{"id":692989,"date":"2025-11-14T15:28:52","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T12:28:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=692989"},"modified":"2025-11-14T15:28:52","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T12:28:52","slug":"the-cast-of-the-night-manager-on-the-shows-thrilling-return","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=692989","title":{"rendered":"The Cast of The Night Manager on the Show\u2019s Thrilling Return"},"content":{"rendered":"
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TV & Movies<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The Cast of The Night Manager<\/em> on the Show\u2019s Thrilling Return<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n
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By <\/span>Olivia Marks<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

November 14, 2025<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Photo: Scott Trindle<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n
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Sorry to say it, but Tom Hiddleston would make a terrible spy. It\u2019s just past Monday lunchtime on Sloane Square, and the British actor is beginning to turn heads. He should blend right in, dressed in a sharp, West London\u2013appropriate Ralph Lauren suit, his clean-cut good looks lightly disguised by a hint of a beard. Even Vogue\u2019s photographer is hidden from view, positioned several floors up in a nearby hotel room, from where he is snapping the 44-year-old in the street below, sniper-like, with a long lens. But such is his fame that it takes just a matter of minutes\u2014seconds?\u2014before the first passerby pulls a phone from a pocket. In Hiddleston\u2019s defense, he is posing alfresco at a restaurant table with a drop-dead Camila Morrone (looking a world away from her hippy-ish breakout role in Daisy Jones & the Six<\/em>) draped in a lush coat, a flash of a candyfloss-pink satin slip shimmering through this otherwise dreary, autumnal afternoon. Rounding out the trio? Babylon<\/em> star Diego Calva, jetted in from his home in Mexico City, whose cheekbones alone could have an eye out. A crowd forms. Hiddleston\u2019s cover is very much blown.<\/p>\n

As Jonathan Pine, though\u2014the ex-soldier turned hotelier turned MI6 asset\u2014in the BBC\u2019s 2016 adaptation of John le Carr\u00e9\u2019s The Night Manager<\/em>, Hiddleston made an utterly convincing spook (among the best since Bond\u2014he has the Golden Globe to prove it). Come this January, a decade on from its culture- and career-shaping first series, The Night Manager<\/em> is back for a thrilling second outing, with Hiddleston returning as star and executive producer, alongside Morrone and Calva as gorgeous, global crims Roxana Bola\u00f1os and Teddy dos Santos.<\/p>\n

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Tom Hiddleston returns as Jonathan Pine, alongside newcomers Diego Calva and Camila Morrone.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Photo: Scott Trindle<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cMore scars on the inside, more scars on the outside\u201d is how Hiddleston describes 2020s Pine to me later, sitting in a dimly lit basement speakeasy, which Vogue<\/em> is using as a base during the shoot, beneath the Sloane Square Hotel, a former hangout of young royals back in the day, apparently. I\u2019m struggling to see the \u201coutside scars\u201d to which Hiddleston refers: he looks largely unchanged, the sandy hair still generous, the eyes still a glittering blue, even though he\u2019s likely been kept awake by the arrival, just a couple of weeks earlier, of his second baby with his wife, actor Zawe Ashton (which might explain his late-afternoon black coffee). \u201cIt\u2019s unlike any character I\u2019ve ever played,\u201d he continues, that endearingly earnest charm, well known to chat show hosts and stage door groupies, kicking in. Pine, you see, is a part that Hiddleston had never really left behind. \u201cIf somebody stops me in the street, or I find myself at a social gathering, people will bring up The Night Manager<\/em>,\u201d he says. \u201cThe association is really strong.\u201d<\/p>\n

I can believe it. Even if you can\u2019t quite recall the twists and turns of its debut, which opened in Cairo against the backdrop of the 2011 Arab Spring before moving to the sweep of the Swiss Alps, and then to a sun-bleached Mallorca (it looked expensive\u2014and was, costing the Beeb \u00a320 million to make, a high price in those days), it\u2019s a show that has lodged in collective televisual memory, largely down to its career-defining performances. Hugh Laurie\u2019s billionaire wannabe-warlord Richard Roper\u2014a master class in depravity; Tom Hollander, borderline terrifying as Corky, his Iago-esque right-hand; Olivia Colman\u2014pre-Oscar\u2014heaven as Angela Burr, Pine\u2019s heavily pregnant intelligence officer. It didn\u2019t hurt that the show also looked deeply stylish. Hiddleston wore a suit like no one before or since, but it was then\u201324-year-old Elizabeth Debicki who really brought the glamour, wafting about in a series of barely-there gowns and bank-breaking caftans, accessorized with her fantasy, money-can\u2019t-buy blonde crop. The cash might have come from the worst means possible, but boy, did it make you want to shop. No surprise that it sent Debicki to the top of global casting lists.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s few and far between that you get that level of sophistication in a TV show,\u201d new cast member Camila Morrone says of the first instalment.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Photo: Scott Trindle<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Morrone surely hopes for similar. \u201cI watch a lot of TV. I love TV,\u201d says the Los Angeles\u2013born actor, 28, in her hotel room post-shoot. She was still a teenager, not even acting yet (\u201cI was in the womb almost,\u201d she jokes), when the first series aired, but watched it in one sitting when her chance to audition came up. \u201cI\u2019m supposed to be doing my lines, and instead I\u2019m binge-watching all six episodes, which ended up paying off in the long run,\u201d she says with a grin. \u201cI was taken aback. It\u2019s few and far between that you get that level of sophistication in a TV show.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is to say, there are sky-high expectations for the sequel. \u201cIgnore everything that\u2019s come before\u201d is how the new director Georgi Banks-Davies (who won a BAFTA for Sky Atlantic\u2019s I Hate Suzie<\/em>) has dealt with the pressure. She knows her creation will invite comparison, which is \u201cwhy you can\u2019t try to reproduce,\u201d she says. \u201cYou can\u2019t try to recreate magic. You just have to follow your instincts. It\u2019s like, I don\u2019t want to copy a great Picasso, because it\u2019s going to look shit.\u201d<\/p>\n

We pick up the action 10 years on: Roper is gone, in body at least; Burr is allegedly retired; and Pine\u2014now going by the name Alex Goodwin\u2014is in London, haunted by the events of a decade ago, living alone with a cat. He is still, as Hiddleston puts it, \u201chiding behind a toolkit of manners, politeness, and charm,\u201d still working a graveyard shift, though now as part of MI6\u2019s unglamorous Night Owl Unit, providing nocturnal surveillance of the city\u2019s top hotels, looking for high-powered crooks. But despite his calm protestations otherwise, Pine is a bomb ready to explode. When a cohort from Roper\u2019s old gang resurfaces, the touchpaper is lit. He goes back undercover, heading to Colombia, into the orbit of Morrone\u2019s mysterious Miamian shipping broker Roxana, and Calva\u2019s Colombian arms dealer Teddy dos Santos\u2014Roper\u2019s \u201ctrue disciple.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A decade on, Pine is still \u201chiding behind a toolkit of manners and politeness and charm,\u201d says Hiddleston.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Photo: Scott Trindle<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

\u201cYou lie to survive, but only the truth can save you\u201d is the strapline 33-year-old Calva would give the show. He pauses, looks around the bar for a pen. \u201cI should write that down. That\u2019s good,\u201d he says with a smile. With dos Santos, Calva is keen that he \u201cis more than a nasty villain.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m from Mexico, so I played several bad guys in my career,\u201d he says, listing parts in drug cartel shows such as Narcos: Mexico<\/em>. \u201cThere\u2019s something really cool about playing the bad guy, but there\u2019s also something that can get really close to being offensive.\u201d To crush the stereotype, he wanted to \u201ctry to put humanity and vulnerability into Teddy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s an approach that drives the series. From the opening scene\u2014in which we find Pine in the therapist\u2019s chair\u2014it is as smitten with the interior lives of its characters as it is with high-octane gloss (though there\u2019s plenty of that too). \u201cIt\u2019s about PTSD,\u201d says Banks-Davies. \u201cIt\u2019s about generational trauma. It\u2019s about all the things that make us who we are, but how they then either bring us together, or divide us. The espionage, the action, the glamour, the beauty, the thriller, that all kind of takes care of itself. But to really hit, you\u2019ve got to excavate that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The show\u2019s writer, David Farr\u2014a \u201cconnoisseur of le Carr\u00e9,\u201d according to executive producer Stephen Garrett\u2014has also returned. Le Carr\u00e9 never permitted new works to be created from his books in his lifetime, but he was thrilled and entertained by the success of The Night Manager<\/em> and, before he died in 2020, had given his blessing for a sequel of sorts to be explored\u2014his sons, Stephen and Simon Cornwell, are both executive producers. One of the ideas Farr wanted to investigate was \u201cthe existential and psychological discussions about what it is to be a spy, what it is to be someone who is infiltrating worlds and losing themselves in the process,\u201d he says over a call. \u201cAnd that seems to me to be more and more relevant in our world where, morally, we are so lost. Young people feel completely bewildered and confused, and I think a character like Pine speaks to that deeply.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hiddleston was thrilled by being able to \u201cinvestigate\u201d being \u201c10 years older, and the world [being] 10 years stranger, and more polarized, more unsettled. John le Carr\u00e9 was an extraordinary analyst of the British psyche, and there are live debates [happening] about the definitions of patriotism and national character,\u201d he says. \u201cI think nationalism is dangerous\u2026 Movements start to emerge, which are not creative or imaginative. There\u2019s nothing constructive, they just want to destroy.\u201d Patriotism, he continues passionately, \u201cis a much deeper instinct, it\u2019s just believing in basic decency and defending basic freedoms. I do believe in the basic decency of people, but I know that\u2019s an optimistic viewpoint. There\u2019s a lot of noise coming from forces who wish to divide us, a lot of noise, and it\u2019s mobilizing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Morrone plays mysterious shipping broker Roxana, and Calva a Colombian arms dealer, Teddy dos Santos.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Photo: Scott Trindle<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Who\u2014and what\u2014is \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cbad\u201d are further blurred this time around. Perhaps nowhere more evidently than in Morrone\u2019s character. From the outset, you don\u2019t know which side she\u2019s playing for. \u201cUltimately, Roxana is a survivor, and to her that means: \u2018How am I going to make it out of any situation alive and OK?\u2019\u201d says Morrone. \u201cShe\u2019s a woman who does whatever she needs to do in order to make that happen.\u201d As a \u201chyper-emotional\u201d person whose \u201chighs and lows are very dramatic,\u201d Morrone used her costume choices as a way to channel some of her character\u2019s steeliness. Think \u201cglamorous, high-end realtor\u201d\u2014oversized hoop earrings, push-up bras, and plunging necklines. All too often, women\u2019s parts in the male-dominated world of espionage are reduced to mistresses, or victims, frequently both. \u201cEven if they have a great role, and they\u2019re given a great acting opportunity, it\u2019s rare that you see the woman driving the story. There is no part of Roxana that is a hopeless romantic. She\u2019s a real player among\u2014and an equal to\u2014these very powerful men.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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From the wardrobe to the locations, it is, inevitably, difficult to ignore a distinct air of Bond about the series. \u201cEven critics said it was the closest le Carr\u00e9 got to Fleming,\u201d says Garrett. \u201cI\u2019m not sure he liked that very much.\u201d Hiddleston has long been dogged by Bond rumors\u2014will this reprisal in a similar role put them to bed, or reignite them? \u201cI just\u2026\u201d Hiddleston puts his head in his hands\u2014it\u2019s momentarily unclear whether he\u2019s laughing or crying (thankfully, the former, though through exasperation). \u201cI actually just can\u2019t answer that question,\u201d he says, resignedly. \u201cIt\u2019s nothing to do with me.\u201d (Banks-Davies, though, is unequivocal where she stands: \u201cJust putting it out there that I am available to be the first woman to direct a Bond movie.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Outside on Sloane Square, the sun has long set. Calva has departed for the airport, back to Mexico; Morrone to Prague, where she is filming an adaptation of Edith Wharton\u2019s 1870s-set The Age of Innocence.<\/em> (\u201cAll I\u2019m looking for as an actor is for every role to just feel so different from the last thing I did, physically.\u201d) Hiddleston, though, isn\u2019t quite done. \u201cThe nature of Pine\u2019s burning zeal, his curiosity to understand, I really connect to that sense of\u2014with the short time I have on this planet\u2014wanting to really understand the experience of being alive,\u201d he says, back in his hotel room, perched dangerously close to the edge of an open window, the cold night air whipping up the curtains. \u201cHe\u2019s the old dragon slayer who gets a scent of smoke\u2014and has to chase it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Styling: Ola Ebiti.<\/em><\/p>\n

The new season of<\/em> The Night Manager airs on Prime Video in January 2026.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

Source URL: http:\/\/vogue.com\/article\/the-night-manager-season-2-preview<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TV & Movies The Cast of The Night Manager on the Show\u2019s Thrilling Return By Olivia Marks November 14, 2025 Photo: Scott Trindle Sorry to say it, but Tom Hiddleston would make a terrible spy. It\u2019s just past Monday lunchtime on Sloane Square, and the British actor is beginning to turn heads. He should blend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":692992,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[50],"class_list":["post-692989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-vogue-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=692989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/692992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=692989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=692989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=692989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}