‘The Night Manager’: ‘Humans’ Namsi Khan & ‘The Rook’s Francesca Gardiner Join Second Season Writers Room
EXCLUSIVE: The writers room for the secretive second season of The Night Manager is complete and it’s more gender balanced than it first appeared.
I understand that Humans and Black Mirror writer Namsi Khan and The Man In The High Castle writer Francesca Gardiner are joining British spy author Charles Cumming and up-and-coming British writer Matthew Orton in the room for the sophomore run of the BBC and AMC thriller.
Although the show has yet to be officially recommissioned, and there’s plenty of rumors as to what shape it will take and which stars will return, I hear that the foursome are in full swing, working on plots for the “slowly developing” drama.
Khan and Gardiner are both rising writers out of the UK. Khan recently wrote an episode of the third season of AMC and Channel sci-fi drama Humans and was part of the writers’ room for both Charlie Brooker’s Netflix dystopian thriller Black Mirror and Sky One’s buddy cop action drama Bulletproof. She is represented by Grandview and Independent Talent. Meanwhile, Gardiner, who is repped by 42mp, wrote the Kintsugi episode of Frank Spotnitz’s Amazon drama The Man In The High Castle and has been working on Starz and Liberty Global’s The Rook. She has also been involved in series such as Dustin Hoffman-fronted Italian drama Medici: Masters of Florence, Crossing Line, Transporter and Hunted.
This comes after it emerged earlier this week that Cumming, fresh from penning spy novel The Man Between, joined Orton, who recently wrote the script for MGM drama Operation Finale and is writing Reason Of State, a political thriller set in 10 Downing Street for Suburbicon producer Black Bear Pictures, for The Ink Factory-produced second season of the John Le Carré spy thriller.
This is despite the fact that Le Carré did not write a sequel to The Night Manager. The first series featured Tom Hiddleston as enigmatic Jonathan Pine, who goes undercover to expose billionaire arms dealer Richard Roper, played by Hugh Laurie. Hiddleston has also said he would consider appearing in a second series, but it’s unlikely the entire cast, which also featured Olivia Colman and Elizabeth Debicki, would return. For one, Tom Hollander’s Corky is no longer, having been killed by Jonathan Pine.
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