‘Night Manager’ Team On How Limited Series Became Trilogy, Promise Faster Return

Despite its smash success when the adaptation of novelist John le Carré’s espionage thriller The Night Manager first aired, it took a decade for a second incarnation of the Prime Video/BBC series to return to television – but the creative team vows it won’t take nearly that long to complete a now-planned trilogy.

Creator and executive producer David Farr revealed that work already is in progress on a third installation during Deadline’s Contenders TV panel for the show’s second run.

“Right now, I feel the deep weight of doom of stress about it because I’m the one who has to actually do the writing of the damn thing,” he chuckled. “It’s a huge challenge. It’ll be very exciting. And it won’t take as long as the last one, I promise.”

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Farr said viewers should expect the third season to address the Season 2’s dark, concerning ending, which “was important to us all because the world is a tough place at the moment, and it didn’t feel right not to reflect that. But of course, all of us want to see justice, redemption and we want to see something change, so I feel like Season 3, there is actually a deep emotional and moral imperative to honor that.”

“It’s also in the title,” offered star Tom Hiddleston. “John le Carré was a genius, is one of the great writers of the 20th century – I believe that, spies or otherwise. … He called it The Night Manager for a reason: [Jonathan Pine] is the protagonist, someone who is managing, containing darkness – principally the darkness inside himself, the darkness of his childhood and the loss of his parents, his disillusionment with military service.

“But also he’s managing the night,” he continued. “He’s managing the world’s darkness because he believes the light should win. And it’s all comes from him in a way, and it’s such a thrill that we get to do it again. A trilogy feels tidy. And I hope I’m not that much older by the time we start.”

Addressing the significant gap between the first and second seasons, Farr said there initially was no plan or roadmap to create a follow-up, as there was no le Carré-penned sequel to the novel.

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“There was never any expectation that we would go ahead and make a second one, because you just don’t do that to great novelists,” Farr explained. “But it was a huge, huge hit, and we got asked, and le Carré was extremely willing, suddenly, to do so. But of course, we hadn’t prepared anything. It takes time.”

“And then one night I had a very specific idea,” Farr continued, “because the show is an emotional family drama masquerading as a spy thriller. That’s I think basically the best way of putting it. And I had an idea of a new character called Teddy Dos Santos, who would be secretly familiarly connected to [Hugh Laurie’s villainous] Richard Onslow Roper. And it provided me with both the thriller narrative, excitement, adventure, espionage but also — more importantly for all of us, I think — of a deep emotional relationship with Roper that would give Pine a very strong emotional as well as spy mission.”

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Hiddleston also addressed the long layoff between Night Manager iterations.

“I’ve been waiting to do this again for so long — I love this character,” he said. “I’m so inspired by his courage. I’m so inspired and confronted and curious about his internal world and his contradictions. He’s someone who on the surface is immensely capable. He’s confident. He’s capable of great charm and elegance, but his internal world, there are deep wells of pain and solitude and bravery and moral fire. He’s on fire on the inside, and that double helix is something that’s such a privilege to inhabit.”

“I was so thrilled to get to do it again because I’m 10 years older, the world is 10 years older. I’ve been in the same world that he had been in,” the actor continued. “And my belief was always that his courage had never dimmed and his curiosity was still searching, searching for some incorruptible, unassailable, unseducible truth about human beings. Beneath all of the lies and beneath all of the corruption, he’s just a crusader. He wants to know the truth about the world…I’m not sure that he’s jaded. I think he’s just older in a way that perhaps I didn’t have to act because I am older and the world is older.”

Check back Monday for the panel video.