AMC’s ‘The Night Manager’ makes room for big change

Anyone who has read The Night Manager, John le Carre’s bestselling espionage thriller, might consider Olivia Colman to be an unlikely casting choice for the TV version.

The six-week miniseries, which premieres at 9 p.m. Tuesday on AMC, also stars Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie.

Colman plays a calculating British “spook” who recruits Hiddleston’s title character in her personal crusade to bring down Laurie’s billionaire arms broker, a villain she calls “the worst man in the world.”

This versatile English actress, perhaps best known as David Tennant’s detective sidekick in Broadchurch, can quite capably portray a cunning intelligence honcho.

The catch — and the reason she initially seems so fundamentally wrong for the role — is that her character, Angela Burr, originally appeared in the pages of le Carre’s 1993 novel as a Leonard.

What’s more, Colman was spectacularly pregnant in 2014 when the miniseries was in production throughout Europe and the Middle East.

“The book was written more than 20 years ago,” Colman notes. “Maybe there weren’t as many women spies at that time. But today, rather famously, the head of MI6 is a woman.

“And apparently there’s a large number of women in the spy world. And they don’t stop working the split second they get pregnant.

“I’m happy the producers decided to make Burr a woman — not just because it reflects the times that we live in, but also because it wouldn’t have crossed anyone’s mind to cast me as a middle-aged man!”

It’s worth noting that le Carre, one of the executive producers, approved of the gender change and of casting Colman.

In her hands, he says, Burr is “shrewd, gutsy and in turn dour and sparkling.”

Even though Hiddleston (who played comic-book baddie Loki in Thor and country music legend Hank Williams in I Saw the Light) and Laurie (who starred as TV’s crankiest doctor in House) are the marquee names of the cast, Colman proves to be every bit their equal onscreen.

The cast as a whole, meanwhile, thoroughly impressed le Carre, author of such espionage classics as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

He says the cast’s work in The Night Manager brought him back to “those glory days in the ’70s” when the BBC’s version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was “magicked to life by Alec Guinness.”

The Night Manager is the story of Jonathan Pine, a former British soldier and Iraq War vet hiding out from life as the night porter at an opulent Cairo hotel.

Evidence linking charismatic businessman Richard Roper to the international arms trade falls into Pine’s lap quite by accident. After he forwards the information to British Intelligence, Pine is recruited by Burr to infiltrate Roper’s inner circle and obtain even more dirt.

But to gain the trust of “the worst man in the world,” Pine must become a criminal as well, transforming himself into “the second worst man in the world.”

Is it worth the personal sacrifice that Pine will have to make? Burr believes it is.

“She is so tunnel-visioned about bringing this man down.” Colman says. “People like Roper should not be allowed to be doing what they’re doing. She’s doing an important job and she has to see it through. That is even more true now that she’s about to bring a life into the world.”

Colman loved playing this character.

“She’s such an impressive human,” the actress says. “Her sense of right and wrong, of justice and injustice, is unerring. She’s good and she’s right. And to play that is an honor.”

Not once, though, did she feel the need to do any extracurricular research. At no time did she want to seek out a real-life woman Intelligence agent to gain insight into her character.

Why bother, Colman reasons, with le Carre on hand?

“I couldn’t have found out anything on my own that John le Carre doesn’t already know,” she notes. “Anything I need, I can just ask him. It’s much easier.”

This story was originally published April 17, 2016 at 3:53 AM with the headline "AMC’s ‘The Night Manager’ makes room for big change."