Before ‘The Crown,’ Elizabeth Debicki Stole This Show From Tom Hiddleston

The Big Picture

• The Night Manager, a 2016 adaptation of John le Carré’s book of the same name, challenges spy genre stereotypes, specifically ones about women.
• Six years before she played Princess Diana in The Crown, Elizabeth Debicki’s performance in The Night Manager showcases her talent and proves she was a star on the rise.
• Debicki’s turn is sensitive and vulnerable and deserves the same level of award-winning recognition that her co-stars earned.

Adaptation is tricky. Retroactive adaptation is an even thornier beast. In 2016, director Susanne Bier and writer David Farr brought espionage novelist John le Carré‘s 1993 book The Night Manager to screens for the first time. An unfairly excellent miniseries, The Night Manager out Bond-s James Bond in its neo-noir sleekness. In true John le Carré fashion, The Night Manager‘s psychological stakes are harrowing and the thriller tension electric. It’s an award-winning star vehicle for Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, and Olivia Colman, the first two playing against type to excellent effect; Colman, as is her wont, dominates the screen with enviable ease.

Outside that trio yet integral to its success are the contributions of the non-award-winning (for this role) Elizabeth Debicki. Six years before she would embody Diana, Princess of Wales in The Crown and become a household name, her performance in The Night Manager is peerless — and she had considerable peers. Now a Golden Globe winner for The Crown, The Night Manager proves Debicki, hovering on the cusp of a breakthrough, was already a star. And in a twist worthy of John le Carré but unlike him, Debicki’s character isn’t “just” the femme fatale or damsel in distress. In adapting The Night Manager, Bier and Farr upended the spy genre’s limiting female stereotypes, some of which le Carré helped proliferate.

‘The Night Manager’ Turns a Stereotype on Its Head

John le Carré’s work favors the male perspective. Likewise, The Night Manager series centers on vengeful protagonist Jonathan Pine (Hiddleston), a former soldier and luxury hotel owner who infiltrates notorious arms dealer Richard Roper’s (Laurie) inner circle. Roper, frequently referred to as “the worst man in the world,” caused the death of Pine’s lover. Naturally, Pine’s rage makes his vendetta personal, not patriotic; such is the trope. Introduced through Pine’s eyes, Elizabeth Debicki’s Jed Marshall looks like nothing more than the villain’s girlfriend. Pine studies her at length, silently drawing as many dismissive suppositions about her as the audience. Aloof, blonde, and statuesque, Jed could be a trophy mistress who’s too draft to realize how her older boyfriend acquires his wealth. Perhaps she’s a gloriously dressed femme fatale with no moral qualms about her position. She certainly doesn’t hesitate to bathe in public. With the camera playing proxy for Pine’s eyes, it’s textbook male gaze; Jed strips her dress off, and one almost hears a collective, exasperated sigh at another trope’s continued pervasiveness.

Once Jed has her first scene alone, those labels fall away. Episode 2 opens with a carefully curated ritual, that of Jed emerging from the shower, stoically applying perfect makeup, and taking a tiny white tablet. An unexpected call from her mother demolishes the illusion, which also reveals The Night Manager‘s sleight of hand. Jed is quietly, and utterly, miserable. The money she makes as Roper’s mistress provides for her son, the one she had at 17 years old, left in her sister’s care, and whom she misses like a severed limb. Roper doesn’t know because that didn’t come with the package deal. There are rules to this precarious life. Still, Jed can’t help but ask about her son. Desperately trying not to ruin her fresh makeup with tears, Elizabeth Debicki reveals a vulnerable underbelly as battered as a leaf in a hurricane. It’s a fragile state of self-loathing exacerbated by her mother making sure Jed knows she is, quote, “nothing but a dirty whore.” In answer, Jed dry swallows the rest of her pills. She jumps when someone knocks, and the mask reassembles. This woman is barely holding on, scrambling for purchase with the slightest disruption. Everything outside the privacy of Jed’s bedroom is a performance.

By deliberately adjusting John le Carré’s text, The Night Manager deconstructs a prevailing espionage stereotype. Jed’s autonomy might be limited, but she’s what happens when someone gives the throwaway love interest a voice, perspective, and breadth. Debicki loved the character’s humanized complexity, telling Vogue: “In the spy genre you often get these women who are stereotypes […] but unfortunately, with not a lot behind the surface. The persona that Jed feels the need to be is sort of like a Bond Girl: always glamorous, always looking effortless, always looking really chic, never having a care in the world. It’s not realistic, but to keep up with Roper she has to be this woman. She plays the role very well, or tries hard, and so she’s repressing a lot—who she really is. And that schism I found really intriguing.” Susanne Bier agreed: “Yes, [Jed’s] a girlfriend,” she said in the same interview, “but she’s a troubled, secretive character. The idea was to treat every single character as a spy, even if they aren’t. Because if you start treating every person as a spy, you embrace the fact that they all have secrets and they are never completely straight with one another.”

‘The Night Manager’ Plays to Elizabeth Debicki’s Strengths

That said, Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie’s reverse cat-and-mouse game takes up most of The Night Manager. As Jed realizes Roper’s corruption and joins Pine’s cause, she falls into a dangerous romance with Pine. The important thing about retroactively including a woman’s perspective within a male-centric story’s structure is whether Jed remains an emotional player throughout. She does; Debicki infuses every glance with layer upon layer. She’s watchful and guarded to the point of mercurial. Among her many gifts is her intense sensitivity, which often unspools through her eyes: Debicki’s Princess Diana conveys a legacy of pain with her lowered head and raised gaze. Jed hides for different reasons. However, once we know she’s surviving tooth-and-nail behind her mask, that’s a codebreaker for the audience. We understand who this woman is.

Or, at least, we understand what Jed is willing and able to show. She’s adept at the game’s rules because it’s become habitual, but protecting her son is no game. Debicki told the BBC, “What I think that Jed has managed to do for the sake of her own sanity, survival and mental health is to block out the fact that she’s suspicious and attempt to live in a forced ignorance.” Jed never says this straightforwardly. She skirts the edges, especially after Pine catches her sobbing naked in bed. “I don’t care who sees me naked,” she tells him. “I care who sees me crying.” Pine saw the forbidden Jed, who’s vulnerable as an exposed wound to sepsis. She’s both survivor and victim, a woman defined by her constant tightrope walk between identities. She recognizes another performer in Pine, and that disrupts her world. Cracks emerge in her facade, and her pain leaks through.

As Jed falls for Pine and her life fractures, Debicki’s body language surrenders by inches: touching her lips after Jonathan kisses her, an act she doesn’t reciprocate. Her neutral expression melting into an unaffected smile. Betraying Roper starts with a still look of cutting fury and ends with the wide-eyed stare of skittish prey. Across six episodes, Debicki transforms from a reserved Grecian statue into a remorseful, lost human being. The actress told Digital Spy that the miniseries format gave them that freedom: “There’s every possibility that in a two-hour version of The Night Manager,” Debicki said, “Jed would not be able to exist as fully as she does in a television show – because we have time to do that.”

‘The Night Manager’ Wouldn’t Work Without Elizabeth Debicki

This feminine focus likely came from Susanne Bier, an award-winning Danish filmmaker and part of the country’s Dogme 95 movement, which prized realism. The production team emphasizes Jed’s interiority with camera angles and editing beats. Debicki said of Bier: “Susanne is the best sort of director to work with in the sense that she pushes you to investigate parts of the character and parts of yourself or the scene in a way that you did not even think you were capable of. She’s always searching for the truth of each character.”

Bier applies this tonality to The Night Manager‘s full cast. Everyone understood the assignment and took home gold statutes to prove it. Paradoxically, that makes Elizabeth Debicki’s lack of recognition more surprising. The industry caught up with her, but The Night Manager proves it was a delayed arrival. Even paired against Tom Hiddleston at the top of his fame, Hugh Laurie’s mini-renaissance, and a rising Olivia Colman, it’s Debicki who carries The Night Manager‘s weighted, flinty soul on her shoulders. Once she’s seized the story’s heart, she refuses to let go until it sets her free. How appropriate for a humanized “Bond Girl,” a woman who’s far more than the sum of our assumptions.

The Night Manager is available to stream on Prime Video.

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