It came to David Farr in a dream. While asleep at his UK home in 2020, the creator and executive producer conceived a way forward for The Night Manager, his 2016 adaptation of John le Carré’s novel, starring Tom Hiddleston as a luxury-hotel manager who goes undercover for MI6 to infiltrate a criminal arms-dealing enterprise. When he woke up the next morning, still foggy with visions for the second installment, Farr turned on the morning news to discover that le Carré had died in the night at age 89.
That’s the inception tale, according to le Carré’s son, Simon Cornwell, who, alongside his younger brother, Stephen, runs the Ink Factory, which owns and produces all of their father’s intellectual property. Sitting socially distanced in Cornwell’s garden, Farr outlined his plan for season two of the Emmy Award–winning series, all six episodes of which premiere exclusively on Prime Video worldwide, but on BBC and BBC iPlayer in the UK. Vanity Fair has the exclusive first-look images of the series’ return, although the release date is still top-secret intel.
Despite his grief, or perhaps because of it, the elder Cornwell wanted to explore the current state of affairs through le Carré’s morally searching characters. “Not a day passes that I don’t think about my dad with sadness,” he tells VF. “But at the same time, it can be liberating. When a lot of writers pass, their estates contain all kinds of strict rules. Thou shalt not change this, or that. And my dad’s letter said, ‘You know what I stand for, respect what I stand for, but only you can figure out where to go next.’ And that is sort of the invitation.”
