Morrone surely hopes for similar. “I watch a lot of TV. I love TV,” says the Los Angeles-born actor, 28, in her hotel room, post shoot. She was still a teenager, not even acting yet (“I was in the womb almost,” she jokes), when the first series aired, but watched it in one sitting when her chance to audition came up. “I’m supposed to be doing my lines and instead I’m binge-watching all six episodes, which ended up paying off in the long run,” she says with a grin. “I was taken aback. It’s few and far between that you get that level of sophistication in a TV show.”
Which is to say, there are sky-high expectations for the sequel. “Ignore everything that’s come before,” is how the new director Georgi Banks-Davies (who won a Bafta for Sky Atlantic’s I Hate Suzie) has dealt with the pressure. She knows her creation will invite comparison, which is “why you can’t try to reproduce”, she says. “You can’t try to recreate magic. You just have to follow your instincts. It’s like, I don’t want to copy a great Picasso, because it’s going to look shit.”
We pick up the action 10 years on: Roper is gone, in body at least, Burr is allegedly retired and Pine – now going by the name Alex Goodwin – is in London, haunted by the events of a decade ago, living alone with a cat. He is still, as Hiddleston puts it, “hiding behind a toolkit of manners and politeness and charm”, still working a graveyard shift, though now as part of MI6’s unglamorous Night Owl Unit, providing nocturnal surveillance of the city’s top hotels looking for high-powered crooks. But, despite his calm protestations otherwise, Pine is a bomb ready to explode. When a cohort from Roper’s old gang resurfaces, the touchpaper is lit. He goes back undercover, heading to Colombia, into the orbit of Morrone’s mysterious Miamian shipping broker Roxana, and Calva’s Colombian arms dealer Teddy dos Santos – Roper’s “true disciple”.
A decade on, Pine is still “hiding behind a toolkit of manners and politeness and charm”, says Hiddleston.
Scott Trindle
