Mark Rylance: I like stories where people change

Mark Rylance

Actor Mark Rylance, who plays English lawyer Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall -- based on an eponymous historical novel -- says he enjoys taking up characters that undergo change. Known primarily as a theatre and film actor, what made him want to be part of this television drama? "My wife had read the books and said they were very good. And the scripts that I saw initially were very good. So, I hadn't read the books, but the scripts were the things that inspired me," Rylance said in a statement to IANS.

"I didn't really know about the depth of the character at that point. But there was a lot of change in it. I like stories where people change, where the characters that I play change. And, this character changes a lot. I think that was it," he added. Wolf Hall airs in India on Zee Cafe as part of BBC First content block. The show features Rylance as Cromwell.

Preparing for a role of this magnitude involved reading the books. "When you have such fantastic detailed books behind the script, it makes sense to use them and I read them twice. I'd check each scene in the script with the book. "Sometimes it's a few different scenes in the books that have been put together to make a scene. The book, in particular, is so much about what Cromwell is thinking, so I really made a study of that," he added.

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