Mark Rylance plays Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith’s son who becomes the most feared fixer in Henry VIII’s court, calculating whom to charm, whom to bankrupt and whom to send to the block. Damian Lewis’s king swerves from bonhomie to menace between mouthfuls of quail, while Claire Foy’s Anne Boleyn practices her French tongue on the men who will decide her fate. Peter Kosminsky keeps his cameras hovering at candle-height in dim stone corridors, letting whispered threats carry further than shouts. Shot on location at Berkeley Castle and Gloucester Cathedral, the first six-part run cost £7 million and covered the fall of Jonathan Pryce’s Cardinal Wolsey to Anne’s coronation, ending with Anton Lesser’s Thomas More losing his head. Debbie Wiseman’s score threads Tudor choral music through sparse strings, underlining the silence that greets each broken oath. The second series, broadcast November–December 2024, picks up with Cromwell at the height of his powers, arranging the king’s marriage to Kate Phillips’s Jane Seymour while enemies circle. Hilary Mantel’s trilogy sold five million copies; the television version proved prestige drama could still draw seven million viewers on BBC Two. Kosminsky returned, insisting on 35 mm film to keep colours muted like 16th-century pigments. Peter Straughan compressed 1,000 pages of Mantel’s prose into twelve episodes, each running a precise 60–65 minutes. The production won the Golden Globe for Best Miniseries in 2016; the second run filmed from November 2023 to April 2024, again with Rylance, now 64, shaving his hairline to match the portraits in Hans Holbein’s drawings.
Production Details
BBC One / 2 Seasons / 12 Episodes / 2015
Created by: Peter Straughan, Peter Kosminsky, Hilary Mantel
Showrunner(s): Polly Hill, Rebecca Eaton, Colin Callender
Writer(s): Peter Straughan
Producer(s): Mark Pybus, Lisa Osborne
Cinematography: Gavin Finney
Music: Debbie Wiseman
Main Cast
Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell
Damian Lewis as Henry VIII
Thomas Brodie-Sangster as Rafe Sadler
Joss Porter as Richard Cromwell
Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn
Kate Phillips as Jane Seymour
Richard Dillane as Duke of Suffolk
Will Keen as Thomas Cranmer
Jonathan Pryce as Cardinal Wolsey
Hannah Steele as Mary Shelton
James Larkin as William Fitzwilliam
Bernard Hill as Duke of Norfolk
