I dunno, I never got into the BBC series, and part of that was that Mark Rylance didn't epitomise Cromwell for me. To me it's essential to his character that he's a thinker who looks like a bruiser, who physically frightens people, and Rylance looked too artistic to me. Plus I felt a lot of the nuance of his inner monologue was lost.
That was my problem, too, and I adore MR as an actor. He did a brilliant job, but for me he was miscast. As was Ben Miles (who I also admire) in the RSC stage version, which I didn't much care for. Once you take out the astonishing richness of his inner monologue, and the distance and contradiction between what he says, does and thinks, what you're left with a story we all already know.
But I seem to be in a minority in not much caring for TMatL, which I finished last night. Not compared to the previous two novels.
To whichever pp was complaining about the weight of the hardback -- I saw paperbacks in a bookshop yesterday, so they must have been released simultaneously...? Still a hefty tome.