‘The Night Manager’: A Cloak-and-Dagger Masterpiece

Meet the new Hugh Laurie: the World’s Most Evil Man, living large in a Mallorca palace with an entourage of guards, servants and an oft-naked blonde consort. By day, Laurie’s Richard Roper is a respectable tycoon, one of those jet-setting wheeler-and-dealer types who give philanthropic speeches about saving the refugees. By night, he presides over a black-market gunrunning empire, or as he puts it with his roguish grin, “We do a little swashbuckling now and then.”

Hugh Laurie makes the perfect gentleman villain on The Night Manager, the excellent AMC six-part miniseries updating John Le Carre’s 1993 spy novel. After his stint on Veep as Julia Louis Dreyfus’ slimeball running mate, Laurie has now conquered the bad-guy phase of his brilliant career. He’s part Bond nemesis, part the Most Interesting Man in the World, and he waltzes away with The Night Manager, making it the model of how to modernize the old-school spy thriller.

Tom Hiddleston — Loki from The Avengers — plays Jonathan Pine, the British spy who’s out to bring Laurie down, going deep cover in his criminal empire. He’s a British soldier who’s left the Iraq war zones behind to adopt a new identity as the night manager at a posh Cairo hotel. He’s looking to bury his violent past and live a very English life of rules and routine — until Cairo goes up in flames, in the midst of the Arab Spring. He tries to keep his guests pampered, drunk and clueless despite the riots in the streets outside. A little burning and shooting doesn’t faze this man; after walking through explosions on his way to the hotel, he shrugs, “I’ve seen worse.” However, when one of his guests turns out to be a seductive lady spy, that does weaken him in the knees a bit, especially since she can see right through his disguise. “I want one of your many selves to sleep with me tonight,” she purrs. “You can choose which one.”