Wolf Hall director says Mark Rylance took ‘significant’ pay cut after streamers rejected series

Wolf Hall star Mark Rylance took a “significant” pay cut for series two after the BBC drama was rejected by the big streamers.

Peter Kosminsky, the series’ director, gave evidence to Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee this week as he revealed how sacrifices had been made to give viewers a second run of the popular show, which aired in December.

It comes amid years of cuts and clawbacks across the British TV industry as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Apple TV+ enjoy record success.

In the written submission Kosminsky revealed that production had begun on the Golden Globe-winning series only after “the producer, the writer, the director and the leading actor all gave up a significant proportion of their fees”.

Rylance plays Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, a series based on the book by Hilary Mantel.

“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,” Kosminksy wrote. He suggested that streaming service giants did not want to invest in British storytelling.

“Though there are exceptions, it is not currently part of the streamers’ general financial model to co-produce with UK PSBs. They prefer to wholly own a project.”

Kosminsky suggested a model in which the companies would offer five per cent of their cultural revenue, which would be transferred to a cultural fund for British content. He pointed to similar schemes that are currently in place in France and Germany.

“The streamers are perhaps the ultimate manifestation of a free market in television. They have made some extraordinary, mould-breaking programmes – turning high-end TV drama into the medium of choice for ‘A-List’ talent, partially usurping the feature film and breaking the unhealthy, snobbish divide between theatrical and television filmmaking,” he said.

“But an unintended consequence of this explosion of creativity has been a market failure – a failure to fund the kind of drama, such as Mr Bates or Wolf Hall, that is of particular interest to a UK audience. Whilst these programmes will always be a minority of our output, they are also an essential part of it. And we are losing it. Blink and it will be gone – and our audiences will not thank us for it.”