{"id":406558,"date":"2026-02-04T01:09:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-04T01:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/406558\/"},"modified":"2026-02-04T01:09:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T01:09:11","slug":"tom-hiddleston-on-teddys-death-pine-in-season-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/406558\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Hiddleston on Teddy’s Death, Pine in Season 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t[This story contains MAJOR spoilers from the season two finale of The Night Manager<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

\n\tTom Hiddleston<\/a> knows that Night Manager viewers \u2014\u00a0much like his Jonathan Pine \u2014 will be left reeling after the season two finale <\/a>of the Emmy-winning BBC and Prime Video series.<\/p>\n

\n\tNearly a decade after The Night Manager earned the actor a Golden Globe and two Emmy nominations, Hiddleston has reteamed with writer David Farr for two more seasons of the spy thriller series. In the same vein as the first season, this second season and the forthcoming third installment both focus on the high-stakes, international game of cat and mouse between Hiddleston\u2019s MI6 agent and Hugh Laurie<\/a>\u2019s morally corrupt arms dealer Richard Roper.<\/p>\n

\n\tWritten by Farr and directed by Georgi Banks-Davies, the six-episode second season followed Pine as he journeyed to Colombia to secretly investigate a new arms operation headed by young businessman Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva).<\/p>\n

\n\tUpon his arrival, Pine, under the alias Matthew Ellis, crossed paths again with Roxana Bola\u00f1os (Camila Morrone), a Miami-based shipping broker connected to Teddy\u2019s criminal enterprise. Pine originally questioned Roxana in the season two premiere in connection with the suspicious death of his superior Rex Mayhew (Douglas Hodge), who had been killed by MI6 chief Mayra Cavendish (Indira Varma) for investigating a high-level leak within the organization. Despite the blackmail they had on each other, Pine used Roxana to get close to the center of Teddy\u2019s criminal enterprise.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs he seduced both Teddy and Roxana, Pine learned that Teddy was merely a figurehead. The true puppet master is his archnemesis Roper, who faked his death in captivity years ago. Now operating from the shadows in Colombia, Roper has been operating a massive arms-smuggling ring with the goal of rebuilding his empire and bankrolling a private guerrilla army to topple the local government.<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter his cover was blown, Pine managed to get Teddy alone to play him secret recordings of Roper revealing that the antagonist never intended to acknowledge Teddy as his legitimate heir. In reality, Roper was planning to return to England, where his other son, Danny (Noah Jupe), has been sequestered at a boarding school. Pine took advantage of Teddy\u2019s obvious hurt to convince the young drug lord to turn on his father for good.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the finale, Teddy then worked with Pine to redirect the final shipment of weapons and give international authorities the evidence they need to put away Roper for good. But after being tipped off by Roxana, Roper hatched a plan to use two different planes, sending the empty plane to the authorities and the real plane to the Colombian militants in the jungle. Once he fulfilled his end of the deal with the militia, Roper then shot Teddy in the head in front of Pine.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe way it felt like playing [Pine\u2019s reaction to Teddy\u2019s death] was almost like being enveloped or engulfed in an explosion of pain and trauma and vulnerability,\u201d Hiddleston tells The Hollywood Reporter on a video call from his home in the U.K. \u201cIt\u2019s an impact of enormous grief and loss that engulfs him or washes over him and renders him completely incapacitated for 10 or 20 seconds.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPine\u2019s survival instinct was then reactivated when he heard another series of gunshots. In the ensuing shootout, Pine narrowly manages to escape with his life, but is last seen, after hours of walking in the forest, collapsing in the middle of nowhere. (Read the full breakdown of the season in THR\u2019s finale interview with Farr here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the conversation below, star and executive producer Hiddleston deep dives with THR into the psychology of his damaged MI6 agent and explains how the devastating finale sets the stage for the very likely final season: \u201c[Pine] is a man alone, a man cut adrift, a man completely abandoned. And, dramatically, that\u2019s an extraordinary place to leave someone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tOnce David Farr approached you a few years ago with his plans to revisit The Night Manager, what kinds of conversations did you have with him about how Jonathan Pine would evolve between seasons one and two?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first answer is time. The simple nature of the evolution of time \u2014 that he would be 10 years older, that I would be 10 years older, that the world is 10 years older. If you are in the intelligence community, the last 10 years must have been incredibly complex with so many international conflicts, so many uncertainties \u2014 including a pandemic \u2014 and a lot of fragmented stability all over the world at home and abroad. And if you work for an intelligence agency either in the United Kingdom or in the U.S., I\u2019d imagine that life is complex. So [we were] just allowing for the 10 years to have passed.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Pine specifically, David and I talked a lot about his vigilance \u2014 he is someone with enormous competence and capacity and, crucially, moral courage. There is a fire inside him. There always has been. He was a British officer in Iraq and Afghanistan before he was a hotel manager, but he was comfortable in uniform. He then hid behind the uniform of being a luxury hotel manager, and he\u2019s a collector of other people\u2019s languages. That\u2019s one of the le Carr\u00e9 quotations, which is literal and metaphorical. In the first season, I spoke French and Arabic. In this season, I speak Spanish. But also, he\u2019s a collector of other people\u2019s personas. He doesn\u2019t necessarily speak his own truth, or somehow his own truth is filtered through the masks of other men.<\/p>\n

\n\tAngela Burr [Olivia Colman<\/a>] finds him in the Swiss hotel and recognizes a similar moral fingerprint and recruits him to become a field agent for MI6. He then delivers Richard Roper to his captors. After that, David and I agreed there is no going back. Once he\u2019s seen behind the curtain, he\u2019s wide awake; he\u2019s alert and aware and watching. So that\u2019s why in the genesis of this [second season], there was no version of him going back to a kind of ordinary life. He stays in the intelligence community with a different role, but of course, the role is a half-life. He\u2019s got a desk job, he\u2019s in nocturnal surveillance, and it doesn\u2019t satisfy this urgent burning, searching, curiosity he has about the world. It\u2019s really only that familiar scent of dragon smoke, the scent of Roper\u2019s legacy, that impels him back into action. So that was a long answer, but that\u2019s what we talked about \u2014 in 10 years, [there are] more scars on the inside, more scars on the outside.<\/p>\n

\n\tDavid never envisioned making a second season of The Night Manager without Hugh Laurie, and as if it wasn\u2019t already clear enough, this finale cements the notion that this show will always boil down to the international game of cat-and-mouse between Pine and Roper. You have even compared that dynamic to the tale of St. George and the dragon. What do you think Pine learns from having to quite literally confront the ghosts of his past \u2014 and for those ghosts to ultimately get the better of him \u2014 this season?<\/p>\n

\n\tThere is probably an existential shock, and the profundity of that shock is probably not yet understood. I do know that le Carr\u00e9 was fascinated by the mirror of Pine and Roper. There\u2019s so much about the reflection they find in each other that is the same. They move through the world with a similar elegance, a similar intelligence, a similar understanding of the complexity of people. They trade in secrets. They trade in masks. They\u2019re very, very sophisticated in the way they operate. They have similar charms, similar manners, similar bearing. In another world, they could have been best friends, or they could have been family. There is a red line that divides them, which is that Pine believes in the goodness of people and Roper does not. As [Roper] says in the first season, \u201cThe world is rotten. Might as well celebrate that rottenness.\u201d I think that is the crucial difference.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis season is about fathers and sons. Teddy is desperate for his father\u2019s approval. Meanwhile, Roper\u2019s worried about his English son in an English boarding school, in a distant land. And then the third, I suppose, is Pine. Pine has been chosen, unconsciously or not, by Roper as his heir and executioner. Roper makes Pine an offer [this season], which he refuses. But when I talk about the red line, the thing I love about the scene between myself and Hugh in episode five is \u2026 He says, \u201cYour father\u2019s values are dying. Mine are in the ascendant. Wake up and smell the effing coffee.\u201d And Pine\u2019s response is, \u201cMy father loved me. What about yours?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSo what it always told me \u2014 and I believe it is at the core of this story and the core of le Carr\u00e9\u2019s novel \u2014 is that Pine is a character who understands love, who understands the force of love in the world and its transformational power. Roper probably doesn\u2019t, and doesn\u2019t believe in it. So there\u2019s a cynicism deep in Roper \u2014 as much as we like him, because he\u2019s played by the most charming man in the world. [Grins.]<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tTom Hiddleston (Jonathan Pine) with Hugh Laurie (Richard Roper) in season two.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAmazon Prime Video<\/p>\n

\n\tBut David is right that le Carr\u00e9\u2019s fascination was with this extraordinary distorted reflection that they see in each other, which I think [le Carr\u00e9] always felt about those who work in intelligence. There is a kind of brotherhood forged between people who work in the shadow world. They\u2019re all liars, they\u2019re all dishonest, they\u2019re all pretending. So, in that sense, they\u2019re all the same. But in these crucial moments, [regardless of] what ideology you choose to support, whether you choose to believe in the goodness of people, that is the uncorruptible, indivisible, unassailable character of a human being.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut I didn\u2019t really answer your question. I think the fact that Roper finishes [this season] in the ascendant \u2014 it would force an existential crisis that Pine has never had to confront. [Pine has to accept] that he was played, that he lost the game, that Roper was too good, and that actually the tide is with him. That is a profound crisis. There are people who Pine supposed were on the side of the angels and supporting his cause who are happy to cut him off and possibly even shame him when he thought he was doing the right thing.<\/p>\n

\n\tDavid admitted to me that there was a bit of a misdirect in season two, in the way he initially introduced the central trio and suggested there would be a classic love triangle with Roxana at the center. But, in the finale, Roxana tells Roper she wasn\u2019t the one who lost their heart to Pine, seemingly confirming that Teddy had developed some feelings for Pine. Or, at the very least, Teddy became so attracted to Pine that he was willing to switch allegiances, to Teddy\u2019s own detriment. What was your take on Pine\u2019s relationships with Teddy and Roxana?<\/p>\n

\n\tI think that Pine\u2019s relationships with both of them are surprising. And narratively, I found that really exciting. I think there\u2019s a vulnerability in Pine, which we\u2019ve understood from that first [season]. He feels enormous and accumulated guilt about women being put in extreme danger because of his actions \u2014 or inaction. And that happens twice in the first season with Sophie Alekan (Aure Atika) and with Jed (Elizabeth Debicki). There\u2019s a line in this season where he says, \u201cI have a bad record with people I get close to.\u201d I think he has a self-diagnosed \u2014 misdiagnosed, possibly \u2014 pathology, which is, \u201cIf I get close to women, they\u2019ll get hurt. I must not get close to them.\u201d I think that\u2019s actually his Achilles heel.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the first episode, he sees Roxana. He knows that there are mysterious circumstances surrounding Rex Mayhew\u2019s death, and he\u2019s worried that Roxana will find herself in incredible danger. In actual fact, he doesn\u2019t know that Roxana is the source of the danger. So there\u2019s a vulnerability [where] he\u2019s trying to look after her, but she already has the power \u2014 and she is in no way a damsel in distress. She has her own reasons for doing what she does and for being where she is. She\u2019s personally, emotionally, deeply invested in Teddy\u2019s plan, and it\u2019s all to do with her family circumstances and the loss of her own father. So she\u2019s playing them at the game as much as they\u2019re playing her.<\/p>\n

\n\tWith Teddy, I think there is a strange [connection]. They\u2019re both orphans, and at first Teddy materializes in Pine\u2019s perspective as a true villain, somebody who is formidable and dangerous with violence in his past. But as [Teddy] pieces together the picture of his biography, it\u2019s very clear that you can see this emotional vulnerability, this lost boy who is trying to find a center in his life. Pine could also be characterized as a lost boy trying to find a center. John le Carr\u00e9 could be characterized as a lost boy trying to find a center. So there\u2019s a fellowship or a kindred spirit that\u2019s recognized in the other.<\/p>\n

\n\tDavid talked about this, and I think it\u2019s probably true that there\u2019s something about the secret world, and these characters who trade in secrets and lies, and the game they play and the dance they do is one of seduction and betrayal. Seduction is a part of the game. So I think that\u2019s what Pine and Teddy do. If Pine needs to get close to Teddy to find out who he is, there is a part of that which is a seduction \u2014 in the same way that Pine seduced Roper [in season one]. Pine seduced Roper away from Corky [Roper\u2019s fixer, played by Tom Hollander, who was killed off in season one]. Corky could see it as plain as day that Pine was not who he said he was, but Pine somehow seduced Roper and said, \u201cIt\u2019s okay. You can trust me. I\u2019m your man.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSo I suppose in that game of seduction, there are levels of intimacy all the way along. And, obviously, we\u2019ve played that out in the show in demonstrable ways \u2014 for example, the [suggestive, three-way] dancing sequence in episode three. But I think it\u2019s a psychological seduction; it\u2019s a spiritual seduction all the way through that they\u2019re all doing. They all get close to each other in different ways. To me, that just felt very real. It seemed to be very honest about these very fragmented people.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tDiego Calva (Teddy, center) with Hiddleston (Pine).<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAmazon Prime Video<\/p>\n

\n\tHow would you define the relationship between Pine and Teddy? Some people, including David, have called it homoerotic. Others would even venture to describe it as romantic.<\/p>\n

\n\tWell, it depends on your definition of homoerotic, really. I certainly saw it in that dancing sequence, and it was very deliberate how we choreographed it, because Pine is sailing very close to the edge in that scene. He\u2019s being deliberately provocative, and he needs information quickly, so he\u2019s loosening his control on the situation to see if it changes the temperature. And I suppose that, yeah \u2014 but how do you define homoerotic? Do you find it as explicitly sexual?<\/p>\n

\n\tNot necessarily!<\/p>\n

\n\tThere is a charge between them certainly, and that charge is one of two people who are in a very, very dangerous situation and having to depend on each other. And they\u2019re also both incredibly alone and incredibly vulnerable. So I suppose, yeah, the charge is there. I always knew it was there, but I would never wish to prescribe how people should feel about it, and I\u2019m sure lots of people feel lots of different ways about it. So I\u2019m just delighted. I loved working with Diego. I thought he gave the most magnificent performance of immeasurable complexity and depth. I think he plays many, many colors in his performance as Teddy. In our scenes together, we were always doing something different. There was always something complex and interesting going on. But as I say, I never want to put a label on it for the audience.<\/p>\n

\n\tPine and Teddy\u2019s alliance costs Teddy his life in that final confrontation with Roper in the jungle. There\u2019s a brief moment that Teddy has the opportunity to shoot and kill Roper, and Pine is almost urging him to pull the trigger. But as soon as Teddy lowers his weapon, the situation quickly spirals out of control and Roper is able to gain the upper hand. Pine\u2019s hands are tied up in that scene, so that, unfortunately, means that Pine would have been unable to stop Roper from shooting Teddy. Can you give voice to Pine\u2019s internal dialogue in those heart-wrenching final moments with Teddy?<\/p>\n

\n\tI think the stakes are almost unimaginably high, and Pine has put all his chips on Teddy and on the unlikely brotherhood that they have forged together. And the magic trick that Roper pulls off, [where] he switches the cargo planes \u2014 because of something he gleaned through a conversation with Roxana, he knows that Teddy\u2019s been turned, and he can\u2019t trust him and he can\u2019t trust Cabrera [the exiled Colombian politician planning to overthrow the government, played by Luis Fernando Hoyos] either. So he\u2019s like, \u201cI know they\u2019re going to try and pull the wool over my eyes, so I\u2019m going to pull the wool over theirs before it happens.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t[In their final conversation before the shootout] Pine says to Teddy, \u201cHave faith,\u201d and it\u2019s almost as if Pine is saying it to himself: \u201cKeep your faith, you will prevail.\u201d But the jungles of Columbia are deep and thick. We were there. Actually, we didn\u2019t shoot that sequence in Columbia, but we had shot a lot in the jungles of Columbia, and there\u2019s no one for miles around. So Pine is completely alone; he has no support system. It\u2019s just him and Teddy.<\/p>\n

\n\tDiego, Hugh and I and Georgi Banks-Davies, our extraordinary director, talked about: How easy is it to kill your father? I would imagine [it\u2019s] not easy, and that\u2019s why Teddy hesitates. It\u2019s not something you can do. Hesitation is totally understandable, and he\u2019s torn. In a way, everyone\u2019s hoping for more clarity and trying to buy more time [in that final confrontation with Roper], and there\u2019s nothing Pine can do. As you say, he\u2019s tied up; he\u2019s completely powerless.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe way it felt like playing [Pine\u2019s reaction to Teddy\u2019s death] was actually almost like being enveloped or engulfed in an explosion of pain and trauma and vulnerability. It\u2019s a terrible, crashing doom, an impact of enormous grief and loss that engulfs him or washes over him and renders him completely incapacitated for 10 or 20 seconds. It\u2019s actually only the [subsequent] gunshot that wakes him up and ignites his survival instinct, and he runs. But in the aftermath, as you see in the last frames of Pine, he is in bad shape \u2014 in very bad shape, indeed.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tOlivia Colman (Angela Burr) in season two.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAmazon Prime Video<\/p>\n

\n\tYou and David have both made it clear that you see The Night Manager as a trilogy, so there is only one chapter left of this story. By the end of the season two finale, Pine is not only in serious physical peril, but he also does not yet know that Angela (Olivia Colman) is dead. How do you think Angela\u2019s death will affect Pine, considering that so much of the second half of the season stemmed from him being mad at her for lying to him about Roper\u2019s death?<\/p>\n

\n\tIt completely isolates him. He is alone. Anybody who ever cared about him is gone. Both his parents and all those agent runners in London are gone. Le Carr\u00e9 used to profess that the relationship [between MI6 agent runners and MI6 agents] was so intimate as to be almost maternal or paternal. Angela\u2019s gone. Rex is gone. [Pine\u2019s quiet surveillance unit] \u201cThe Night Owls\u201d are gone. Sally\u2019s still out there, but I would imagine he\u2019s a marked man. I don\u2019t think the security service run by Mayra Cavendish is a safe haven for him. So where do we go from here? He is a man alone, a man cut adrift, a man completely abandoned. He\u2019s a man with a memory of his experiences, his pain, his mission and his loss \u2014 all alone. And, dramatically, that\u2019s an extraordinary place to leave someone.<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first two seasons of The Night Manager are now streaming on Prime Video. Read THR\u2019s finale postmortem with writer David Farr.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[This story contains MAJOR spoilers from the season two finale of The Night Manager.] Tom Hiddleston knows that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":406559,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,25921,44230,102759,102760,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-406558","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-gb","10":"tag-hugh-laurie","11":"tag-olivia-colman","12":"tag-the-night-manager","13":"tag-tom-hiddleston","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=406558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/406559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}