A small-screen adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Booker-prize winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies will be coming to the BBC and PBS, reports the New York Times. Called Wolf Hall, the mini-series will be a Tudor-period costume drama starring Mark Rylance, the Tony-award winning actor and former artistic director of London’s Globe Theater. Rylance will play a fictionalized version of Thomas Cromwell, the masterful advisor to King Henry VIII and the center of Mantel’s books. Filming is scheduled to start early next spring, the Times reports, and the miniseries will air on BBC Two in the UK and on PBS Masterpiece in the US in 2015.
Both 2009’s Wolf Hall and 2012‘s Bring Up The Bodies, won the Man Booker Prize, making Mantel the first woman to win the award twice. The sweeping story has been distilled into six one-hour segments by Peter Straughan, who wrote the screenplay for 2011’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The series will be directed by Peter Kosminsky, who also directed the critically lauded movie adaptation of Janet Fitch’s best-selling coming-of-age novel White Oleander in 2002.
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