Wolf Hall - The Mirror and the Light

[virgocatlover]

Series 2 is confirmed to start Sunday 10th November.

Almost 10 years after the first series, I'm excited to see the third and final novel brought to life.

Absolutely agree. I think he is brilliant in the role. You need an actor that can hold and captivate an audience, he is in nearly every scene. If, as some people are saying, he is not right for the role, the series would not be as successful as it is. It is his talent as an actor that keeps us all watching.

I agree with posters that Mark Rylance is perfect in the role. He might not look physically threatening but to me that's part of his power - when he does manhandle someone, as he does three times iirc in this episode, it's shocking and therefore more effective. Most of his acting is just in his facial expressions.

I was a bit confused, haven't watched it yet but at the beginning, AB is still alive. Thought the last series ended with her execution?

It's ages since I read the book. It's so long since Wolf Hall that I almost feel a bit over it tbh.

Not for me. I think MR is a genius, and have often seen and adored him on stage, but Cromwell’s pugnacious physicality is key to his character. Obviously Holbein wouldn’t have wanted to insult a powerful client like TC, and his contemporary portraits of More and Erasmus were praised by ‘lifelike’, so I imagine that, while there are no surviving portraits by other artists, we can, for instance, assume TC wasn’t tall and willowy.

(Having said that, I can’t think offhand of any actor with the right ‘brick shithouse’ physicality who would also be likely to give a good performance as TC as Mantel writes him…?)

An uglified Tom Hardy?

Can I watch Bring Up the Bodies anywhere or has it not been adapted yet

Bring up the Bodies is covered in season 1

No not really. It's nowhere near The Tudors' in terms of gore.

Wow
how to make a racist remark by dressing it up as 'colour-blind
From 'The Voice' newspaper

DOCUMENTS FROM the 15th and 16th centuries show that Africans were present in most of the royal courts.
For example, John Blanke, an African trumpeter, served in the court of King Henry VII and King Henry VIII.
Blanke may have come to England as one of the African attendants of Catherine of Aragon in 1501. He is one of the earliest recorded Black people in Britain after the Roman period.
Court records from Queen Elizabeth I’s reign relating to the Baskerville campaign of 1595–96 document a large number of Spanish and African prisoners of war captured in an assault by Sir Francis Drake on a Spanish pearl-fishing settlement in Rio de la Hacha in the Spanish West Indies during the Anglo-Spanish War.

Fuck me
Read some history

Of course there were black people in England hundreds of years ago, no-one with any education would argue otherwise.

But objecting to "colour blind" casting of historical people is not racist. Anne Boleyn was definitely not black. Nor were the members of Jane Seymours close family. We know they weren't as there are portraits.

I agree with pp that it dies a disservice to black people by presenting a version of history that is a total fiction.

Nor were they members of the Privy Council

In that case, you are in bed with Mchael Sheen school of narrow-minded, nonsensical thinking
Only Welsh actors can play Welsh people
Only gay actors can play gay people
It's called acting - the viewer suspends their disbelief

Well I would certainly object to a male Welsh actor portraying, say, the late Queen Elizabeth with a Welsh accent.

The personal sexual preferences of any actor are irrelevant as they are not visible or audible.

Why is it distracting?

It's called acting - the viewer suspends their disbelief

It depends on the context whether it works or detracts. Mostly it's fine to be colour blind or swap sexes in Shakespeare (most of my viewing of late has been via stage to screen and it's the rule rather than the exception that the presenter will breathily say something about swapping or 'queering' 'gender' as though it was a new and exciting idea) but even then with limits. It'd be pretty hard to stage Othello effectively without him being visibly racially different from the rest of the cast for instance wouldn't it?

But in something that's at least ostensibly historical, anachronisms do jar. I don't see how it helps anyone if racial minorities and women are portrayed with either more or less status and power than they would have possessed.

I've not started watching The Mirror and the Light yet so this is just a general observation.

Quite. An uneducated person watching could very well think black people held positions of real power and high status, therefore there was no prejudice historically.

Yes. The Tudor era is very well documented. None of the characters featuring in 'Wolf Hall' were black. There were black people in Tudor England, but they were very few in number and were not members of the aristocracy or landed gentry. That's just a fact. Pretending otherwise is to give a falsified idea of history.

It's interesting how things have changed in the near decade since the first 'Wolf Hall'. I doubt it ever occurred to the casting directors then to cast black actors, but now it's practically a requirement, however ahistoric.

This new series starts with her execution, it's from the last series but just used again to begin this one and set the scene.

A Man For All Seasons was one of our set books for O-Level English Literature (showing my age there). It led me to a decades long interest in Tudor history. The film was on tv a couple of months ago. I did feel that it's time for a remake. Mark Rylance would make a superb Thomas More, he has the exact energy that Robert Bolt portrayed in AMFAS.

🙏

Well, let's have some tv dramas about them then! I know there was a black herald in the Tudor court, highly regarded as well, according to David Olusoga.

Robert Bolt?

Don't you mean Paul Scofield?