The Night Manager season 2 writer reveals why new episodes are perfect for this Trump era – and talks plans for a trilogy

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

After its huge success, audiences and producers wanted a second series. But despite The Night Manager winning three Emmys, a pair of Baftas and Golden Globes and selling to 180 countries, it will have been almost a decade since the February 2016 UK premiere that the second series arrives on our screens this winter.

The main reason for this is that the initial six episodes – featuring the pursuit of arms dealer Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie) by reluctant hotelier-turned-spy Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) – were based on a novel by John le Carré, and no second book existed.

“No one has ever taken le Carré beyond le Carré source material [on screen] before,” says David Farr, screenwriter of both series. “And so there’s a humility. We finished the first one and no one knew it would be such a big success.”

Once it was, there were discussions about a sequel, though not involving Farr. “I was engaged in doing a TV version of Hanna, the film I wrote for Joe Wright. So there were chats about a Night Manager 2 and they came to me about it, but I wasn’t available,” Farr says.

The 2022 book A Private Spy: the Letters of John le Carré include a letter in December 2018 to the playwright Sir Tom Stoppard reporting that: “The sequel to The Night Manager is suddenly happening… with the old gang minus Tom Hollander, whose part I so carelessly despatched.”

Hollander played “Corky”, Roper’s quirkily vicious sidekick. The novelist killing off such a memorable character might be seen as a clue that he envisaged no continuation. But le Carré, who loved the TV version of The Night Manager, may have also become pernickety about television, telling Stoppard that he was “very disappointed” with the BBC’s 2018 adaptation of his novel The Little Drummer Girl.

For whatever reason, the Night Manager sequel went to sleep. As, in late 2020, did Farr, waking early from a vivid dream: “I knew that le Carré and his wife, Jane, were ill, so perhaps they had returned to my head. But I had a dream – and for plot-spoiling reasons this is all I can say – but it was set in the past and a black car was driving towards a boy high up in the hills in Latin America. And the boy is thrilled and has expectation in his eyes.

“I half woke up and thought: I think I know what that is. I realised what the story could be. I told my partner – so there is a witness! The story came to me in the half-and-half stage between sleeping and waking.”

For all Farr knew, though, someone else could have been writing the sequel. But, after the novelist’s death in December 2020, he met, at memorial events, two of the novelist’s sons, Simon and Stephen, who run The Ink Factory, producers of the original series and other le Carré adaptations: “I told Simon about the dream. And he commissioned an episode.”

First time round, Farr worked closely with the author, who was generally cooperative. When the screenwriter wrote to le Carré to explain that the latter half of the story required surgery as it wouldn’t work on television, he wrote back confessing, “The second half of the novel didn’t work in the novel.”

Farr explains that the second season belongs to “the same universe, and I would argue is a continuation of the same story. What I was afraid of was creating a sort of tangential spin-off.” Without a novel or the novelist for reference, he adds, he found “the long gap had been useful because depth had accrued to characters in that time, particularly Jonathan Pine”.

That meant confirming Hiddleston’s availability, on which there was qualified reassurance, says Farr: “All of the anxieties I had about a sequel, he also had, so it was a hand-holding exercise. Tom read each script to check he believed the story.”

That story mostly unfolds in South America, with the scripts referencing the huge change in international politics since 2016. When the first series aired, reality TV star Donald Trump was emerging as a surprise frontrunner in the Republican presidential primaries and the Brexit referendum hadn’t happened. So the world has sharply turned?

“It’s very different,” Farr agrees. “Even in our setting of South America, Trump has become very engaged with Colombia and Venezuela in the past year. And I would argue that the fundamental philosophical debate in season one – Roper v Pine, libertarian freedom versus a deep sense of duty to a cause – that debate has become a very hot one because at the moment the first side is winning and Trump is the perfect manifestation of it.”

When the novel came out in 1994, some queried the sheer amount of global power that Roper had and whether it was plausible for someone to become notorious enough to become known as “the worst man in the world”. Donald Trump, while not sharing Roper’s psychopathic criminality, is quite a Roperesque figure in reach and reputation?

“I totally agree with that,” says Farr. “Roper was prophetic in the way you describe. There’s no question we are dealing in a world of what I would call Caesars. Trump, Elon Musk and others are not accountable in the way that leaders have traditionally been. It feels as if the people are accountable to the leaders.

“I’m not saying that these are necessarily bad people, but the level of power that some have is extraordinary and we need to have a conversation about it. Because that level of economic power gives them untrammelled political power if they want to wield it.”

With the scripts written and Hiddleston and Olivia Colman on board, alongside other original actors and some new recruits, Georgi Banks-Davies was hired to direct. The British film-maker has worked on new TV shows (Kaos; I Hate Suzie) and, like everyone else, she had some sequel fears: “This is the first series two I’ve ever done. You’re inheriting everything that has gone before but also the expectation.

“What’s unusual about this series is that there’s such a large gap, nearly 10 years. And the material is new, it’s not from a book. But I felt I had to forget what came before or otherwise you’re chasing down a rabbit hole. If you’re looking to re-create magic, you can’t do it. I rewatched it once and then forgot about it.”

With the BBC already committed to a third series, it seems unlikely to be another decade until the next Night Manager. “We have a clear sense of the arc of our show,” confirms Farr. “We’re not into endlessness here. Tom and I see it as a trilogy.”

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The Night Manager, another Ink Factory project and adaptation of le Carré's work, will return for its long-awaited second season on 1st January 2026.

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