Posted in: Amazon Studios, TV | Tagged: The Night Manager

The Night Manager Production Manager on Season 2 Planning & Stunts

The Night Manager production designer Victor Molero discusses Season 2, loving the spy genre, mapping out difficult sequences, and more.

Production designer Victor Molero has been active in the entertainment industry for 30 years, initially rising to prominence in Spain. Some of his best-known work includes Paramount+'s A Gentleman from Moscow, IFC's Savage Grace (2008), and Sony's Talk to Her (2002). His latest is the BBC and Prime Video hit The Night Manager, the spy thriller series starring Tom Hiddleston, based on the John le Carré novel of the same name, taking over for Tom Burton, who did season one. The series follows Jonathan Pine (Hiddleston), who is the night manager of a luxury hotel in Cairo and a former British soldier. He's recruited by Angela Burr (Olivia Colman), the manager of a Foreign Office task force investigating illegal arms sales, to infiltrate the inner circle of arms dealer Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie), which picks up four years after the season one finale. Molero spoke to Bleeding Cool about the David Farr series, the amount of work that went into post-production from wrapping filming in December 2024 to the recent release on Prime Video, how working on spy thrillers compares to other genres, and his most difficult sequences to plan and film.

The Night Manager Production Designer Victor Molero on Making Time for VFX Before Season Two's Release, Spy Genre Work and Memorable Sequences

When filming finished back in December 2024, there was a significant gap between production wrapping and release. Were there a lot of things going on in post-production that caused the delay, or was it planned that way?

Not in this case. Normally, the work I've done in the last five years, several size productions like this one, always takes at least one year. Sometimes, it takes more because, for example, in some productions I did two, three years ago, like A Gentleman in Moscow, that took more than a year, because there were some parts that were completely digital. Visual effects always take more [time]. One year ago, during this gap, I was in contact with director Georgi [Banks-Davies], and the most difficult thing was the story, which was very complex.

The most difficult part was trying to put all the pieces together and to convey that to the audience. They were working with several editors, and you may have noticed in the series that there is a lot of work behind the editing. Georgi brought some ideas to the show, and of course, when you have the tool on a script, and it's a good script…sometimes when you put it in editing, you need to clean the ideas to make it understandable. That's why I think it took so long, and the good thing is they had the time to do it.

In this case, there weren't many digital works around. We did it several times, for example, in the first episode ("201"), the last hotel, when you see the explosion, we couldn't find this location, because it was at Costa Brava near Barcelona, in Catalonia. We couldn't find the idea of the hotel…very French in that area, which will be like in the middle of a cliff, so I found a block apartment in an amazing strategic seaside place, and I proposed to the production to create some extensions in the building to make it look as the director wanted, but no more than that. We have an explosion, but not a big one.

What do you like about working in this spy thriller genre, and how do you compare a project like The Night Manager to your other work?

I worked on a TV series a long time ago for the BBC, set in the Cold War, that was called Legacy (2013), and I understood the stories, all these characters, and I liked the idea of all these characters working undercover, and everything is a lie. I found it interesting working with that. It can give you these special ideas working with the space, because everything is undercover and is like a classic noir in a way.

With John le Carré's stories having that kind of cinematic noir was interesting. It was like this Humphrey Bogart movie, a long time ago, and I love that. Sometimes, the story and scenes give you the possibility to apply that in the images. For example, in the proxy Britco Hotel in the first episode, I tried to try to achieve this kind of femme fatale, Laura Bacall type character, because you can trust her because she never shows herself. With that in mind, I used an amazing location we found in central London. I don't remember the station. It was very close to Paddington. There are many small hotels, so we did the set completely with wallpaper and everything. I put in the window a kind of red neon as a veil for the character, so it was this kind of element giving the audience a kind of flair or a flavor of this genre, like the noir style. It was a way as well to show the character with different layers.

What was the most difficult sequence for you to kind of put together for the season?

There were many within the six episodes, but I think the most difficult one was to find La Estancia, which appears in the fourth episode (204). It was a very difficult location even before I arrived at the project. The producer was looking not only in Colombia, but also in Brazil. I think they were in Venezuela because it was difficult to find this big house in the middle of nowhere, completely isolated. A lot was going on from the fourth to the sixth episode because it's Roper's (Hugh Laurie) house.

After a lot of work searching this location, we found this abandoned "hacienda," which is what Colombians call this kind of home, that belonged to that period where all the Narcos were buying these huge houses in the middle of nowhere to be covered. We needed to prep the whole house, because there was this main character, who appears in every area of the house, so we did a big renovation at this home that was very close to the jungle. The heat was pretty unbearable, and we did this job under difficult conditions.

Another difficulty we found was this location called the Rossignol Hotel, which you saw in the first episode (201), which was also difficult to find. From the apartment building to the hotel, we planned the sequence with Tom's character running from the explosion, which was also difficult. We needed to show this as one location, but needed to use three different locations [for the sequence]. That was very complicated, because we had to make sure the interiors matched the building's exterior. To do that, we need to build at a [soundstage], the corridor where we saw the explosion, and put everything together, which was a kind of puzzle that was difficult and took time.

The season two finale of The Night Manager, which also stars Alistair Petrie, Douglas Hodge, Michael Nardone, Noah Jupe, Diego Calva, Camila Morrone, Paul Chahidi, Hayley Squires, Indira Varma, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Slavko Sobin, Unax Ugalde, Alberto Ammann, Diego Sandos, and Cristina Umaña Rojas, streams February 1st on Prime Video.

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