The drama series features 102 characters and Kosminsky began casting the other parts in October 2013. He had managed to distil 1,000 pages of the novels into six hours, using prose so sensitively. When I saw Peter Straughan's script, only a first draft, I couldn't believe what I was reading. I have a sense that Hilary Mantel wanted that immediacy. It is about the politics of despotism, and how you function around an absolute ruler. Peter Kosminsky, the director of the series, said: This is a first for me. BBC Two controller Janice Hadlow said it was 'very fortunate to have the rights' to the two novels and called Wolf Hall 'a great contemporary novel'.

According to The Guardian £7 million was to be spent on the adaptation. On 23 August 2012, BBC Two announced several new commissions, one of which was Wolf Hall. Thomas Arnold as Hans Holbein the Younger.

James Larkin as Master Treasurer FitzWilliam.

Aimee-Ffion Edwards as Elizabeth Barton.

It proceeds through Cromwell's own rise to political power, and ends with the execution of Anne Boleyn. The action opens at a point in Cromwell's career where his master, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, is about to fall from power because of his failure to secure a marriage annulment for King Henry VIII of England. The series centres on the character of Thomas Cromwell, a lawyer who has risen from humble beginnings. The series was a critical success and received eight nominations at the 67th Primetime Emmy Awards and three nominations at the 73rd Golden Globe Awards, winning for Best Miniseries or Television Film. It was reported in 2022 that a second series, covering the final novel in the trilogy, was in pre-production, with Mark Rylance and director Peter Kosminsky returning. Wolf Hall was first broadcast in April 2015 in the United States on PBS and in Australia on BBC First. The six-part series is an adaptation of two of Hilary Mantel's novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, a fictionalised biography documenting the rapid rise to power of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII through to the death of Sir Thomas More, followed by Cromwell's success in freeing the king of his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Wolf Hall is a British television serial first broadcast on BBC Two in January 2015.

Bbc bring up the bodies