He was fantastic in this. He does best with parts that let him have a smarmy charm.Quoting Winston* (view post)
EDIT: No major spoilers but this is after seeing all six episodes.
Overall, I'm not sure how I felt about The Night Manager. There were enough great elements that it's worth watching, but plenty of other elements I found frustrating. You can't fault the cast, though-- everyone was perfect. Olivia Coleman was stupendous. And the last two or so hours were pretty thrilling.
But.... but. There was not enough story to stretch over six hours, not by a long shot. There were long stretches of nothing in particular happening.
Also, there's a reason why most spy stories have a trained spy as the lead character; because untrained people make terrible spies. Jonathan does almost no spy work for the entirety of the story; he is passive passive passive. Most of the time he hangs around silently waiting for seven-year-old children to tell him how to break into secure rooms, or essential strangers confess their marital problems (with a side bonus of What Illegal Crap my Husband is Doing) to him. He is told he will have to behave like "the worst person in the world" in order to fit into Roper's world but we mostly see him swimming, dancing, eating ice cream, being polite to people, and smoothing over misunderstandings. Oh, and lurking... he lurks a lot.
I know Hiddleston is brimming with charm but I just wasn't seeing it in this character. His butt looked great in the butt shots, but other than that pretty much anyone could have played this part.
Roper fares a little bit better, because although he is repeatedly called "the worst person in the world" for 80% of the running time he's just chilling at the beach, playing with his kid, and having gentle domestic squabbles. Laurie, though, can really bring just the slightest hint of menace to these proceedings, and his gradual moral strip-tease into a villain plays out beautifully. Plus, we keep seeing clips of what I assume was his TED talk on "How to Be Evil" and that is amusing to me.
My final impression was kind of that I couldn't understand why so much time, money, and talent was thrown at a story this slight. Not that it was bad, I just felt like it could have been better.