Exclusive | Tom Hiddleston on 'The Night Manager' Season 2 and How 'Devdas' Was The First Indian Film He Watched
As the series returns, actor Tom Hiddleston speaks about trauma, moral clarity and why his character Jonathan Pine’s calm exterior hides a far more dangerous man.
When Tom Hiddleston returns as Jonathan Pine in the second season of The Night Manager on Prime Video, he says the character begins from a place he can no longer retreat from. “I felt that the lights had been switched on inside him,” he says, describing Pine’s psychological state after the events of the first season. Fully recruited into the intelligence, Pine is no longer operating on instinct or moral panic.
“There’s a curiosity about seeing behind the curtain, about seeing the world as it really is, not the world as it appears to be,” Hiddleston says, adding that Pine is now driven by “a desire to understand the truth, to have the courage to see every truth.”
That awareness, he says, makes it impossible for Pine to return to an ordinary life. “After the events of the first series, he cannot go back,” Hiddleston says. “He has to stay in the intelligence community because he needs to keep searching.”
But the courage and clarity Pine displays come at a cost. Hiddleston is careful not to frame the character as healed or resolved. “I believe he’s somebody who was asked to undergo extraordinary suffering and solitude,” he says, “and withstood a lot of danger and personal pain.” The result, he suggests, is a man whose identity has shifted in ways that are not immediately visible.
“I think his identity has changed and he has suppressed that trauma,” Hiddleston says. “It sits within him like an unexploded bomb.” What interested him most about returning to the role was playing those contradictions at once. Pine, he explains, possesses “real courage, real moral clarity, real competence,” and on the surface appears “calm and capable and elegant and immaculate.”
Internally, however, “he’s turbulent and vulnerable and passionate,” Hiddleston says. “His soul is on fire.” The tension between that composed exterior and the chaos beneath it is, for him, where the character truly begins this season. “So I would say he starts from a place of trauma,” he says, before adding, almost as an afterthought, “and courage.” A dangerous man, then, by definition.
The conversation shifts closer to home when the Indian adaptation of The Night Manager comes up. Hiddleston confirms that he is aware of it and has watched it. “I do. I’ve seen it,” he says simply. He also speaks about his recent experience working in Nepal on a project that functioned as an Indian co-production. “It was an Indian production company, India Take One Productions,” he says, recalling that much of the crew came from the Indian film community. “It was my first time working with a largely Indian crew, and I had the best time.”
The experience, he says, left a strong impression. “We were working in Nepal on location, but essentially it was an Indian co-production,” Hiddleston explains. “And it was a great pleasure to work with all of them.” Asked whether he would consider acting in an Indian film, particularly at a moment when Indian cinema is enjoying heightened global visibility, Hiddleston doesn’t hedge. “I’ve loved Indian cinema for a long time,” he says, recalling that the first Indian film he watched was Devdas. Since then, he says, he has continued to follow both Indian films made primarily for domestic audiences and international co-productions.
When the idea of dream collaborations comes up, he pauses. “I have to think about that one,” he says, before the name SS Rajamouli is suggested. “Excellent,” Hiddleston responds immediately, chuckling.