Tom Hiddleston Breaks Down Angela’s Season 2 Betrayal Over Roper’s Survival (Exclusive)

[Warning: The video above and the article below contain MAJOR spoilers for The Night Manager Season 2 Episode 4.]

The Night Manager‘s plot continues to thicken as Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) finally uncovers the betrayal Angela Burr (Olivia Colman) was forced to enact, explaining Richard Roper’s (Hugh Laurie) inexplicable rise from the dead.

After observing the big bad in action amid new deal-making in Colombia, Pine sent a photograph of Roper to Angela, asking for an explanation as to why she lied. It turns out that when they traveled together to identify Roper’s body in the Season 2 premiere, years prior to the current timeline, he wasn’t actually dead.

Meeting at the airport, Angela shares with Pine that Roper had surprised her in her hotel room the day before the body identification was set to occur. According to Angela, Roper threatened to kill her daughter if she didn’t lie to Pine and quit working at the River. Needless to say, she was scared silly enough to relocate to France.

“One of the overarching and unifying themes of all John le Carré‘s work is betrayal. Trust, betrayal, they are in a cycle…  to gain someone’s trust [inevitably entails] betrayal. There is no center to a human being, and risk is attractive, and…  these are people who deal in secrets and lies,” Hiddleston tells TV Insider.

And in this instance, it was Angela who delivered the crushing blow, which Hiddleston points out, “[le Carré] always stressed that the relationship between agent and agent runner was so close that it was… almost maternal because there is only one other human being in the world who understands what you’re going through, and bringing down Richard Roper was a project they shared and a project they risked their lives for.”

Along with Angela admitting to lying, she also shares that Rex Mayhew (Douglas Hodge) was in on the secret before he died. “I think it shakes him and his sense of what’s real and what’s not to his very core,” Hiddleston continues. “The betrayal is enormous, it’s a shock like I couldn’t even really fathom, so it was a thrill to try to perform it,” the actor adds.  “I think there would be a profound rage and disillusionment,” Hiddleston continues.

Meanwhile, Pine may have Roper in his sights, but Pine is in Teddy’s (Diego Calva) sights when he’s dropped off at the airport and instructed to leave Colombia. But what is it about Pine that fascinates the Roper men so much? Calva notes, “I think in a different universe, Roper would prefer Pine as his son [more] than Teddy… There’s something weirdly paternal with Roper too… In our case, I think we’re kind of like orphan brothers,” the actor continues.

As Episode 4 of the captivating second season plays out, Teddy is forced to reveal the identity of an investor who duped him, not realizing that Roper knows Pine all too well. “This sounds like the most perverse idea, but Pine and Roper both feel relief at their re-meeting again,” Hiddleston says of the mutual realization that they’re once again caught up in a metaphorical tango. “They are defined by the other… The dragon slayer is defined by the dragon, and vice versa,” Hiddelston adds.

Find out what happens when their worlds come crashing back together again, and watch the full video interview with Hiddleston and Calva above.

The Night Manager, Season 2, New Episodes, Sundays, Prime Video & BBC