RYLANCE LIKES STORIES WHERE PEOPLE CHANGE
Playing one of the greatest statesmen of England led Mark Rylance to devour the books on which the show is based
Oscar-winning actor Mark Rylance, who plays English lawyer Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall, based on an eponymous historical novel by Booker Prize-winner Hilary Mantel, says that he enjoys taking up characters that undergo change.
Known primarily as a theatre and film actor, what made Rylance want to be part of this television drama? “My wife had read the books and said they were very good. And the scripts that I saw initially were very good. So, I hadn’t read the books, but the scripts were the things that inspired me,” Rylance says. “I didn’t really know about the depth of the character at that point. But there was a lot of change in it.
I like stories where people change, where the characters that I play change. And, this character changes a lot.”
Preparing for a role of this magnitude involved reading the books. (Cromwell was one of the greatest statesmen of England and his aim was to enhance the efficiency of royal governance and curtail some feudal privileges.)
“When you have such fantastic detailed books behind the script, it makes sense to use them and I read them twice. I’d check each scene in the script with the book,” he says. “Sometimes it’s a few different scenes in the books that have been put together to make a scene. The book in particular is so much about what Cromwell is thinking, so I really made a study of that.”