CHECK IN WITH LE CARRÉ’S ‘ NIGHT MANAGER’
As heroes go, The Night Manager’s Jonathan Pine shows up on the complicated end of the spectrum.
The graveyard- shift luxury hotel manager ( Tom Hiddleston) exists on the obscure fringes until a tragic loss persuades him to risk everything to thwart charismatic but despicable international arms merchant Richard Roper ( Hugh Laurie). The six- episode miniseries ( AMC, Tuesday, 10 p. m. ET/ PT) is based on a 1993 novel by John le Carré, an executive producer.
After a series of period- piece roles, Hiddleston liked the idea of playing a contemporary man who changes his identity to enter an elite, extralegal world in a story with political resonance. Pine, who must gain Roper’s trust while maneuvering around his chief of staff, Major Corkoran ( Tom Hollander), “was a thrilling prospect, mysterious, elegant, refined. His particular
blend of Englishness and edge was something I found exciting.”
Hiddleston sees Pine, who works with tenacious British intelligence officer Angela Burr ( Olivia Colman), as an emblematic le Carré character.
“His heroes are all haunted by doubt and moral ambivalence, by an awareness of the hypocrisy of doing bad things for the greater good,” he says.
“In spite of their heroic action, their spirits are unquiet.”
Laurie, who wanted to play Pine at the time the book was published, is a fan of the novel, citing Manager’s understanding of a murky world hidden from most. “I imagined that with the end of the Cold War, not only would spies be out of work, but spy writers would be out of work. And, instantly, I saw he’d found a greater adversary” in Roper, Laurie says.
The Panama Papers, an investigative-journalism project revealing shell companies operated by some of the world’ s wealthiest people, underlines the author’s prescience regarding Roper, a worldly criminal who jaunts with his beautiful mistress ( Elizabeth Debicki) between Swiss ski resorts and Majorcan beaches with no concern for the law, Laurie says.
“It’s a weird fraternity of rich and powerful people,” Laurie says. “Roper would be a platinum member of that particular club.”
The novel gets a contemporary makeover, as Pine’s military service was in Iraq, not Belfast; his hotel work places him in Cairo during 2011’ s Arab Spring; Roper has a major arms deal with Middle Eastern operators rather than a Colombian drug cartel. And Burr is now a woman. “It’s a truer reflection. There are a lot of spies who are women.
“In 2016, ( making) one of the deci- sion- making characters a woman makes sense,” Colman says.
Colman, who was pregnant during filming, says that’s “a perfectly normal occurrence. Spies don’t get sterilized.”
Any changes made in adapting the book from the miniseries don’t obscure the author’s passionate belief in Pine’s cause.
“Le Carré’s anger with Richard Roper is righteous, and his support of Pine and Burr’s mission is deeply romantic,” Hiddleston says.
Although he enjoyed playing the character, it doesn’t sound as if Hiddleston envisions a sequel.
“We’ve reached the end of the novel. I don’t want to count my chickens on whether The Night Manager has a further life.”
John le Carré’s heroes “are all haunted by ... an awareness of the hypocrisy of doing bad things for the greater good. In spite of their heroic action, their spirits are unquiet.” Tom Hiddleston