‘The Night Manager’: Tom Hiddleston on How Jonathan Pine’s Trauma Impacts His Season 2 Mission

Tom Hiddleston is back in action as Jonathan Pine in The Night Manager Season 2, and he’s being joined by faces familiar and new as Babylon star Diego Calva joins the ranks as big bad, Teddy Dos Santos.

Continuing the legacy of John le Carré‘s characters and novels, The Night Manager continues the story of Pine, now living as a low-level MI6 officer named Alex Goodwin, running a surveillance unit out of London. Believing he put his past with Season 1’s villain, Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie), behind him, Pine finds himself rattled when he crosses paths with an old Roper mercenary, prompting further investigation that leads him to Teddy, a dangerous Colombian businessman.

While Pine could very well stay put without digging in deeper, that’s harder said than done, as star and executive producer Hiddleston tells TV Insider, “At the end of the first season, I always believed that he’s seen behind the curtain, and once you’ve seen behind the curtain, you can’t go back. A fire has been lit in his soul, ignited by Angela Burr, played by the great Olivia Colman, and that fire won’t be extinguished until the end of his lifetime, and his desire to know and understand the world as it really is, not merely as it appears to be, is keen and intense.”

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After all this time, though, how has Pine gotten sharper, and in which ways has he begun to slip on the job? Hiddleston shares, “In the 10 years that he’s been working for the intelligence community, he has a greater curiosity, greater experience, I think a greater capacity and a greater courage.  So those are the things I think he’s better at.”

As Hiddleston puts it, “He’s very sharp, very alert. I think a blind spot for him might be that he doesn’t understand fully or hasn’t healed from his trauma.” That trauma was the experience he had in bringing arms dealer and businessman Richard Roper to justice alongside Burr.

“I think there are experiences of the first season that he went through, which sincerely logged his nightmares and those ghosts haven’t been exercised, his pain hasn’t fully been healed, and I think that’s a blind spot,” Hiddelston further explains. “It could be an Achilles’ heel. So he’s got this extraordinary courage, he’s got this extraordinary bravery and moral clarity, but there’s a vulnerability. His pain makes him fallible.”

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Meanwhile, when it comes to Teddy, there’s plenty of depth beyond your run-of-the-mill villain archetype. “The idea of good and evil, black and white, is just too easy,” Calva says about categorizing his character. “I hope I achieve with my character, to change that line. I don’t know if my character is good or bad, but I try to create a human villain.”

Don’t miss the men go head-to-head when The Night Manager premieres its second season on Prime Video, and let us know what you’re looking forward to seeing when the series returns in the comments section below.

The Night Manager, Season 2 Premiere, Sunday, January 11, Prime Video