I am here to interview The Night Manager\u2019s manager, the driven director of the new season that arrives on Thursday, five years after le Carr\u00e9\u2019s death. She is Georgi Banks-Davies, \u201cearly forties\u201d, a celebrated commercials-maker who directed Billie Piper\u2019s I Hate Suzie for Sky and was the lead director of Netflix\u2019s Greek god riff Kaos.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn The Night Manager, with the lead character being somebody who is constantly in disguise, hotels are definitely a place to hide in plain sight,\u201d she says. \u201cBut they also work as a character trait. You\u2019ll see in the second episode when Jonathan goes into a hotel, the way he talks to people, the way he takes up space, the way he decides to present himself. Hotels are great places for that because word gets around.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Camila Morrone plays Pine\u2019s love interest, Roxana<\/p>\n
Broadcast in February 2016, BBC1\u2019s original Night Manager was unexpectedly successful, attracting about ten million viewers each week, excellent reviews and prizes for its star Tom Hiddleston, its director Susanne Bier, its writer David Farr and Hugh Laurie, who played Pine\u2019s target, the loathsome arms dealer Richard Roper. In it, Pine insinuated himself into Roper\u2019s super-rich circle, but, the nation asked, would he expose Roper\u2019s villainy before being found out himself? BBC management seized on the show as a prime example of the corporation bringing the UK together in a multichannel, although still barely streamer, age.<\/p>\n
The new series begins with Pine back on the night shift and still scrutinising the more dubious clientele of hotels, but this time he is based in MI6 and watching a bank of screens displaying feeds from London fleshpots. He spots a face from Roper\u2019s circle. Soon he has plunged through the LEDs into the real world and is in furious secret pursuit of more creatures of the night, the arms trade\u2019s merchants of death. Pine, Banks-Davies says, is like a coffee percolator, managing the anger that boils within him by pushing it down.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut he\u2019s also the dormant dragon-slayer. And as soon as the puff of smoke is over the hill he has to start running. Tom and I would talk about that on set. The dragon-slayer can sit sleepily on the hill, just thinking that he\u2019s safe, that he\u2019s slayed the dragon. At the beginning of the first episode Roper is gone. Pine\u2019s done it! But then what? Because who are we without purpose? And for Pine that means going back in, and by going back in I don\u2019t mean undercover or in the service. I mean going back into oneself, looking in the mirror, accepting who you are. I mean, Pine would be in therapy for ever if he were to open up that percolator.\u201d<\/p>\n
Smooth on the surface, raging beneath it, Pine is the antithesis of Billie Piper\u2019s explosive Suzie, Kaos\u2019s impetuous deities and, perhaps, the family in which Banks-Davies grew up in Leicester and London. \u201cIt was a working-class Irish family. People are really present with their emotions and I think that\u2019s a good thing we don\u2019t necessaryily have so much in England.\u201d She understands Pine, the digital night watchman. \u201cI think about me as a child just sitting very quietly, very unobserved, very much at the back but watching everybody, watching and being fascinated.\u201d<\/p>\n
This time round we shall again wait to see whether Pine is rumbled by his new prey, the corrupt Colombian businessman Teddy, played by Diego Calva, or his love interest, Roxana, played by Camila Morrone. In series one Pine allowed himself to be viciously beaten up to convince Roper of his loyalty and there is a less literal version of the ritual in series two. Both sequences hint at something dark, even masochistic, in Pine and both times we cannot be sure that when he comes round he will remain in character or betray himself. This, I say to Banks-Davies, is the mechanism of much spy fiction: secretion\/exposure. It is almost too easy, yet it never fails.<\/p>\n
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Olivia Colman as Pine\u2019s former boss, Angela Burr<\/p>\n
BBC\/INK FACTORY\/DES<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there\u2019s the literal mechanism of the spy who is undercover and can be exposed,\u201d she replies. \u201cBut I think there\u2019s also a bigger one at play, in which the characters have to make peace with who they are. I\u2019m not going to give too much away, but the three lead characters, Teddy Dos Santos, Jonathan Pine and Roxana Bolanos, all take that journey of \u2018I have to understand through this who I am\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hiddleston\u2019s own journey from Eton, Cambridge and Rada to fame in the Marvel Universe as the mischievous Loki and critical respect as a Shakespearean lead was already well underway when, aged 34, he took the role of Pine. Since he was filming Kong: Skull Island when The Night Manager aired, he did not immediately appreciate its reception, he tells me.<\/p>\n
\u201cMonths later I was invited to attend the White House correspondents\u2019 dinner in Washington DC, where President Obama dropped the mic, and where I was introduced to then vice-president Joe Biden, who told me that they had screened The Night Manager in the White House to great excitement. That kind of thing doesn\u2019t happen every day.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell on Marvel, Shakespeare and being mates<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n It seems he was always going to return for a second Night Manager. \u201cJonathan Pine,\u201d he says, \u201cis a genuinely great, complex character. Still waters run deep. I admire his extraordinary courage, and what he represents. He\u2019s one of le Carr\u00e9\u2019s \u2018lonely deciders\u2019: people who have a strong moral compass, and \u2014 at enormous personal cost, to body and soul \u2014 choose to act on it, to do the right thing. Jonathan Pine is a solitary, soulful figure, living and working in the shadows, quietly defending our freedoms, an errant knight, aflame with moral fury. I admire his resilience, self-sacrifice and capacity for endurance.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m fascinated by the tension between his internal world \u2014 turbulent, traumatised, on fire \u2014 and his external persona \u2014 immaculate, contained, controlled. He dissembles to discover the secrets of others. He seduces to betray. He lies to tell the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n Diego Calva and Tom Hiddleston in a scene from The Night Manager<\/p>\n Hiddleston points out that when we meet Pine again that is no longer even his name. \u201cHis real identity has been erased from the record. He lives a new life under a new alias: Alex Goodwin. For Pine\u2019s own safety, his real name, his real identity, his personal history and private pain have been buried and suppressed. His trauma has been locked deep within him, like an unexploded bomb.\u201d<\/p>\n Wiring the bomb is David Farr, the British playwright, novelist and theatre director who wrote the original Night Manager and now its sequel. Fans, I tell him, will want to know what took him so long.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the very simple answer is that there was never an intention to make a second season when we finished the first. It was an adaptation of a le Carr\u00e9 book. And nobody would go beyond le Carr\u00e9. That would be sacrilegious.\u201d<\/p>\n That taboo has since been lifted, and by le Carr\u00e9\u2019s sons. Nicholas Cornwell (writing under the pen name Nick Harkaway) published a Smiley novel, Karla\u2019s Choice, last year, and it was announced this month that Stephen Cornwell is writing a new BBC series, Legacy of Spies, fusing two le Carr\u00e9 works, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and A Legacy of Spies. A new Night Manager, though, needed an idea that honoured not just the geopolitical anger of series one, but Pine\u2019s psychology too. For years Farr busied himself on other projects, then the second series came to him, fittingly in the middle of the night.<\/p>\n John le Carre with his sons in 1964<\/p>\n SAUER JEAN-CLAUDE\/PARIS MATCH VIA GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n \u201cI call it the 4.30 in the morning, half-dream thing. It\u2019s when a lot of writers and I think musicians have the best ideas. I don\u2019t know why. The brain is somehow in an open space and weird stuff happens. Someone else can explain that better than me, but it was vividly clear and pretty comprehensive.\u201d<\/p>\n He contacted Simon Cornwell, who co-heads the Ink Factory, the production company that turns his father\u2019s oeuvre into film and television. Simon confirmed that no sequel was in development. Farr began his research in Colombia, meeting \u201cinteresting people right on the edge of the political situation\u201d and, of course, staying in hotels Pine would appreciate. Writing the series, he missed le Carr\u00e9\u2019s enthusiasm, but was compensated by the absolute trust of his sons, \u201cwho carry the flame very consciously\u201d.<\/p>\n \u2022 Le Carr\u00e9\u2019s final plot to put fraudster father centre-stage<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n When he met Banks-Davies, before she had been offered the directing gig, she told him the scripts were about the \u201cperilous nature of identity\u201d. He agreed. \u201cHere is a younger man, Pine, who is at one level desperate to control the darkness of the world in the form of illegal arms dealing, which is why, I think, he\u2019s called the night manager. He is patriotic and he\u2019s honourable, but he gets lost. He gets lost in the many different identities he takes in order to infiltrate whatever operation he\u2019s trying to bring down.<\/p>\n Director Georgi Banks-Davies<\/p>\n PHIL SHARP<\/p>\n \u201cMy job is to create a thriller plot that is so totally believable and gripping you almost don\u2019t notice it. I always feel plots only become really apparent when they don\u2019t work. When someone suddenly goes, \u2018Well, I didn\u2019t believe that\u2019, you detach and therefore can\u2019t do the thing Georgi wants you to do, which is to invest in the emotional narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n For all this ambition, there are good reasons this Night Manager might not achieve the acclaim its predecessor enjoyed. Two of its most compulsive characters do not return: Tom Hollander<\/a>\u2019s Corky and Laurie\u2019s Roper \u2014 although Laurie does have a cameo of sorts as Roper\u2019s corpse. \u201cOccasionally when we shot in London he would come down on his motorbike, looking extremely cool, just to tease Tom and be, like, \u2018It\u2019s all on you, kid,\u2019\u201d Banks-Davies says. Streaming has transformed linear television\u2019s fortunes for the worse, making ratings of ten million newsworthy. <\/p>\n But there are even better reasons to think The Night Manager (for which a third series is already planned) will do the business again. The Oscar-winner Olivia Colman returns as Pine\u2019s boss\/surrogate mother, and Farr says Calva and Morrone are high-wattage and produce \u201ca very hot sexual triangle\u201d with Hiddleston, who is \u201cbrilliant\u201d: \u201cI think it\u2019s the best thing he\u2019s done.\u201d <\/p>\n![\"Diego](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/\/720edc9f-fb78-44a3-a633-4b7807f1cff4.jpg\")
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