Tom Hiddleston is set to make his anticipated return to The Night Manager after almost 10 years
Almost a decade after its explosive finale captivated over 10 million viewers, hit BBC spy thriller The Night Manager is officially back with a bang.
Based on the characters created by John le Carré, the series followed Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston), a night manager of a luxury hotel in Cairo and a former British soldier, who was recruited by the manager of a Foreign Office task force to infiltrate the inner circle of a dangerous arms dealer.
The award-winning drama returns to BBC One tonight (January 1) at 9pm as Pine takes on an explosive new case. The official synopsis teases: “Jonathan Pine thought he’d buried his past. Now living as Alex Goodwin – a low-level MI6 officer running a quiet surveillance unit in London – his life is comfortingly uneventful.
“Then one night, a chance sighting of an old Roper mercenary prompts a call to action and leads Pine to a violent encounter with a new player: Colombian businessman Teddy Dos Santos.”
Pine later meets a businesswoman who reluctantly helps him infiltrate Teddy’s Colombian arms operation. Once in Colombia, Pine is plunged deep into a deadly plot involving the training of a guerrilla army.
The logline concludes: “As allegiances splinter, Pine races to expose a conspiracy designed to destabilise a nation. And with betrayal at every turn, he must decide whose trust he needs to earn and how far he’s willing to go before it’s too late.”
Alongside Tom Hiddleston, the new season also stars Diego Calva as Teddy, as well as Camila Morrone as Roxana, Indira Varma as Mayra, Paul Chahidi as Basil, and Hayley Squires as Sally.
Olivia Colman reprises her role as Angela Burr, alongside returning cast members Alistair Petrie as Sandy Langbourne, Douglas Hodge as Rex Mayhew, Michael Nardone as Frisky, and Noah Jupe as Daniel Roper.
Where was The Night Manager filmed?
The Night Manager filmed across several diverse locations for season two, including the UK, Spain, Colombia and France.
Colombia serves as a major backdrop for the new storyline, with filming taking place at a villa in Girardot – four hours from the capital of Bogotá.
On the preparations that took place before production began in South America, screenwriter David Farr explained at the season two premiere: “Colombia is a very, very complex country, massively misunderstood. Everyone thinks it’s just completely dangerous and it’s totally not true. But for me, I think it was really important to sort of engage in that seriously. So we did.
“We went there properly, we met people, fantastic people. That’s the great luxury of being writers.”
Director Georgi Banks-Davies added: “We went on a massive global adventure because I’m a realist… I think we shot 96, 97 days across six months because of the travel.
“That meant going to the depths of every place, and that’s brutal. It’s really, really hard. You just can’t fake it, and my god, it was hot!”
Executive producer Stephen Garrett concluded: “We ended up slightly mad, Georgi and I and a couple of others. There were a few of us who ended up in daily shirt wars, just because they would be destroyed on a daily basis, because we got, sorry to say, so sweaty.
“Weirdly, one of the challenges we had in post [production] was communicating the heat that we were actually experiencing.”
The Night Manager season 2 premieres on BBC One and BBC iPlayer from 9pm on Thursday, January 1
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