Playground Entertainment’s Colin Callender casts new light on return of Wolf Hall

LONDON SCREENINGS: Today, we hear from Colin Callender, founder & chairman of Playground Entertainment, about adapting the final novel in Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, 10 years after the award-winning Wolf Hall.

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Colin Callender

The Mirror & the Light is the final instalment of late author Hilary Mantel’s trilogy charting the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, chief advisor to King Henry VIII in sixteenth century England.

The first two novels were adapted for the BBC and PBS Masterpiece in 2015 by writer Peter Straughan and director Peter Kosminsky, via Colin Callender’s Playground Entertainment and All3Media’s Company Pictures.

Wolf Hall was an award-winning six-part series starring Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis, and the pair – together with Straughan and Kosminsky, plus many other members of cast and crew – have been reunited to bring Mantel’s concluding tome to television.

Filming on Wolf Hall: The Mirror & the Light began in November and will continue until March, with the series expected to air in 2025 – a full decade after its predecessor.

The title is among the highlights of distributor Banijay Rights’ slate at this week’s London TV Screenings and Callender spoke to Michael Pickard about its gestation, and why he believes it will be another example of British drama at its finest.

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