SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Jonathan Pine has become Alex Goodwin, the MI6 recruit who helped subdue an unscrupulous international arms cartel magnet. And really, is there any other kind? In "The Night Manager," now runs a subdued MI6 surveillance unit in London. He's awakened at home one afternoon when an inquiry neighbor brings back his wandering cat.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE NIGHT MANAGER")
MAJA SIMONSEN: (As Theresa) You work at night, don't you?
TOM HIDDLESTON: (As Jonathan Pine) I do, yes.
SIMONSEN: (As Theresa) Yeah. What do you do? You're like a vampire or something?
HIDDLESTON: (As Jonathan Pine, laughing) I work in a bank. So, yes. Basically, yeah.
SIMONSEN: (As Theresa) Yeah.
HIDDLESTON: (As Jonathan Pine) I am.
SIMONSEN: (As Theresa) All right. I'd love to have dinner soon if you dare to journey across the hall.
HIDDLESTON: (As Jonathan Pine) Yes, maybe one day.
SIMON: Ooh, that's cold. John le Carre's character, Jonathan Pine, has returned for a second series after almost 10 years. Tom Hiddleston returns as Pine, alongside Olivia Colman, Indira Varma, Camila Morrone and Diego Calva on Amazon Prime Video. And Tom Hiddleston joins us now from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
HIDDLESTON: Scott, thank you so much.
SIMON: You've got quite an investment in Jonathan Pine by now, don't you?
HIDDLESTON: I certainly do. I feel that, as a role, Jonathan Pine has been one of the great gifts in my working life. There was a moment before we made the first series back in 2015 - I know it aired in 2016. But we had a dinner, which John le Carre was in attendance. And at the end of it, I pulled up a chair next to him, and I said, is there anything you would like me to know? He said, with a twinkle in his eye and a glint of mischief in his tone, well, of course, Tom, you'll have guessed by now, Jonathan Pine is me, and now he must be you. And it was the most generous exhortation...
SIMON: Yeah.
HIDDLESTON: ...To take it, own it, possess it and pour as much of myself into the character as he had. And I'm so inspired by the character's moral courage. There's a fire inside him, which I think is ignited by Angela Burr, played by the great Olivia Colman, which is a desire to know and understand the world as it really is not as it appears to be. What's the line? I think it's Nietzsche, but I'll paraphrase or butcher it. A man's life expands in direct proportion to how much truth he can stand.
SIMON: We might explain that when we meet him in Le Carre's 1993 novel, and, of course, the series, Jonathan's an expert, special forces soldier seeking a quieter life as the night manager of a posh hotel when he sees something that winds up bringing him into the life, if you please. So in the second series, he stares at a lot of screens all night in Season 2. Is he happy doing that?
HIDDLESTON: I don't think so. I think he's half asleep. Anyone who saw the first series knows that he succeeded in infiltrating the crew of Richard Roper, this international British arms dealer played by Hugh Laurie, and delivered Roper to his captors. But because of the exposure, he has had to bury his past and his identity. His name has been erased from the record. He carries a different passport, and he's been given a job in the intelligence community. He's still a night manager, but he's now running a nocturnal surveillance operation. You know, at the end of the first series, he became a dragon slayer who slayed the dragon. And here, in front of these computer screens, I think he's half asleep. He's waiting for the scent of dragon smoke so he can be called back into the fray.
SIMON: What's it like to take this character created by John le Carre beyond le Carre's lifetime?
HIDDLESTON: I was aware of my responsibility, but I was reassured by what I know was the profound trust that Le Carre had communicated to his sons, Simon and Stephen Cornwell, who run the ink factory, the production company that makes "The Night Manager." And that, before he died in 2020, he had encouraged them to go back to the night manager to develop another story. The way I prepared for it was I just - I felt I got to know Le Carre better myself in the time since the first series. I found the documentary that he made with Errol Morris, "The Pigeon Tunnel." And there are things he says in that about his writing, about his characters, about his imagination, about his childhood, which became, you know, guiding lights for me as I approach this.
There's one thing he says about the attraction of risk and the thrill of duplicity. It's the joy of self-imposed schizophrenia that the secret agent loves. I thought what an unusual insight. I'm not sure that most of us would find that joyful. And it takes a particular kind of human being to be drawn to this way of life, to live as a spy, to trade in secrets and lies. And these are all iterations of human behavior, which he knew intimately from his very turbulent childhood.
SIMON: We should explain to Set the obvious his very turbulent adulthood, too, and domestic life.
HIDDLESTON: Yes, exactly, and we know that now. For me, I think what's interesting is discover the childhood, discover the man, and the more I knew about his childhood, the more I realize that's a very difficult milieu to escape from. And I don't know how much of this is known, but I found it extraordinarily insightful that as a young man, his father was a conman and so he lived in a hall of mirrors with distorted reflections everywhere. He couldn't trust anyone. He couldn't trust anything. They moved house all the time. There was money, then there was no money.
And he speaks to his childhood in these terms. He says, of truth, we didn't speak, of conviction, we didn't speak. Being offstage was boring and risk was attractive. But above all else, what was attractive was the imprint of personality. You learn early on, there is no center to a human being. And that's the foundation of his life, of his imagination, is that he's, I think, through creating these characters and telling these stories about the lonely deciders who work in the intelligence community, he's trying to discover some aspect of himself. He's trying to search for a center, to a human being and to society itself.
SIMON: You, of course, are one of the best-known actors in the world right now. How do you play Loki, Hamlet, Hank Williams and Jonathan Pine? Or is that...
HIDDLESTON: Well...
SIMON: ...Is that just the business?
HIDDLESTON: ...First step is, you know, learn the lines and turn up on time. That's always a good place to start. The whole exercise for me is an exercise in empathy and imagination. There are aspects of the characters that I play that resonate very deeply with my own personal experience, and I connect with them because perhaps I have experienced something similar or I feel something similar. But, of course, there are aspects of those characters which I have no shared experience, and then that's where the imagination takes over. It's rather like traveling to a new country where they do things slightly differently.
And after I always find that in the real experience of traveling, hopefully, it broadens your horizons and it widens your perspective and gives you a greater appreciation over the variety of the experience of being alive. And that's how I feel about playing different characters. It's a privilege afforded to me by people who ask me to come to work because I get to explore these - the lives of others and live in their shoes for a short time. But at the end of it, perhaps I retain some of that expansion, and I carry their experiences with me.
SIMON: Tom Hiddleston returns in another season after nine years of "The Night Manager" on Amazon Prime. Thank you so much for being with us.
HIDDLESTON: Thank you so much, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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