MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
When last we saw Thomas Cromwell, master manipulator in Henry VIII's court, Anne Boleyn had just lost her head. The king, anxious to marry anew and secure a male heir, had soured on Anne and turned to Cromwell to get rid of her. In the final scene of "Wolf Hall" on Masterpiece, King Henry gives Cromwell - just back from the beheading - a hero's welcome. Well, it's been about a decade since the show came out, and now, Part 2 of the series, directed by Peter Kosminsky and based on books by Hilary Mantel, is here. It's called "Wolf Hall: The Mirror And The Light." And in the royal court, not a moment has passed since Part 1.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "WOLF HALL: THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT")
THOMAS BRODIE-SANGSTER: (As Rafe Sadler) Did it have to be this way, so bloody?
MARK RYLANCE: (As Thomas Cromwell) When negotiation and compromise fail, then your only course is to destroy your enemy. Before they wake in the morning, Rafe, have the axe in your hand.
KELLY: Thomas Cromwell, as played then and now by Mark Rylance. Welcome.
RYLANCE: Hello.
KELLY: Hi. I'm thinking of the particular challenge of playing Cromwell. Because the character, as he's written in the books, is inscrutable. We never know quite what he's thinking. How do you play that?
RYLANCE: Inscrutably, yeah (laughter).
KELLY: Elaborate.
RYLANCE: Well, when you have, you know, a couple thousand pages of character detail behind you, you've got a lot of foundation. Someone will ask Thomas Cromwell, do you want a piece of cheese? Seven pages later, he'll say, thank you, I won't - after considering where the cheese comes from, why it was named, what happened in the making of the cheese, who sells it - everything. He considers the detail of everything. And I think all the historians agree that his memory was absolutely remarkable, phenomenal.
KELLY: There's no spoiler alert required here. We all know how Cromwell's story ends, which is more or less the same as Anne Boleyn's. He eventually falls from the King's favor and is beheaded. How do you prepare to play a scene like that?
RYLANCE: With great difficulty, Mary Louise, with great difficulty. You know, to come through a crowd who despise you and then walk up onto a platform to have your head cut off, I don't know how people did it. I mean, there was a certain feeling of defiance, but my mind just kept blanking. I can't be doing this. There must be something else. And then they've got the axman drunk. The enemies of Cromwell got him drunk, so it took him three chops to get Thomas' head off. So the whole thing was horrific.
KELLY: Yeah.
RYLANCE: Fortunately, the way it's written, there is a spiritual element to it in terms of mercy coming to Thomas about the worst crimes that he feels he was part of in his life. So there is a slight positive thing. And of course, all these people would have been great people of faith and had no question about an afterlife, though I suppose they might have feared the spectrum of possibility in the afterlife.
KELLY: I suppose, too, when such a thing happens in real life, by definition, you're only going to do it once. You don't get a second take at being beheaded. As an actor, did it require multiple takes?
RYLANCE: Everything requires a few takes for different reasons, yeah - different angles, different lenses. Now, we do know what is going to happen to him. You still - even I, watching it and I've played it - I still, even in the last episode, believe that Henry might change his mind. The downfall has lots of ridges as well as valleys when you can see a different future, possibly. But the brutalization that has happened to him, being the thug of a very unruly leader, catches up on him.
KELLY: Mark Rylance, if I may, I want to ask about your partner in life and in art, your wife, Claire, who died earlier this year. And I want to say, first of all, my condolences. And secondly, for people to know that she was a celebrated director and composer and playwright, and I understand to credit for the music in "Wolf Hall." Would you tell me a little bit about the way you two created together?
RYLANCE: Well, when we got the job to open Sam Wanamaker's wonderful Shakespeare's Globe in London, she was a composer and classical pianist already, but that really featured more with modern music. And so she had to learn very quickly what early music was and then spent 20 years at the Globe working with me and the succeeding artistic director and became an expert in early music.
So she's not responsible for all the music, Mary Louise. She's responsible for the historical music when there are people playing in a scene or when Peter Kosminsky has decided he wants to use historical music rather than modern music. But Claire and Peter were great, great, great friends. And she would bring him four or five different pieces for a particular thing he wanted and then would arrange them for the show and hire the musicians and all that kind of thing.
KELLY: Well, and much credit to the music here because the challenge - as you know better than I - of a historical drama drawn, yes, on a trilogy of novels, but those are obviously very heavily researched from the actual history. We all know how it turns out. We all know who's going get beheaded and when, eventually. And yet, the music does an incredible amount of work of making us feel what you just described, like this - maybe this could go another direction. We'll see. There's such tension and such hope in it.
RYLANCE: He's so smart, you know, and you've just seen him get out of so many tricky situations before too. So you bet money on him that he's going to find a way out of this. And that's one of the most interesting parts of the character, is his own self-hatred actually stops him escaping at times that he could.
KELLY: He also brings so much of his own grief - Cromwell - and what he's lost. And I want to bring us toward a close by noting something beautiful that I read you said in response to a question about the earlier deaths of your daughter and your brother. You talked about being hollowed out by loss - that feeling - but not feeling the need to refill the space with something else, just sitting with the emptiness. I'll ask about that in relation to Thomas Cromwell, because his wife and daughters die early in the story. Did your own experience inform the way you were able to play the depth of what Cromwell may have felt?
RYLANCE: You can't help, as any kind of artist, for your own experience to inform what you do. You can't be really different than who you are, although, you can highlight different characters in your psyche, of course. But yeah, yeah. It's a hollowing or an emptying of the world - isn't it? - not only the heart, but the world, an emptying of meaning when someone you love very dearly goes. But there's hollow reeds by the side of the river, pipes, gutters, drains, all kinds of musical instruments. What musical instrument doesn't have a hollow space in it? So there's an enormous amount of soul in empty, hollow space. So grief is an instrument maker.
KELLY: Do you feel done with Thomas Cromwell?
RYLANCE: I wish I had some of his strength, to be honest with you, Mary Louise. I wish I had some of his cleverness and his memory and stuff. But yes. Yes, I'm - unless I hit hard times, and I offer a kind of Tommy Cromwell summer tour of Elizabethan...
(LAUGHTER)
KELLY: I would pay to watch. I'll be in the front row.
RYLANCE: (Laughter).
KELLY: Mark Rylance - he plays Thomas Cromwell in Masterpiece's "Wolf Hall: The Mirror And The Light," out now on PBS. Mark Rylance, thank you. This was a pleasure.
RYLANCE: Thanks, Mary Louise.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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