This article contains major spoilers for the final episode of The Night Manager season two.

On October 31, 2023, Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie went for a long walk around London’s Hyde Park in torrential rain. For the first hour, they talked about soccer, but eventually, as they realized the walk was about to end, they discussed the matter at hand. Would they both return to the world of The Night Manager; to the cat and mouse game between Jonathan Pine (Hiddleston) and Richard Roper (Laurie)?

“Hugh said to me, ‘So are we going to do this, and are we going to do it properly?’” Hiddleston recalled recently. “And I told him, ‘I think we can try.’”

Roper’s return after we, like Jonathan Pine, believe he is gone after we see him dead with our own eyes, is one of many dramatic, unsettling twists that The Night Manager packs into its second season. In the final episode, we leave our hero alone in the jungle, outsmarted by his antagonist, cut off from his allies, and not yet aware that Angela Burr, the woman who has always been able to get him out, has been shot in the chest in the garden of her home. Recently Hiddleston sat down to explain how this season was architected, the story behind its whiplash twists and turns, and where next for his character Jonthan Pine.

GQ: There’s a huge reveal at the end of episode three where we learn Richard Roper is in fact alive. Was that idea there from the beginning?

Tom Hiddleston: Oh yeah, we built it together. Hugh and I were very gratefully included as producers. So David Farr—our extraordinary screenwriter, who adapted the first one—had the idea at some point in the pandemic. He emailed Simon and Steven Cornwell, le Carré’s sons, and said ‘I’ve had a dream: Roper has another son that we don’t know about’. The whole story is about fathers and sons, inheritance and legacy, and in a way there’s a mythic spine like a cauldron of fire that felt very ancient under the whole story.

Can you unpack the fathers and sons theme beyond the obvious?

So you’ve got Danny Roper [Noah Jupe] and Teddy Roper [Diego Calva], and then Pine. Pine, in many ways, is the third son because in the first series Roper selects him as his right-hand man, his surrogate son and his executioner. In some unconscious way, Roper says, ‘This one, I trust him, but he may be my undoing.’ They’re so similar, except for their completely opposite moral compass. Roper believes the world is rotten, and why not celebrate that rottenness? Pine believes that the world is good. They’re sort of obsessed with each other, and they seduce each other and confront each other and need each other.

What does Roper’s return do to Pine?

At the beginning of the season, the old dragon of Roper has been slain. And then this familiar scent of dragon smoke glides into the valley and Pine as a kind of dragon slayer is reactivated. This fire that’s in his heart and soul, which won’t be extinguished in his lifetime, is reignited. He can’t help himself. He has to chase it.

Pine finds out Angela Burr has betrayed him because Roper threatened to kill her child. Is this an ultimate betrayal?

It’s her baby. She said he’s going to kill her child, so you understand her reasons, but I hope you also understand Pine’s extraordinary rage at the betrayal. Le Carré’s one big note before we started the first Night Manager was, remember, with Pine and Burr, the relationship between agent and agent runner is so intimate, it is almost maternal. It’s almost familial, because the agent is completely alone, and the only person who understands, or has the capacity to understand what the agent is going through is the agent runner.

Are we then to take her lying to him as a maternal act?

When she says, in the airport, ‘you would have gone in there all guns blazing and wrecked it,’ she’s right. She was protecting him and protecting the situation. She’s got her reasons for lying, because actually she recognizes his trauma. That it might be better for him to think he’s dead.

Roper’s return feels shocking because Teddy has been set up as the figure continuing his legacy, and as a worthy new foe for Pine.

That’s a great credit to Diego [Calva]’s performance. He’s got to suggest something early on where he’s very powerful, with a capacity for violence and menace, but with a suave, charming elegance. You buy that this very charismatic young man is running a complex operation in Colombia, and then suddenly it switches, and you see the vulnerability, and you see a son who is working for his father’s approval.

Do you think that’s what is going on with the tussle between Teddy and Pine by the sea? Does he recognize someone with an absent father?

Totally. He sees the hole in his heart. He sees the grief. And he knows who Roper is. The purpose and the meaning in Teddy’s life will never find its closing chapter. It’s like Teddy is chasing a sunset that will never come, that warm accepting embrace of your father is not going to happen. For that scene, Diego and I had a long rehearsal the night before. We didn’t want it to look too choreographed or like they were suddenly really gifted at martial arts.

Pine, while pretending to be Mathew Ellis, is drugged by Teddy in the pool scene in the second episode. How was that to shoot?

It was actually quite unpleasant. We did it quite quickly in one night, and I felt that funny feeling of being manipulated. It’s really fun to play Pine when he’s in control—when he knows exactly what he’s doing when he feels he has more of the cards than they do.

What were the hard scenes to play this season?

One was the loss of Graham and Waleed, at the end of episode one, where Pine is not given the time to grieve, and there’s almost a kind of instantaneous explosion of shock, guilt, shame—like an absolute nightmare.

There’s another moment when he finds out about what’s happened to Rex Mayhew, and he finally gets home to his flat, goes out onto the balcony and looks out over London. You see how painful it is for him, but he hasn’t really got time to grieve, or he’s not got time to metabolize his feelings. I look forward to those moments because they’re different from these moments of control, where he feels confident and able to play the game, or navigate his way through the maze.

There’s a frisson of sexual tension within this triangle of Pine, Teddy, and Roxana Bolaños (Camila Morrone) which is teased. How do you see their dynamic?

I guess it’s kind of coded into The Night Manager, in a way. It’s all there in the book, actually, that there is something about eliciting secrets from people that is a seduction. People in that world seduce each other, and boundaries get blurred. The best way of dissembling and dissimulating is to just genuinely seduce someone.

Similarly, Roxana and Pine getting together is teased but doesn’t happen. That feels at odds with what might have happened in the previous season.

Roxana and Pine are sort of locked in this very treacherous dance where, you know, one misstep, and it all goes south very quickly. That treacherous dance felt like the engagement, and more exciting and progressive. It felt like something very new to play for me.

Roper offers Pine a big sum of money to walk away and go live his life. Why does Pine turn it down?

I think he’s fighting for the goodness that he knew existed in his father, his mother. I think he’s fighting for the goodness he knows exists in Sally and Walid and Graham and the Night Owls. Those are good people, and he believes in them.

Is it also about the version of the country he believes in?

Fair play, decency, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom to vote—we have to remember these are freedoms not everyone has. They are enormous privileges. That’s why le Carré called Roper “the worst man in the world,” because Roper has been the recipient of these extraordinary privileges—being like born in Britain in the 20th century, with a great education, with democracy and freedom of speech and all of those things—and you do this cynical thing, which is trade in weapons that kill children. That’s why he’s the worst man in the world.

At the very end, Pine is totally alone. He doesn’t yet know, but Burr has been shot in the chest and she isn’t coming to get him out. Where do you think he is mentally in that final shot in the jungle?

I don’t know yet, and I should say we’re still developing it. We haven’t filmed the third season. We’ll film it soon, but we’re still playing with the dials on the story. I know that the place he goes to is very, very dark. He’s had a lot of brushes with death—a lot of pain and suffering for an institution. He’s just completely out on a limb on his own, adrift in the wind, betrayed by everybody. It’s incredibly lonely, almost unthinkably so. What do you believe after that? Do you even believe that trust is ever possible?

This article originally appeared in British GQ.