\n<\/p>\n
Mark Rylance sat quietly and alone, his black-capped head bowed, his eyes closed. Nearby in a grand chamber, Damian Lewis stood resplendent in a huge gold jacket, playing King Henry VIII, as the director Peter Kosminsky rearranged some actors playing courtiers.<\/p>\n
It was Shoot Day 77, last spring, at Bishop\u2019s Palace in Wells, England, one of the locations for \u201cThe Mirror and the Light,\u201d the second and final television series based on Hilary Mantel\u2019s dazzling trilogy of novels<\/a>. The books, and the show, chart the rise and fall of the energetic, inscrutable Thomas Cromwell \u2014 a blacksmith\u2019s son who became chief minister and all-around fixer to the king before his astonishing career took a tragic turn.<\/p>\n The six-part \u201cMirror and the Light,\u201d which will air on PBS\u2019s Masterpiece<\/a> starting Sunday, begins exactly where the last one ended, in 1536, as Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy) is beheaded.<\/p>\n That series, which aired on PBS in 2015, encompassed the trilogy\u2019s first two novels<\/a>: \u201cWolf Hall\u201d and \u201cBring Up the Bodies.\u201d It was a miracle of writerly and filmic compression, giving us Cromwell\u2019s ascent to prominence; his successful negotiation of the king\u2019s first divorce; the break with the Catholic church; and Anne Boleyn\u2019s rise, and her fall, which is engineered by Cromwell at the king\u2019s behest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe Mirror and the Light\u201d has a near-identical creative team: written by Peter Straughan (who recently won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for \u201cConclave\u201d<\/a>), directed by Kosminsky and starring Rylance and Lewis, with British acting royalty, including Alex Jennings, Timothy Spall and Harriet Walter, in small roles. (This time, though, there is no comparably meaty female role to equal Foy\u2019s turn as Anne Boleyn.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n When the show was first broadcast on the BBC in Britain last fall, it won reviews as rapturous as those of 2015. It opens with Anne\u2019s execution, juxtaposed against scenes of Henry being groomed and magnificently outfitted for his wedding with Jane Seymour (Kate Phillips). Cromwell is at the peak of his power, but the opening shot of Anne on her way to her death prefigures his own fall at the hands of the capricious royal.<\/p>\n \u201cA character is always inside you,\u201d Rylance said. \u201cCromwell was there, but heavier, darker this time.\u201d In \u201cWolf Hall,\u201d Cromwell took revenge for the banishment and death of his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, Rylance explained, but in \u201cThe Mirror and the Light,\u201d \u201che comes to own a little more what he projected onto these people: his own feelings of guilt.\u201d<\/p>\n