I think we all felt we were part of a process where we were making something pretty good. He’s someone who doesn’t need to be hard on himself, but is. We all have come across people who perhaps should be harder on themselves and aren’t. That makes their lives tougher for them than for people who aren’t hard on themselves. I think a lot of people are very hard on themselves. Partly, yes, out of his fidelity to the character in general, and this moment, in particular, he wanted to make sure it was right.
I think part of the reason he’s so good is he’s an extraordinary perfectionist and is his own harshest critic. Do you think he loved the story that much, it was a momentary fear that he wouldn’t do Roper justice? Hugh’s talked about how he actually tried to option The Night Manager novel when it was published in the ‘90s. That sense that there is a bond between them but that they can’t be together just feels very true and much more like life than many stories can be. In a way, whatever you want to happen to him can and will happen to him.įor Pine and Jed, I think it would have been too sickly and cute if they’d run off into the sunset hand-in-hand. I love the way that the audience’s imagination takes over at that point. That hint of ambiguity that’s attached to him being dragged off by people who don’t mean him well and you know are capable of very bad things just felt right. We wanted something that felt like justice, but an appropriate justice, for Roper. It ends, and you think, “Okay, great, I’m waiting for the titles now,” and then there’s another ending and another. Again, we’ve all seen movies where you feel it’s got three or four endings. Really, the challenge, going back to the writing process and the filming and editing, was you’ve got a number of people’s stories you want to end. The combination of him wandering into that space and being a threat to Burr played beautifully. He was such a lovely man, but physically enormous and very, very imposing. He really was a very big guy and, actually, a gentle giant, almost the mascot of the crew. I don’t know if you know this, but at his peak, the actor playing Tabby, Hovik Keuchkerian, was the heavyweight boxing champion of Spain. And when Burr goes into Roper’s room armed with the code, and then Tabby comes in and she hides - we’ve all seen scenes a bit like that before, but there’s something about Burr being pregnant and Tabby being played by this huge man.
Even on the page you could tell that was just going to be a killer moment, terrifying. In fact, even as I remember it, a shiver goes down my spine. For me, one of the most agonizing moments is when Jed can’t get back into the safe.
I think there are a number of moments that we really wrestled with, both in the script-writing process and the filming, and then the editing. You know what you want to achieve, you just don’t know quite whether it’s going to come off. I was watching a screener of the finale on my laptop, full-screen, and I got so tense at times I had to shrink it down. In our final weekly postmortem with executive producer Stephen Garrett, we talk about building that suspense - and whether Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) would really have shown up at the Nefertiti in a dry suit after drowning Freddie Hamid (David Avery) in his pool. Spoiler alert: The ending of The Night Managerwould seem to not bode well for Hugh Laurie’s Richard Roper, the international arms dealer who’s last seen in the back of a paddy wagon driven by the arms buyers he’d inadvertently stiffed and intentionally insulted. Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine (Photos: Des Willie/AMC)
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