cromwell and the other courtiers, are anxiously waiting to see what he will do next. The prodigious Rylance is fine, but Cromwell's role in 'The Mirror and the Light' involves a preponderance of rueful staring into space. Henry may be the secondary character, but as the title says, he's the show's light.
BBC News
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Rags-to-riches hero or villainous torturer? The truth about Henry VIII's scheming right-hand man Thomas Cromwell
With her award-winning Wolf Hall series of books, novelist Hilary Mantel made sympathetic a figure long considered a historical bad guy. But did she also 'sidestep crucial matters'? Nearly 500 years after his death, Thomas Cromwell lives again, reborn in the popular imagination thanks to novelist Hilary Mantel, and her Wolf Hall trilogy. For decades, historians piled layer after layer of interpretation upon Henry VIII's astute chief minister, a key figure in the Reformation, when King Henry broke from the Catholic Church to establish his own Church of England. But now, with the emergence of Mantel's fictional Cromwell – so attractive, so splendidly presented – the real man is in danger of being buried forever. Going forward, Cromwell's name will likely call to mind the lean, canny look of actor Mark Rylance – star of the television adaptations of the Wolf Hall series – rather than the grumpy, heavy-jowled visage captured by artist Hans Holbein in a portrait done from life circa 1534. And a figure once counted among history's villains will retain the glow of Mantel's revisionist high regard for many years to come. Starting on 23 March, US audiences can watch Rylance play Cromwell, alongside Damian Lewis as King Henry, one more time. Six hours of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, based on the third and final book, make up the last tranche of episodes of the BBC's lavish costume drama. The script takes the complicated story of Cromwell's fall, culminating in his execution for treason in 1540 after six years as the King's right-hand man, and renders it (relatively) easy to follow. Especially impressive is the dialogue, often lifted directly from Mantel's text. The author, who died of a stroke in 2022, had a gift for rendering 16th-Century speech in a non-risible way. (The Wolf Hall novels have also been adapted into two plays.) Although critics consider The Mirror and the Light to be the least successful of the novels – it's the only one of the three not to win the Booker Prize – the TV version received rapturous reviews when broadcast in the UK last autumn. The Guardian's five-star review proclaimed: "The final instalment of Hilary Mantel's masterpiece is the most intricate television you are ever likely to see. It is so beautifully made it's breathtaking." Fact v fiction But where do sumptuous production values end, and the facts begin? Such questions have accompanied Mantel's project from the start. Tracy Borman, Chief Historian at Historic Royal Palaces and author of 2015's Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII's Most Faithful Servant, tells the BBC about the impact Mantel's first Tudor novel, Wolf Hall, had on her upon its publication in 2008. "All through my education, from early school days until university, I was taught that Henry VIII's chief minister was a grasping, ruthless, cynical henchman, driven by greed and power. Then I read Wolf Hall and it gave such a different perspective… I was inspired to write a non-fiction biography so that I could find out where the truth lay." Researching her book, Borman discovered a sharp-witted and enterprising Cromwell, as Mantel did, and realised just how thorough the novelist had been in mining primary sources for innumerable details, including Tudor swear words, Cromwell's favourite wines, and the names of his servants. "Granted, she took artistic license when she needed to," Borman says. "Notably in downplaying Cromwell's role in Anne Boleyn's execution, and in making him something of a heartthrob at court." Samantha Rogers, who teaches early modern history at Vanderbilt University, agrees. "There are a great many popular novels about the Tudors I can't bear to read," she tells the BBC. "Mantel's work is the gold standard – well-researched and rooted in history. However, to paint a largely sympathetic portrait of Cromwell, she does sidestep some crucial matters." Rogers notes that when King Henry wanted to rid himself of his second wife, Anne Boleyn, the court musician Mark Smeaton, under torture, implicated her in serious crimes – adultery with five men including her own brother. Cromwell most certainly supervised his torture, and yet in the taut and chilling Bring Up the Bodies, the second of Mantel's Tudor novels, Smeaton is merely threatened, put in a dark closet, and never physically assaulted. Literary critic and biographer Megan Marshall, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, explains to the BBC how, in writing about a historical figure, both a biographer and novelist "will pluck out what concerns us, and what concerns the audience… although the novelist likely has a more conscious agenda than a biographer". Mantel's view of Cromwell is inevitably coloured by her personal perspective. She made no secret of her rejection, during adolescence, of the Catholic faith she was brought up in, nor her scorn for the representation of Cromwell and his staunchly Catholic nemesis Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, which, as a film, won the Oscar for best picture in 1967. In Bolt's telling, Cromwell is the big baddie, both ruthless and underhanded in his methods. More, Lord High Chancellor of England, and later venerated as a saint by the Catholic Church, is the hero, executed for refusing to swear an oath recognising the monarch as the supreme head of the Church in England. More's eloquent resistance, and faithfulness to the dictates of his own conscience, resonated amid the counter-culture of the 1960s. Eamon Duffy, emeritus professor of history at the University of Cambridge, has accused Mantel of going too far with her demythologising of More. He says that she made More into a monster, "a torturer and a misogynist whose wife and womenfolk were afraid of him," he said in a recent interview with the Idler magazine, adding, "I think that [More] portrayal was the least successful bit of Wolf Hall." A hero for our times Yet as she drags More down, Mantel is simultaneously rehabilitating Cromwell. And in the process, does she not give readers a Cromwell that fits the 21st Century? A hero for our time? Rogers believes that she does, pointing out that writer and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda, with his hit musical Hamilton, recast Founding Father Alexander Hamilton in a similar way. "Both are appealing, scrappy guys who come from nothing," says Rogers. Appealing, in other words, to audiences preoccupied by the structural barriers – be they based on class, race, wealth or gender – that prevent people today from flourishing. Borman concurs. "Henry VIII's court was far from being a meritocracy: most of its members were blue-blooded nobles and the top positions were practically hereditary. Then in comes Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith from a seedy part of London, and he takes the court – and its king – by storm. It's a story as dramatic as it is seductive." More like this:• How History got Henry VIII wrong• Did a gay affair spark a 14th Century royal crisis?• America's most vilified First Lady What Wolf Hall leaves out, however, is of particular interest to the leading Cromwell scholar working today. Diarmaid MacCulloch, emeritus professor of history at the University of Oxford, and author of 2018's Thomas Cromwell: A Life, argues that rather than Cromwell pursuing the country's religious change for political ends, he was a sincere Protestant, determined throughout his years in the King's service to bring church reform to England. And while MacCulloch greatly admires Mantel's novels, in a 2018 interview with the podcast History Extra, he said that "the one thing she played down… is the religion". He added: "Perhaps for a modern novel-reading audience, you simply can't do it." Historical fiction may indeed reveal as much about the time it is written in, as the time it is written about. Mantel referred to this duality in her Reith Lectures on the craft, presented for the BBC in 2017, along with the many challenges of weaving fiction out of fact. "The pursuit of the past makes you aware, whether you are novelist or historian, of your own fallibility and inbuilt bias," she declared. It's in the gaps in the official record that a writer of fiction can do her most valuable work, she said. That audiences – readers, theatregoers, TV viewers – all find Mantel's Cromwell so compelling testifies not only to her skill at filling in gaps, but to her love for the protagonist – the witty, affectionate, energetic, all-seeing polymath – she contrived after emerging from the archives. "When I sat down to write at last," Mantel recalled in a 2012 essay, "it was with relish for his company." The Mirror and the Light premieres on 23 March on PBS Masterpiece in the US and is available now to stream on BBC iPlayer in the UK --
