This script has been lightly edited for clarity

Jace Lacob: I’m Jace Lacob and you’re listening to MASTERPIECE Studio.

Tudor England was an unforgiving time. The mood was drenched with executions, imprisonments, betrayal, sickness — a political chess match from which no one was safe. As we saw in Wolf Hall, being in King Henry VIII’s favor was both one of the safest and most dangerous places to be. For a king who has his own wife beheaded, there was no telling what he would or would not do. 

Wolf Hall and its sequel Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light depict the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, one of Tudor England’s most successful, and most notorious figures. 

CLIP

Wolsey: (whistles) Come out dog. So, Master Cromwell. William Popely tells me I might find a use for you. Where are you from?

Cromwell: Putney. Left when I was a boy.

Wolsey: Your father?

Cromwell: Blacksmith.

Wolsey: Ah, at last! A man born in a more lowly state than myself.

For two seasons now, Cromwell has balanced on the razor edge of serving in King Henry’s court — a position where the line between life and death is as tenuous as a single heartbeat. Cromwell’s story serves as a lesson and warning about loyalty.

CLIP

Cromwell: Many of you will know that I have been a great traveler in this world. And being but of base degree, have been called to higher state. Since that time, since that time, I have injured and offended my master for that which I ask heartily for his forgiveness.

Today, director Peter Kosminsky shares his experience bringing the late Hilary Mantel’s award-winning historical novels, Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light to the screen. Peter talks about working closely with Mantel, filming on the same flagstones that Henry stood on at Hampton Court Palace, and finally saying goodbye to Thomas Cromwell. 

Jace Lacob: And we are joined this week by Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light director Peter Kosminski. Welcome.

Peter Kosminsky: Hi Jace. Nice to talk to you.

Jace Lacob: We are at the end of the road with Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light. How does it feel to have reached the end of Cromwell’s journey?

Peter Kosminsky: Well honestly, sad. I’ve been 11 years on this journey, first of all with Hilary Mantel, who wrote the original novels. Of course, as you may be aware, she very sadly died as we were preparing The Mirror and the Light for production. So, we continued without her, but it was a very close collaboration. Of course, I worked closely with Mark Rylance, who plays Thomas Cromwell, and this is the fourth time we’ve worked together.

So, we all got in a very close emotional involvement with this story, and in particular with Cromwell. And obviously it has a sad ending. So it, I think that that rubs off [on] you. You start to feel it. You are sad, and that feeling persists actually.

Jace Lacob: You were reading The Mirror and the Light as Hilary Mantel was writing it, getting about a hundred pages from her at a time. “She was the only genius I ever met.” you said of the late Hilary Mantel, and Hilary’s imprint is felt on every moment of The Mirror and the Light. Her presence felt in every scene, much as Wolsey for Cromwell. Was there a deeper pressure to get it right without her input this time around?

Peter Kosminsky: Well, apologies to all the other geniuses I’ve met along the way, and I’ve met some extraordinary people in saying that. But it was palpable when you were with Hilary, and partly because there was no ego there. She was one of the most self-effacing, brilliant people I’ve ever met. So, it was a joy to work with her. She was genuinely collaborative. There was nothing protective about her, you know, get your tanks off my lawn. Her attitude was, I’ve written my piece, you work in a different medium, how can I help?

And she never varied from that. And I came to rely on it. And she was sending me, as you kindly mentioned earlier on, the novel as she was writing it, and bizarrely, I still couldn’t quite believe it, asking for my response and occasionally changing things. So, it was a close working relationship, and I lent on her very heavily because she had created this world, although of course it’s based on extensive historical research. She had created this world. She had brought forth this entirely revisionist view of English history of the period 500 years ago, turning somebody who was almost universally thought of as a baddie, as a villain into a very sympathetic central character.

And I came to rely on her very heavily and then suddenly, completely without warning, she was gone. And I realized, we all did, the whole team, it wasn’t just me, that we now have this heavy responsibility that this was her last novel. The whole last 10 years of her life was devoted to this story, the three novels that she wrote about Thomas Cromwell. She managed to complete the final novel before she died, and now it was entrusted to us.

And at the same time that I was actually grieving for a friend who’d been snatched away, I was suddenly confronted with, do we go on? And having decided to go on, how can we do justice to, what I still think is the finest of her novels and certainly the finest of the three she wrote about this period. So yes, it was sad, it felt like a weight of responsibility. But all I can do at the end is hope that she would’ve been pleased.

Jace Lacob: I believe Hillary’s advice to you was, remember that these characters don’t know that they’re characters in history. Having spent more than 10 years dwelling within the predatory world that Hillary brought to life, what is it that ultimately resonated most deeply with you about Cromwell’s story? Is it that sense of humanity?

Peter Kosminsky: It’s a really good question, what resonated most deeply with me. I think it was the fact that this was a man almost for the first time in English history who came, I mean, quite literally from the gutter. He was kicked into the gutter, bloody and bruised by his vicious father. He left the country as a child, went to be a mercenary fighting in France’s wars, and slowly clawed his way up without an aristocratic background, without a church lineage to be the second most powerful man in England alongside Henry VIII.

And that’s a modern journey, really. I mean, if you say, okay, well, was Cromwell the first civil servant? I have no idea. He gained his position entirely on merit, on his intellectual abilities, and then had to fight for it. And eventually he lost that battle. And we see that happening in The Mirror and the Light. But he didn’t go down without a fight. And he was a truly extraordinary figure in English history.

And he had amazing platonic relationships with women who trusted him and came to him and sought his advice and his support. He appeared to see women not just as vessels for the birth of an heir or convenient means to marry well and augment a man’s income and influence, but as people. He listened to them and took account of what they said and acted on it. And for that reason, he was loved and trusted, at least by some of them, including Queen Jane Seymour in Hilary’s contention.

So, this felt like a modern figure. And I think it was that aspect and living with that character and living with that character with Mark Rylance, who can explore the complexities of a character in a way that almost no other actor can, I think. That was at the core of this joyful decade-long journey that I’ve been privileged to go on with Hillary’s novels.

Jace Lacob: A lot was written about in the press at the time of Wolf Hall about filming using only candlelight and natural light. The Telegraph ran a story about, “The perils of filming Wolf Hall by candlelight: bumping into things and fearing they might catch fire.” Looking back, the lighting is one of the most striking elements of Wolf Hall and one that I return to again and again and admire. How do you feel about your decision 10 years on?

Peter Kosminsky: Well, it was controversial and it was certainly unprecedented. I mean, directors in the past have used tricks like very fast cameras and double wick candles. We didn’t do that. We just used standard beeswax candles of exactly the type that would’ve been used in the period. And we were shooting in rooms where some of the characters actually lived their lives. So you are in an authentic period space, lighting it authentically.

Now, perhaps one thing I should say in light of your question is the Alexa camera that we used, it’s a state-of-the-art digital camera, sees a great deal more than the human eye sees. So sometimes we would look through the lens at an image that to our eyes looked almost completely dark. And what we saw on our screens was lit up like a gymnasium. So, as a matter of fact, part of the challenge often was to reduce the light level to the point where it actually looked moody and authentic to the camera.

This meant that often we were acting in almost complete darkness as far as our eyes were perceiving. And this did lead to certain challenges, shall we say. Seeing the other actor was sometimes the challenge and I did find that we could get quite dramatic effects just working round one particular candle. But that was very difficult because the actors would move into position through an ancient drafty hall, and not see the furniture that was in the way.

So there were bruises. But I’m glad we did it. We adjusted slightly for the second series, The Mirror and the Light because there was genuinely a feeling, I think, that parts of the first series were a little bit too dark if you weren’t watching it in a darkened room, effectively a sort of cinema experience. So we adjusted the way we graded the series a little bit, and the way we lit it and shot it subtly at the margins. We didn’t change the basic approach. And I do think that it worked better for a 2024, ‘25 eye than perhaps the first series does today.

But overall, what I was trying to achieve was a realistic contrast between what a Tudor palace room with its enormous windows, pretty much the first time in history when those kinds of windows were possible in daylight and what it was like to be in it at night. So we would be in the same space, which would be flooded with daylight during the hours when the sun was up, and then we would shoot another scene in that same space, which would be dark, almost completely dark with just little pools of candlelight.

It gave you a sense of what life in Tudor England was like then, that it revolved around the daylight hours and that when the sun wasn’t up, you were just moving through small pools of light. It is obviously very different from our experience of living indoors today.

Jace Lacob: While both productions use locations to its advantage, one big change with The Mirror and the Light is that you were able to film in the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace this time around. How momentous was that, to be able to use Hampton Court as a location? And as a director, how significant did it feel to be given permission to film there?

Peter Kosminsky: Well, I was overjoyed because it’s a splendid space, first of all. And secondly, because the historians who work at the Royal Palaces and in particular at Hampton Court have some of the highest reputations for scholars of this period. And the fact that they, having refused last time, agreed to let us film in the Great Hall and other spaces at Hampton Court, which is some of the great treasures of our country, was an indication that, to put it crudely, approval for what we had done and what we were proposing to do in the new series.

So, the fact that Tracy Borman, the lead historian there, at the Royal palaces in Hampton Court, and her colleagues were prepared to support us in that way, was wonderful and thrilling. And to know that we were really the first proper drama that had ever been filmed in that space, was humbling and exciting to think that the real Henry VIII, the real Thomas Cromwell, walked those floors.

Having said that, Jace, to be absolutely honest with you, we were only allowed in there under very specific circumstances. The tapestries on the walls are the second most valuable thing that Great Britain owns after the monarch’s crown jewels. They’re completely irreplaceable, obviously, and of enormous value and a period interest, and they’re very nervous about them, not surprisingly. So, there were significant restrictions placed on what we could do in that space. We weren’t really allowed any big lights at all. There were restrictions on the numbers of people. So we couldn’t, for example, have a big banquet scene in there, but we were allowed to move through it.

And through the brilliance of CGI effects, we were actually able to manipulate very subtly the colors of those tapestries, which have inevitably faded over the years, 500 years since they were first commissioned, to make them look much more like they would’ve looked when they were first on the wall 500 years ago in the period when we are set. But we had a great deal of help from the palaces and other sources to get to know what those colors would’ve looked like. They’re almost gone now.

And the whole image, the wide shots that we took in there, came to life in post-production in the most remarkable way. And I pay tribute to the CGI house Blue Bolt, who did the most extraordinary job on colorizing, if that word doesn’t fill your listeners with horror, these magnificent tapestries. And I think the effect is extraordinary.

MIDROLL

Jace Lacob: Your involvement with Damian Lewis goes all the way back to 1999’s Warriors and with Mark to at least 2005’s The Government Inspector. That’s a sizable amount of time. How does that knowledge of each other help to create a shorthand on set? Is there more of an artistic symbiosis with Mark and Damian due to that familiarity baked in?

Peter Kosminsky: Well, the thing is, we’re friends as well, the three of us. And yes, it helps. Yes, it helps. But it’s interesting, what is needed from a director when working with actors at the very top of their game and the very top of their profession like Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis, what do they need from somebody like me in this kind of situation? And bear in mind, these are hugely long, complicated dialogue scenes that they were doing every day, always out of order. In other words, not in story order, but in an order convenient for our shooting style. And the answer is very little, actually. Very little.

My main job on a show like The Mirror and the Light is to cast the right actors and to get the script right. That’s 90% of my job. It’s not working out all the shots and you know, standing there with a megaphone and blasting out my views and requests and requirements to an adoring cast. It’s nothing like that. The first thing I learned, I learned it the hard way some years ago, is if you have nothing particularly helpful to say, don’t say anything.

When I first started I thought, oh, I’m the director, I have to direct. Otherwise, people will start to wonder if I know what I’m doing or if they’ve picked the right person. So, I would offer an opinion on everything. And sometimes when I was offering an opinion just so I would say something, you could see it do active damage. It was really not helpful at all. Often the truth is when you’re working with people like Damian and Mark and Jonathan Price and other actors of their caliber, you don’t need to say anything apart from that was really good. Everyone needs encouragement.

And then really it comes down to what’s in the mind. Actors approach a performance from inside out. And the challenge for them is to get something that’s scripted and on a page so they know what they’re going to say, to feel natural as if it just flowed from them as a result of what was just said to them in the preceding line. And that’s a really difficult thing to do, that actors spend a career trying to perfect. And what helps them is to know what’s in their character’s mind at any given moment.

So, I would usually be reminding actors, particularly the lead actors, of what’s gone before, because we shoot out of order. They might be shooting four scenes a day, sometimes five. So sometimes my job is just to say, remember that you’ve just learned that Princess Mary has done this, and on the one hand, you are excited by the prospect that if you were to marry Mary, there might be a path ultimately to the throne. And just think how the good governance that you, Cromwell, might bring in if you were on the throne would help a rather benighted country. But on the other hand, it’s extremely dangerous. You know the king would not support such an alliance and it would lead to an uprising amongst the nobles.

Those are the kinds of conversations that I would be having, not maybe you shouldn’t pick the cup up at that moment. Or not, could you go a bit faster, or could you look over so we get you in the key light? It’s not that kind of thing at all. It’s all about what’s going on in their minds. And if there’s nothing to add, if the performance is right, just don’t say anything.

Jace Lacob: It’s funny hearing you say this because you sort of make it seem as though you’re just sort of discussing continuity, but every actor on the The Mirror and the Light that I spoke to, the first thing they said about you was the conversations that they have with you in the makeup trailer and that that is the start of the day, that puts them in their place and they can have that conversation with you and anchor themselves to that. So it is sort of a deeper emotional thing, and that was the first thing that came to mind for so many of them in talking about working with you, was the fact that you showed up so early, that you were there in the makeup trailer, that you made yourself available, that you had these conversations with them.

Peter Kosminsky: Well, that’s generous of them to say that. Perhaps the first thing I should say is that I like actors. I actively enjoy their company. I think they’re some of the bravest people I know. When I pitch an idea to a broadcaster and they say, actually no. Okay, they don’t like that idea. I’ll come up with another one someday. But when the actors audition, it’s them that’s being judged and they have to do this every day, and they get rejected and they’ve got to somehow psych themselves up, prepare for another part, and go in and be rejected again.

And I admire them and I think they’re brave and adventurous people, emotionally extremely sophisticated in general, and I really enjoy their company. And one of the things you hear constantly from actors, and I’m told this so often, is that many of the directors that they work with, they seem nervous of them. They stay away from them. They go and spend their time talking to the camera team about the shots and the actors, they tell me, end up directing each other because they’re not getting any feedback. And I don’t think it’s that those directors don’t have an opinion, they’re just, they’re frightened of the actors, particularly well-known actors.

I like actors. I actually like talking to them and I learn a lot about the show that I’m trying to make from those conversations. That’s why I like auditioning, because sometimes this is a sort of cruel admission, but sometimes, you audition an actor and you don’t offer them the part, but you learn something about the part. It’s difficult to explain why that might be, that you don’t cast them, but you learn something. But it just seems to be the process.

Jace Lacob: I want to turn our attention now to Episode Six. Over the course of The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell’s companions are pulled away from him, some by elevations, others by choice or betrayal, Rafe Sadler, Call me Risley, Gregory. The echo of his former master, Wolsey, becomes in many ways, his only counsel. Does the “apparition”, and I’m using this in air quotes here, of Wolsey, represent Cromwell’s guilt, his conscience? How did you look to use this as a device within the narrative?

Peter Kosminsky: Okay, a very interesting question. Well, first of all, I should say that the ghost of Cardinal Wolsey withdraws from Cromwell at the end of Episode Two. And there’s a question about whether he will ever reappear and he withdraws. The reason he withdraws helps us to understand the nature of what that ghost, if you like, is. The reason he withdraws is that Cromwell starts to doubt his actions, his own actions.

Wolsey’s illegitimate daughter, Dorothea, accuses Cromwell himself of betraying her father, Cardinal Wolsey, at the end of his life. And this accusation undoes him completely as he says himself. To learn that the man himself in the last days and weeks of his life thought that Cromwell had betrayed him is the most devastating realization. Somewhere in the back of the mind he had sensed it, but now because of the statements of Wolsey’s daughter Dorothea, he’s forced to confront the reality that that’s what his master thought and therefore perhaps that is what he did.

And so having revenged himself on all the people he thought of as being guilty for bringing his master down, he now has to extend that dramatis personae, if you like, to include himself. You know how when a parent dies or something, you sometimes can almost imagine what they’d say in a situation, and it can be a guide of sorts? I’ve certainly found that in my life with my father who’s sadly long gone. And I think in this we’ve chosen to use the actual ghost as a film device here. But I think what it is, is Cromwell having a sort of internal dialogue within his own head between what’s in his mind at that moment and what he thinks Wolsey might have said or done in those circumstances. Now that he thinks of Wolsey as no longer positive and sympathetic towards him, he’s no longer able to have that comfortable, friendly, and supportive dialogue.

And that’s important. And really the path to the end of Episode Six is ultimately a redemptive path where Cromwell finally openly admits, actually standing on the scaffold in a speech that most, if not all of the audience present will not construe in this way because of the way he says it, but he finally apologizes to Wolsey out loud for having betrayed him. And in that redemptive moment, he is forgiven, at the very end of his life. Now that is Hilary’s conceit, which I found and still find intensely moving, almost like a deathbed confession, really. And the ghost reappears.

Jace Lacob: And not only reappears, but smiles.

Peter Kosminsky: And offers him forgiveness in that moment. Exactly, yes.

Jace Lacob: Yeah, that he, I think Cromwell can finally then forgive himself as well, which I think is just an extraordinary moment in this episode. Cromwell’s fate here echoes Anne Boleyn’s. There’s a deep sense of mirroring at play. Cromwell is imprisoned in the same rooms at the tower as Anne was. There’s a farcical interrogation and execution by beheading. Henry has turned his light away from them both. Should we view them in parallel, both victims to Henry’s volatility?

Peter Kosminsky: On one level, certainly. And in fact, although there was an antipathy between them, and you could argue that Cromwell was ultimately responsible for Anne’s downfall, and I think it was presented to him as, it was either Cromwell or Anne, so take your pick. If you want to survive, you have to get rid of her.

But actually on another level, they were natural allies. They were both political reformers and I use the word political in the sense of religious, because religion was politics in those days. They both wanted to see a Bible in English, in the vernacular, in every church in England, so that ordinary people could read the word of God rather than having it interpreted to them in Latin by a priest standing with their back to the congregation facing the altar. They wanted what we would now call a version of Protestantism really, though they didn’t really use that term in England at that point, as far as I’m aware.

You ask whether there’s a parallel between them, certainly politically they were united. They were trying to achieve the same thing. I think the key question in trying to answer your question is, were they both interested in personal power? Now I think it’s indisputable that Anne was. I don’t think Anne married or wanted to marry Henry because she was madly in love with him, I really don’t. I think she saw it as a means to elevation and power.

So the question is, does Cromwell want power in the same way? And I think personally the answer is yes. Not because I think he was a megalomaniac or wanted to be powerful, but because of what he thought he could achieve. I think he definitely wanted to see political reform, he wanted Parliament to have more power. And I think he thought that if he was in charge, he could spend money more wisely, and there would be a better governance in the land. So in that sense, he had an aspiration for power. And it may be that Anne, at least in part, had the same reasoning behind her desire for power.

So yes, I think it’s a really smart question. And of course we show a parallelism, Anne dies by being beheaded at the end of the first series, and Cromwell dies by being beheaded at the end of the second series. But I think in other ways there is a parallel as well, exactly as you suggest.

Jace Lacob: You are one of the very few television directors, one of only two, I believe, to ever receive a BFI retrospective for your work. It was entitled, Making Mischief and featured your work in drama and in factual television, which begs the question, as a director, what role does mischief play in shining a light on these subjects?

Peter Kosminsky: It is a good question, not one I thought of. But I think the mischief lies in Hilary’s original conception. The mischief comes in Hillary saying, hang on, this guy also has his story. And not doing that from nowhere, but from her research, five years in the archives studying the documents. Because Cromwell was found guilty of treason, the state seized all his papers and all his letters and all his papers are there to be read in the national archives in London.

And Hilary did, she spent five years doing that. And she decided, no, there’s another version of this story, let’s make some mischief. So she wrote three novels, two of which won Booker Prizes incidentally, putting Cromwell as the hero of the story against the backdrop of these extremely familiar characters, Henry VIII and his six wives. That’s the mischief. My job has only been to act as the messenger, if you like, to bring that mischief into a different medium.

Jace Lacob: Peter Kosminsky, thank you so very much.

Next time, we travel to the nostalgic and mysterious world of Jane Austen’s past. 

CLIP

Mr. Dundas: Austen? Are you perhaps some relation to Miss Jane Austen, the great lady novelist?

Cassandra Austen: I am delighted to say I am.