Mark Rylance took a “significant” pay cut along with other members of the Wolf Hall team to get the second series made, the director Peter Kosminsky has said.
The BBC drama, based on Hilary Mantel’s final novel in her epic Tudor trilogy, returned last year with Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.
The original series, first aired in 2015, won Baftas for best drama series, was nominated for multiple Emmys and picked up the best limited TV series award at the Golden Globes.
In a submission to MPs in the culture, media and sport committee, for their UK film and quality television inquiry, Kosminsky wrote he offered Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light to “each streamer”, and they turned it down.
He added: “It was only possible to begin production when the producer, the writer [Peter Straughan], the director [Kosminsky] and the leading actor [Rylance] all gave up a significant proportion of their fees.
“We had shepherded the series through a 10-year development process but, in the end, it was necessary for us to work for very little to get the show made.”
Kosminsky also cited the experience of ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office, which made more people aware of subpostmasters being wrongfully prosecuted, teetering “on the brink of not making it to screen” after a number of its actors took pay cuts to make the show.
He called the finance of public service broadcasters (PSBs), which include ITV, BBC, Channel 4, and Channel 5, “insufficient to make high-end TV drama in the inflated cost environment created here by the streamers”.
Kosminsky also cited research by Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television (Pact), which found there were 15 TV dramas that “have been green-lit by the UK PSBs but are currently unable to proceed” because of cost.
He added: “What do all these programmes have in common? Their subject matter is of particular interest, perhaps of particular cultural significance, to a UK audience. But they are not seen to have ‘legs’ – not likely to appeal to an American audience.”
Kosminsky called for making 5% of streaming income part of a UK “cultural fund” that would finance high-end drama “of specific interest to UK audiences but which doesn’t necessarily have cross-border appeal”.
“A British TV [body], with its self-financing cultural fund, would be brought into existence entirely to address this market failure. Its criterion wouldn’t be profit, it would be excellence,” he said.
