Tom Hiddleston’s turn as charming hotelier-turned-spy Jonathan Pine in the BBC adaptation of The Night Manager had us glued to the television earlier this year, launching a thousand James Bond rumours and earning himself an Emmy nomination in the process. It’s proved to be such a defining role for the actor that it’s difficult to imagine anyone else as the ‘night manager’ of the title – but the show’s producer has now revealed that none other than Brad Pitt was initially in line to play Pine in a very different version of John Le Carré’s novel.
Paramount Studios had initially planned to bring the story to the big screen, buying the rights to The Night Manager back in 1993 (when the book was first published). Mission: Impossible writer Robert Towne was hired to create the script, with Sydney Pollack ready to direct.
‘It went into a big Hollywood development process,’ producer Simon Cornwell explained at a Royal Television Society event titled 'The Night Manager: Anatomy of a Hit'. ‘But at the end of the day, they just ended up with a script that didn’t quite fly – and perhaps that wasn’t surprising, because it’s a 600 page book which is not easy to distil into a 90 minute feature.’
The adaptation then lay dormant for a while, until it was picked up by one Brad Pitt, who decided to produce the film and star as Pine. As Cornwell explained, though, Brad’s version ‘suffered the same fate. It’s actually a solid script, but it just didn’t give you the depth of character’ (which is, of course, one of the main plus points for the Beeb’s roomy six-part miniseries). Pitt went on to play a very different sort of secret agent in Mr and Mrs Smith, where he would meet his future wife Angelina Jolie.
And as for another twist in The Night Manager saga? Paramount had a competitor in their original bid to option the book in the form of Hugh Laurie. The actor and comic eventually went on to play Richard Roper in the BBC adaptation, but has previously revealed that he had ‘rather arrogantly dreamed of the possibility of playing the character of Pine,’ joking ‘I have had to sit back now and watch Tom Hiddleston be virile and charming – and it’s galling to watch.’
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