Why We Had to Wait 10 Years for the Wolf Hall Sequel

Wolf Hall was one of the year’s biggest artistic triumphs when it premiered in 2015. In addition to generating huge ratings in both Britain and America, the BBC-PBS adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize–winning novels scored near-universal critical acclaim, a Peabody Award, Golden Globe and BAFTA wins for Best Limited Series, and no less than eight Emmy nominations. To some, it might seem surprising that a six-hour period drama about the political machinations of Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII in 16th-century England would end up such a smashing success — and lead to an equally acclaimed follow-up, The Mirror and the Light, which premieres in the U.S. this Sunday on Masterpiece. But for Wolf Hall executive producer (and former HBO Films chief) Colin Callender, the show’s success was just a case of history repeating itself.

Back in 1983, the British-born Callender found himself sitting in the audience at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium for the 35th-annual Emmy Awards. Joan Rivers and Eddie Murphy were the hosts, and Callender was there because of the seven nominations for his adaptation of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. The project, which ran in syndication here in the States, was up against a pair of ABC blockbusters. “Back then, the miniseries was the last award of the night,” Callender says. “As the evening progressed, every nomination got knocked down. So by the time it got to Best Miniseries, I had given up and completely assumed that it was going to go to The Winds of War or the Richard Chamberlain show The Thorn Birds.” And yet against all odds, Nickleby ended up taking home the gold. “When the announcement was made, I just sat there,” Callender recalls. “My guest dug at me in the ribs, and she said, ‘They just mentioned your name.’ And I looked up and hadn’t actually realized that we won. It was a bit of a shock.”

Nickleby’s triumph foreshadowed what would become the hallmarks of Callender’s five-decade (and counting) entertainment career: finding success in unexpected places, leaning into changing business models, and doing so with the kind of prestige programming that most platforms reject for not being “commercial” enough. Just three years after his very good night in Pasadena, Callender traded London for New York to run HBO Showcase, the network’s newly formed East Coast movie unit that in 1990 earned the network its first Emmy wins in a drama category. It was the start of a storied two-decade run making movies and miniseries under various HBO banners as part of the network’s “It’s Not TV — It’s HBO” era.

During his time at the company, Callender’s projects — with titles such as Angels in America, Elizabeth I, Grey Gardens, John Adams, and Temple Grandin — were honored with nearly 500 Emmy nominations and 140 statuettes. And long before Netflix and Amazon were getting Oscar nominations, HBO under Callender produced films that played first in theaters and snagged awards (and, in some cases, big box-office returns), including My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Real Women Have Curves, and, through a joint venture with New Line Cinema, Oscar winner Pan’s Labyrinth. 

The production of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light basically cost 100 percent more than it did the first time round.

After Callender’s time at HBO ended in late 2008, he returned to his producing roots, launching his Playground banner in 2012. With offices in New York and London, the company is involved in film development and has been very active in theater (Dear Evan Hansen, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.) But in a throwback to the start of Callender’s career, Playground — with day-to-day operations overseen by joint managing directors Scott Huff and David Stern — has had its biggest success pairing up U.S. and U.K. networks for TV co-productions. Aside from Wolf Hall, Playground is also a producer of the hit PBS–Channel 5 hit All Creatures Great and Small, which just wrapped season five last month and has been renewed for a sixth. All told, the company has produced over 120 hours of television over the past dozen years, including The White Queen and new takes on Little Women, King Lear, and Dangerous Liaisons, with more in the hopper, like a fresh adaptation of the classic detective series Maigret for PBS and the company’s first move into more comedic material with the Chris O’Dowd–created Small Town, Big Story.

Prestige drama with distinctly U.K. roots remains the driving passion for Callender and one he is dedicated to preserving, particularly now, when British newspapers are filled with headlines about increasing woes in the U.K. television industry as streamers push for programming with global appeal rather than the very British stories nurtured by the BBC and Channel 4. Callender believes the success he had with Nickleby more than 40 years ago was in no small part because it was a “quintessentially British” production — and not an Americanized take on U.K. society à la Bridgerton or a British series aimed at a global audience, such as The Crown. “The fact that a nine-hour Dickens show won against those big-budgeted, mainstream miniseries, I think, was an indication of what British programming does in the U.S.: It complements,” Callender told me last week during a wide-ranging, hourlong conversation. “It doesn’t try to compete and be a Winds of War or a Thorn Birds. It provides the audience with something different from the mainstream.”

So there’s a lot I want to talk about given your career, but let’s start with what’s coming up next, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light. The original series was a big success in 2015, both here and in the United Kingdom. I know there were some obvious reasons it took a decade for this follow-up to get made, starting with the fact that you needed to wait for Hilary Mantel to release the book in 2020. What else contributed to the decadelong gap?
Two things. Firstly, we had to work around everyone’s availability because we wanted to bring back as many of the cast as possible. So the combination of that, of COVID, of the time that Hilary took to write the book, and then the time it took for us to adapt it — all that added up. The real challenge was that the production basically cost 100 percent more than it did the first time round, ten years later. Production costs in the U.K. have escalated exponentially, but the fees that the BBC and the other broadcasters in the U.K. pay haven’t increased in the same way.

We were very lucky to have the BBC and Masterpiece attached to the project. In both cases, they stepped up in a very considerable way to help us make it. But it was a challenge. And Wolf Hall, in many ways, is an embodiment of the challenge that British producers face right now producing high-end drama that is primarily addressed to a British audience: Budgets have gone up, and the license fees that the broadcasters paid have not gone up, and it’s difficult to find co-production partners in the U.S. for certain types of English dramas.

Another reason that organizing the schedule was complicated is that the show is shot entirely on location. There were no studio builds. We were shooting in authentic Tudor buildings, many of which were part of the National Trust. And a lot of them have an enormous number of tourists coming to visit, so we had to schedule our shooting in the offseason. That constrained our ability to find a slot where everybody was free because it effectively meant we had to shoot in either spring or late fall and early winter.

Hilary Mantel was involved in helping guide production of the first season, but she sadly died in 2022, before you started filming. Did that make this shoot even more challenging?
It raised the stakes for us because we really then felt even more strongly that we needed to produce a show that honored her work and that she would’ve blessed. Peter Kosminsky, the director, and Peter Straughan, the writer, did spend a considerable amount of time with Hilary when she was alive, talking about the book and discussing her approach to the telling of the story. And Peter Kosminsky had extensive emails with her. So by the time she died, as sad as it was, I think both Peters felt that they had a real understanding of what Hilary had intended with the book.

I would gather that one upside to the long time gap between installments of Wolf Hall is that TV technology has gotten so much better since the mid-2010s. Did that come into play when making The Mirror and the Light? One complaint some viewers had about the original was that, because you shot with natural light, it was often difficult to see certain scenes. Did that get better this time around?
One of the great benefits of shooting ten years later is that the quality of the digital cameras has advanced dramatically. So they are able to shoot in lower light in a way that the cameras back ten years ago weren’t able to. We were very aware that that was a concern for certain viewers the first time round. But I think I can say with enormous confidence that although light and darkness are part of the cinematic palette here, it has been shot very carefully so that you can always see the important information onscreen. I genuinely think the show looks quite beautiful. I don’t think anyone will have any of the problems this time round that some had the first time.

In the decade since Wolf Hall debuted, streaming has undeniably led to more British programming finding its way to U.S. audiences, whether via Acorn TV and BritBox or the originals on bigger platforms such as Netflix and Prime Video. But for a while now, you’ve been warning that streaming represents a threat to U.K. producers. You recently told the U.K. Parliament that streamers “are interested in using British talent to make American programming” and that is making it harder to finance shows aimed first and foremost at British audiences. Other producers have echoed your fears. Can you explain a bit more why you’re concerned?
What we need is a multifaceted television landscape with various different broadcasters, platforms, and cable companies living side by side and complementing each other. As part of that, it’s very important for the British television industry that the public-service broadcasters are healthy, well funded, and free to make the shows they want to make. I think what the streamers have done is extraordinary, and they have indeed funded a whole number of British shows.

But all the talent in those British shows — all the writing, directing, and acting talent — were formed, were shaped, were evolved from working within the British television industry, which is a mix of public-service broadcasting supported by a license fee and ad-supported. So as the world changes, it’s important that we find a way to structure the funding of the BBC and Channel 4 in particular so that they survive in this very competitive marketplace. Because they do make shows that would not otherwise be made by the streamers, that are aimed ostensibly and primarily at British audiences. And if those shows weren’t made, I think the television landscape, certainly in the U.K. but also in the U.S., would be diminished.

Netflix in particular seems to want its biggest British shows to be able to work in America and the rest of the world as much as it wants them to play in the U.K. Something like Baby Reindeer is British-made, but its themes are universal. It sounds like what you’re saying is that’s fine, but there needs to be more British shows that aren’t engineered for global appeal — even if they ultimately attain it.
Some of the most successful British dramas in America — maybe all the British dramas that have been successful in America — were made first and foremost for the British audience. They were shamelessly parochial and specific to a time and place in the U.K. And this is true not just of dramas; it’s true of comedy and of music. Whether it’s Monty Python; whether it’s the Beatles; whether it’s Benny Hill; whether it’s Upstairs, Downstairs; whether it’s Downton Abbey; whether it’s my Nicholas Nickleby — those have all been sort of quintessential British works. They have done extremely well in the U.S. and the rest of the world, but they weren’t designed for the U.S. or the rest of the world. So I believe in that model. And that’s what we’ve tried to do with Playground: With the streamers making what they’re making, find the opportunities — the gaps in the market — and deliver programming that otherwise might not get made.

Do you think the original Wolf Hall would get green-lit by the BBC and PBS in the media world of 2025? Would they be able to devote the resources to it?
If you’re saying “Would the first Wolf Hall be made at today’s prices in the world today?,” it would be very hard. And particularly bear in mind that when Wolf Hall was made the first time round, Mark Rylance, who was an extraordinary theater actor, maybe our finest British stage actor in decades — he did not have a big screen profile over here in the U.S. But nonetheless, the BBC supported that casting. They even waited about nine months for his availability to become free so we could shoot it with him. But I think if we had another actor who didn’t have an above-the-line profile as the lead, and we tried to finance it now, it would be very, very difficult.

Peter Kosminsky, your director on Wolf Hall, has called for a 5 percent levy on U.K. subscriptions to U.S. streamers with the goal of using that money so the BBC and other broadcasters can still make the same number of high-end U.K. dramas they’ve always made. Do you agree with that idea?
Well, that financial arrangement exists all over Europe. I think there are 15 or 16 — I don’t know how many actual countries in all — that have some sort of arrangement like that. It is the case that there are a slew of dramas that the BBC wants to make that it can’t fund. And if this was a way to help fund those shows without damaging in any way the streamers, I think that would be a fine thing to do.

Perhaps because of what you see happening to the U.K. market, your company, Playground, lately seems to be working in a bigger sandbox, if you will. You have series set up at Peacock and BritBox, and several of the shows on your production roster are very different from Wolf Hall and All Creatures. Has this been a deliberate effort to widen your portfolio?
We made a decision a couple of years ago that we wanted to broaden the range of the shows we were doing beyond the classic period dramas. So The Undeclared War for Channel 4 and Peacock is contemporary. Our adaptation of Maigret is contemporary. The series version of Inspector Lynley is contemporary, as is Small Town, Big Story. And in that last case, we went one step further and dipped our toe in comedy, or at least it’s a comedy drama. So, yes, there was a concrete decision to broaden the range of the work that we’ve been doing … For all the challenges that are out there, there are also opportunities, and I think that we’ve looked to find those opportunities.

Even after so many years of making TV, you want to keep evolving, I guess. Or maybe have to is the better phrase.
My career has, in many ways, been defined by change. Nicholas Nickleby was contract 001 at Channel 4 in the U.K., the very first independent drama to be produced by them. Before Channel 4, everything in the U.K. was produced either by the BBC or ITV, and it was all produced in-house and they owned the shows. What we did in 1978 was create a company called Primetime, where we acquired books, developed them into series, presold them to various territories overseas, and then took them to the BBC and ITV. They made them, but we as Primetime owned the rights in the rest of the world. So with Nicholas Nickleby, we were able to presell it to the U.S. and to a German distributor and then go to Channel 4 and say, “Look, this is what it’s cost. We’ve got three-quarters of the money already. You only need to be in for the remaining quarter.” And that’s how it happened. It was literally contract 001, and it was a real inflection point in the British industry.

You had a role in another shift in the industry during your time at HBO. You took a job there in 1986 and went on to essentially create what became the network’s prestige-movie division. There were obviously many examples of great made-for-TV movies and miniseries before then. But I would argue the work you and your various teams did at HBO demonstrated that films produced by a “TV company” could consistently be the equal of what was released in theaters.
When I went to HBO, it was bubbling away, but it hadn’t boiled over yet. We were right in the middle of HBO changing the television landscape. And then by 2003, we had Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson, directed by Mike Nichols, in Angels in America. We won the Palme d’Or in that same year with Gus Van Sant’s film Elephant. We were really in the business back then of bringing movie stars and directors — John Frankenheimer, Norman Jewison, Sidney Lumet — to work for us. At the time, the studios had sort of stepped back from producing those big dramas, and we filled that gap at HBO Films.

So what do you say to those who think movies produced by streamers are somehow not the equal of those that get released in theaters? I want movies to be released in theaters, too, and some of your HBO Films titles, like Elephant, played in theaters first. But if a film is well done, with a good script and great actors, isn’t that more important than the platform on which it’s released?
Oh, I completely agree. But, but — they have to be marketed. The audience has to know they’re there. What we were doing back then at HBO is very different to what’s going on now. There’s so much material, and I think the streamers are relying on audiences just finding shows.

Right — curation matters. HBO used to release movies every Saturday or Sunday night, and when it did an original once every four to six weeks, there was a huge ad campaign behind it. We in the audience knew it was something important. That’s the difference, right?Absolutely. That’s exactly what happened back in those Camelot days.

You’re very diplomatic, but let me ask you this: During the past five or ten years, it’s often felt like streamers were rushing to try to emulate the HBO prestige-TV model — but the way they did that was to throw a lot of money at projects and sign big names. And yet the end result has rarely felt like the best of what HBO so often does. What do you make of this disconnect?
I certainly don’t think there’s a correlation between spending a lot of money and the producing of great television. All Creatures Great and Small has an extraordinary following in the U.K. and the U.S. and it costs shillings on the dollar. I won’t embarrass myself by admitting how little it’s made for, but trust me: It’s an accounting error compared to most other big streaming series. If you think about Baby Reindeer, or even going back to Fleabag, the success of those shows wasn’t a function of how much money was spent on them. So I don’t think there’s any correlation between the amount of money spent on a show and its success.

I think that the key to great television is great development. One of the things that we did at HBO that made us successful is that we were very good at developing shows with creative talent. And I like to think as a producer, and as a company — Playground — we are very good at developing shows. We can lean into the unique qualities of the underlying material and bring them out on the screen and have the dramas informed by the ideas that make that IP in the first place interesting.

That’s certainly what we did with All Creatures, with Wolf Hall, with Maigret, and it’s in a completely different arena, but it’s what we did with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child onstage. There’s a lot of good stuff on TV. But I think that careful and meticulous development is right at the core of great television.

Before we finish up, I have to ask about All Creatures Great and Small. Are you ever surprised by the depth of emotion for the show among U.S. audiences? There seems to be so many fans who are under 35, which is not how we in the U.S. often think of the demos for PBS programming?
First of all, the three central characters are that age — they are young. And we’re watching them trying to get through the day with dignity and facing all the challenges that people face when they’re starting out in their careers or relationships, and so on. So I think there’s a real honesty and humanity to the stories and the characters. And I think the story embraces the small moments, the micromoments that actually we all can relate to.

There’s a scene in the Christmas special of season one where Mrs. Hall, who’s gone to church on Christmas Eve, is missing her son and she begins to cry. And then Siegfried comes into the church late, sits next to her, clocks that she’s crying, and he puts his hand on her hand. That profoundly simple gesture — that micromoment — carried with it an enormous depth and sense of caring, of humanity, of helping one’s neighbor. And I like to think that the show is populated with moments like that, which we all can relate to. It has a profound humanity to it, and I think that speaks to people.

Is this the kind of series you think could go on for another decade? Is there any sort of timetable for how long you see it continuing?
No, there’s no clear end date. I think the answer, frankly, is we’ll go on as long as we can keep making a good series. One of the things I’m proud of is that I think that each season, in its own way, has gotten better and better as we dig more deeply into all the characters and the struggles and the challenges that they face. And I like to think that every season has taken those characters further than before. So I think the answer is we’ll continue as long as we don’t start repeating ourselves. And we certainly haven’t so far, so I’d like to think that we’ve still got a lot more to tell.