Skyrocketing costs nearly sunk 'Wolf Hall.' So key players took a pay cut to save it

A second season of 'Wolf Hall' was inevitable. The first, based on Hilary Mantel's award-winning novels 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring Up the Bodies,' arrived in 2015, before the third and final book existed, but producer Colin Callender optioned Mantel's entire trilogy from the outset. What wasn't inevitable was the wait.
'I always knew that we would come back to it at some point,' Callender says of 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light,' which premiered on 'Masterpiece' on PBS in March. 'Although I never imagined it was going to take 10 years.'
'Part of it was that Hilary took a long time to write it,' adds director and producer Peter Kosminsky. 'The first two novels were phenomenal successes. She became a celebrity almost overnight. But it was also a difficult book to write.'
Mantel sent sections of 'The Mirror & the Light' to Kosminsky as she was working. He says she was daunted by the idea of reaching the end of her story about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell. Her writing was affected by the 'Wolf Hall' TV adaptation, which was nominated for eight Emmys. 'She was very open and honest that she was very influenced by the first season in writing,' Kosminsky says. 'Particularly the character of Henry.'
By the time 'The Mirror & the Light' was published in 2020, returning screenwriter Peter Straughan had already adapted it. The production faced a delay due to the pandemic but was gearing up again when Mantel died unexpectedly in 2022. 'It was incredibly sad,' Kosminsky says. 'It also made me feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to bring her final novel to the screen.'
'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' follows Cromwell (Mark Rylance) as he navigates the tumultuous court of King Henry VIII (Damian Lewis) after the death of Anne Boleyn. Although none of the actors had been contracted for a second season, the hope was that the ensemble cast would reprise their original roles. There were a few obvious hurdles: Tom Holland, who played Gregory Cromwell, was now too famous, and Bernard Hill, who starred as the Duke of Norfolk, died before production (he was replaced with Timothy Spall).
'It was particularly complicated because we wanted to bring back as many people as we could,' Callender says of scheduling the production around cast availability. 'We knew at some point that we weren't necessarily going to get everybody back, but we did pretty damn well.'
'I was always anticipating coming back,' Lewis confirms. 'Being an actor is like being an athlete: You're the sprinter and it's the 100 meters. You're going to come on set for a brief amount of time and you're going to nail it. But there might be a lot of waiting before you get to the starter's block, all coiled and energized. I was like that for 10 long years.'
Everyone had aged, but Kosminsky says 'that wasn't necessarily a bad thing' because the show covers 10 years of Cromwell's life. 'Across the series the actors age by exactly the right amount,' he notes. 'In a different world with a far larger budget and a lot more time for prosthetics and CGI, we might have been able to graduate that change.'
Budget constraints were a huge challenge. Over the last decade, the proliferation of streamers has meant that public broadcasters like PBS and the BBC have to fight for crew and locations and can't match their competitors' budgets. The producers had to figure out how to tell the story in a way that felt like a continuation of Season 1 'without anywhere near enough money to do it,' as Kosminsky says. 'We cut and we cut and we cut,' he notes. 'Eventually it was either shut the show down, or the producers and the screenwriter and the leading actor essentially give back most of their fees.'
So, weeks out from production, Kosminsky, Callender, Straughan and Rylance gave back significant portions of their paychecks to get 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' off the ground.
'The reality is the cost of making this second season was literally 100% more, twice the amount, that it cost to make the first,' Callender says. 'It's a challenge that informs the whole of the British television industry in the high-end drama sector.'
Kosminsky reassembled his original department heads, including cinematographer Gavin Finney, production designer Pat Campbell and costume designer Joanna Eatwell. The costumes had been sent back into circulation, which meant starting from scratch.
'When we came back, we all came back from a position of experience, rather than from a starting point of zero,' Eatwell says. 'That was actually quite liberating. It meant we could enjoy the project more. And not having the costumes meant we could move on and grow because the story is so different.'
Ultimately, Eatwell's team made as many of the costumes 'as the budget could stand,' including all of Henry's sumptuous ensembles. 'He has to be the center of the universe, and that's what I always tried to achieve with him,' she says.
'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' was shot over 84 days entirely on location in Tudor-era structures around England. The schedule was adjusted based on when the historic homes had less tourists. Some locations had been used in the first season, but others were newly accessible. Hampton Court Palace, an actual home of Henry VIII, said no to filming for 'Wolf Hall' but allowed Season 2 to use its Great Hall.
'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' marks the end of the road for Cromwell, whom Lewis refers to as 'the JD Vance of the time,' and for the series itself — an experience that left everyone involved proud of what they accomplished despite the financial constraints and long time gap.
'We worried that maybe there wasn't a place for this kind of show in this TV landscape,' Lewis says. 'But, happily, we've been proved wrong. That, actually, if something's good people come and find it. It's been one of the things I've enjoyed most doing. The subject matter is intrinsically interesting. The material is endlessly deep. Aesthetically, it was so pleasing to be part of. And at the center of it is the reimagining of a very well-known, very well-documented piece of history through another man's eyes.'
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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