Critic Reviews
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An event. .... Rylance’s Cromwell is an astonishing mix of empathy, doom and hope. .... The dialogue is fluid and of its time, so much so that you forget someone wrote it (Peter Straughan did), or that it was directed (by Peter Kosminsky).
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TV's best of the year, so far.
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There is no small thrill in watching Rylance, at last, go through the gears. .... Damian Lewis is excellent as Henry, his body and country and wives failing him. .... Few moments of inelegance stand out in Peter Straughan’s otherwise superb scripts, which are marvels of concision.
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The script is a miracle of compression and architecture, bearing loads that ought to be impossible. The first did justice to 1,200 pages of Mantel’s perfect prose in six hour-long episodes; this distils the essence of her trilogy’s last 900. .... Six hours of magic.
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Altogether, it’s an arresting piece of historical fiction that charts the journey of a man who is always one bad conversation away from death; we may be 500 years removed from these events, but this series ensures you can still hear the sharpening of the axe.
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Rylance’s portrayal, along with the parallels it invokes, are incentive enough to revive “Wolf Hall” one last time. He understands Cromwell’s positioning so innately, it’s impossible not to feel swept up in every brief joyful interlude before being thrown down again as his fortunes inevitably sour.
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This season doesn’t quite have the same thrilling tones as its predecessor. Though there are stunning revelations, it’s a dense internal examination of a man who can feel his time running out.
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In a production shimmering with period authenticity, Rylance reaffirms his status among U.K. acting royalty, creating a figure weighted by sorrow and remorse. [24 Mar - 13 Apr 2025, p.4]
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Despite the mammoth 10-year gap between seasons, they flow seamlessly into one another, which is no small feat considering the likes of the Duke of Norfolk had to be recast. The only real issue with this season, perhaps, is that it has to condense nearly 800 pages of Mantel’s fiction into just six episodes.
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Rylance’s central performance grounds the show – keeps it from floating off into the existential troposphere – but the charge remains.
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Bar a few stodgy lulls, from the two episodes (of six) I’ve seen, this second series crackles with tension, driving forward the busy plot points: succession, ambition, peril, absolutism, religious turmoil, omnipresent female powerlessness and fear.
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There are new faces, such as Timothy Spall as the furious, scowling Duke of Norfolk and Harriet Walter as Lady Margaret Pole. But it is Rylance, husky-voiced and brooding, who makes this series, along with Lewis’s ever more tetchy Henry.
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Lewis’s contained, preternaturally magnetic performance is as sure an embodiment as you could imagine of the force of a powerful monarch. It has an effect on the show that is both historically authentic and dramatically problematic: When Lewis is offscreen, we, like Cromwell and the other courtiers, are anxiously waiting to see what he will do next. The prodigious Rylance is fine, but Cromwell’s role in “The Mirror and the Light” involves a preponderance of rueful staring into space.
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