“Seduction will always be a strategy. You can threaten someone to get the truth, or you can seduce them,” the “Loki” star says of Jonathan Pine’s espionage tactics.

Tom Hiddleston discusses his male ‘seduction’ storyline in The Night Manager: ‘It should always be fluid’

"Seduction will always be a strategy. You can threaten someone to get the truth, or you can seduce them," the "Loki" star says of Jonathan Pine's espionage tactics.

By Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel is a news writer at **. He began writing for EW in 2022.

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February 2, 2026 9:00 a.m. ET

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Tom Hiddleston, Camila Morrone, and Diego Calva in 'The Night Manager' season 2. Credit:

Des Willie/Prime

**This article contains spoilers for *The Night Manager* season 2, episodes 1-6.**

- Tom Hiddleston reflects on his "seduction" dynamic with Diego Calva in *The Night Manager* season 2: "Inevitably, there was going to be a charge."

- Showrunner David Farr describes the men's on-screen relationship as "erotic": "This is extraordinary attraction."

- Hiddleston says the dynamic "should always be fluid."

Tom Hiddleston shares an electrifying chemistry with Diego Calva in *The Night Manager* season 2 — and the *Loki* star says that he wanted the duo's on-screen dynamic to be ever-changing.

"He is a truly phenomenal actor, with such range and depth and sensitivity and complexity," Hiddleston says of Calva during a conversation with **. "As a human being, he's absolutely lovely, open, and honest."

The second season of the espionage series sees Jonathan Pine (Hiddleston) go undercover in Colombia to infiltrate a mysterious enterprise headed by Teddy Dos Santos (Calva), a local crime lord who turns out to be the illegitimate son of English arms dealer Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie).

Diego Calva in 'The Night Manager' season 2.

As Jonathan and Teddy learn more of the truth about each other, their relationship constantly evolves, bouncing between friendly banter that borders on flirtation, violent rage, and unusual emotional intimacy.

"As an acting partner, I couldn't have asked for something more rewarding or more engaging," Hiddleston says. "Every scene felt different. Every scene was a new exchange. I think it's a really interesting relationship that David Farr created in the writing, and I loved playing it out with Diego."

Farr, the series' showrunner, says that the two men begin the show as "the hunter and the hunted" after Teddy kills several of Pine's allies. "Pine is after him — he's done terrible things," the screenwriter says. "Then it changes radically, I think, in episode 2, quite early on, where there's already a strange attraction, which Pine is susceptible to in many ways when he's in that strange, operational hunter mode."

Tom Hiddleston in 'The Night Manager' season 2.

The duo's first breakthrough scene occurs near the end of that second episode after Teddy drugs Pine. "In that first scene in the swimming pool, Pine is completely open," Hiddleston says. "He's just consumed a cocktail of toxic chemicals, which has left him without any physical resistance. And so lying in Teddy's lap, he can't move. It did feel very intimate in the playing."

"This is extraordinary attraction between the two of them, which I think is a flirtation — it's a seduction going both ways," Farr opines. "They're both playing each other as well, but I don't think either of them are in control of it. We really wanted to explore that and enjoy that."

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Hiddleston also brings up the topic of seduction while discussing Calva's Colombian heritage. "The context we're in is not Western Europe and it's not the Middle East, like the first series," he explains."Teddy would have a different way of moving through the world, a different way of seducing, a different way of inviting, a different way of threatening or applying pressure."

Hiddleston says that he wanted his character to become more "provocative" in a later scene at a restaurant in Cartagena, which leads to a tense interrogation aboard a ship. "On the boat, it's very, very violent, and violence itself is a kind of physical intimacy," Hiddleston says. "And the money gets transferred and they go off for arepas, and they go to church and suddenly that intimacy is transmutated or transformed into something almost they could both be sort of washed or cleansed of this ugliness that took place hours before."

Diego Calva and Tom Hiddleston in 'The Night Manager' season 2.

Once Pine acknowledges that he knows Teddy's true parentage, Hiddleston says that the two men become "bonded by the unveiling of these terrible secrets" as Calva's character reflects on his past. "And as in all espionage stories, in the game of secrets and lies in a dance, the dance is seduction and betrayal," he says. "So seduction will always be a strategy. You can threaten someone to get the truth, or you can seduce them. And I think John Le Carré always understood that the latter is more effective. Inevitably, there was going to be a charge."

Once Roper re-enters the show in a twist at the end of episode 3, the dynamic changes again.

"I was always aware that as soon as Roper pitched up, that relationship would then shift," Farr explains. "Somehow the erotic — let's call it that, loosely speaking — would suddenly not work in the same way. It was a realization, rather than the choice, that it just simply can't work because Pine's really deep fascination is with Roper. And as soon as that arrives, he reframes Teddy as something very different."

"We knew that there should be something that never felt like it was set in their dynamic," Hiddleston says. "It should always be fluid. It would always be moving depending on where both of them were in the story."

Tom Hiddleston in 'The Night Manager' season 2.

Both Hiddleston and Farr say that the two men end the season in a more fraternal relationship. "By the end, I think the charge is actually that they are brothers," Hiddleston says. "And having shared all this physicality — I mean, on the boat, Teddy's men are violent with Pine, and he then asks Teddy to play-act an extraordinary sequence of violence in the interrogation scene in episode 6 — and the two vulnerable men staring down this impossible scenario, and their intimacy is almost the sanctity of brotherhood."

"In episode 6, there's a genuine, deep, strange love between the two of them," Farr says. "The relationship shifts into almost brotherly care. I don't think anyone including me or Tom or our director Georgi Banks-Davies knows exactly what it is, but it has to shift. I don't think either of them really fully understand, but it is a catastrophe for Pine that what happens in episode 6, which for me is very interesting if challenging for the next and final season."

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Teddy ultimately dies at the hand of his own father, and Pine also loses one of his closest allies from season 1: Olivia Colman's Angela Burr, who pulled him into the crusade against Roper in the first place, dies mysteriously in the episode's closing moments.

Tom Hiddleston in 'The Night Manager' season 2.

Hiddleston says he felt "profound shock" when he learned of the characters' demises.

"I find Teddy's death deeply tragic because he's so close to the belonging and the acceptance he so dearly needs, and he's on the side of the angels, I think, by then," the actor says. "So for his end to come in that shape, it's, it's actually unthinkable and it felt very uneasy even to shoot that scene for all of us. It felt incredibly unpleasant. Of course, we know we're only acting, but still, it wasn't easy to do."

The deaths will force Pine to operate under a lonelier status quo in the upcoming third and final season. "Pine is now completely alone, cut adrift and abandoned, and anyone who understood who he is or how he came to be — his experience, his pain, his complexity, his mission — is gone," Hiddleston says. "Pine is in very bad shape indeed, physically and spiritually. And what that does to his spirit will be very interesting."

*The Night Manager* season 2 is now streaming on Prime Video.

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