The Night Manager Built Colombia Across 3 Continents
Have you ever constructed an entire jungle at the last minute?
[Warning: Some spoilers ahead for Season 2 of The Night Manager.]
For production designer Victor Molero, working on Season 2 of The Night Manager wasn’t about constructing a world so much as assembling one in between an almost ludicrous number of flights.
“We spent four months traveling between two continents,” Molero says. “U.K., Spain, Colombia… Every 10 days, we were on a plane. It felt like a puzzle.”
In Season 2 of The Night Manager, former hotelier-turned-intelligence operative Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) is pulled back into the shadows as the collapse of Richard Roper’s (Hugh Laurie) empire gives way to an even more elusive global arms network, stretching from London to the depths of Colombia. As Pine embeds himself among new power brokers operating in the aftermath of Roper’s reign, old moral lines blur and personal costs mount, forcing him to confront whether dismantling the machinery of corruption is worth becoming part of it.
That puzzle had a singular goal: convince viewers they were firmly in Colombia, even when much of what they were seeing was shot in London, Barcelona, and the Canary Islands. The feat required not just logistical precision, but a deep emotional and cultural understanding of place, one Molero insisted on grounding in firsthand experience.
Before Europe doubled for South America, the production traveled to Colombia itself, a decision Molero calls essential. “It was my first time there,” he says. “Understanding the culture was more important than understanding the language.” For Molero, Colombia wasn’t the narco-mythologized version often portrayed onscreen, but a country defined by evolution and extremes, lush greenery and through cities, hills rising abruptly behind streets, and a vibrancy that demanded respect rather than cliché.
That respect became the foundation of his design language. Color, in particular, became a quiet cheat code. Drawing on years of reference material, Molero assembled mood boards that served as a visual lingua franca for the entire crew. “Images are the best code we have,” he says. “It’s how you communicate intention across departments.”
Nowhere was that intention clearer than in Teddy’s hilltop home, a modernist mansion perched above the landscape. While the house carries the expected opulence of The Night Manager universe—recalling the Majorca villa of Season 1—Molero resisted designing it as a simple display of wealth. Instead, he approached it as a psychological portrait.
“Teddy is a tortured character,” Molero says. Raised in a convent, shaped by absence and expectation, Teddy lives in a state of quiet austerity. His home reflects that inner life: minimal, restrained, almost monastic. In the bedroom, the design is reduced to its barest elements: a bed and a cross above it. The space subtly mirrors Jonathan Pine’s own ascetic existence in London, visually linking the two men long before they discover common ground.
That same character-first philosophy extended to Richard Roper’s hideaway, a sprawling, semi-abandoned mansion outside Bogotá. Unlike his sun-drenched Majorca palace, this house isn’t a place Roper would choose. Instead, it’s a golden cage that Molero and his team spent over a month transforming, repainting its massive exterior to camouflage it within the surrounding jungle and commissioning hand-painted interior murals.
“It was insanely hard work,” Molero says. High temperatures, relentless mosquitoes, and an exhausted crew pushed the production to its limits. At one breaking point, Molero found himself cooking tortillas in the kitchen just to lift morale. “It was the only thing I could do to help,” he says, laughing. The result, however, is one of the sets he’s most proud of—lush, unsettling, and deeply character-driven.
And then there was the jungle.
Originally planned to shoot in Colombia, the jungle sequences proved too dangerous and unpredictable. The solution? Build the entire jungle from scratch in the Canary Islands. At the very end of the schedule. “It was the last episodes, the most dramatic part of the story,” Molero says. “And suddenly we had to create a jungle.”
Working with an extensive greenery team, the production constructed a dense, controllable environment on a backlot, allowing for complex action beats, special effects, and night shoots. Details gleaned months earlier in Colombia paid off: the knowledge that jungle nights are wet, reflective, and heavy with atmosphere informed everything from plant choice to the constant misting of leaves. “The DOP was very happy,” Molero says. “The reflections on the greenery made everything look good.”
It’s that accumulation of lived detail that defines what production designers do in general and Molero in particular for The Night Manager. “Production designers have shallow knowledge of many things,” he says. “But we’re very curious. That’s what makes the job possible.”
By the time the final jungle took shape, Molero jokes he’d earned an unofficial degree in foliage. But onscreen, the illusion is seamless: Colombia feels present, textured, and real—no matter how many flights it took to get there.
Victor Molero is a production designer whose credits include A Gentleman in Moscow, Savage Grace, and The Irregulars.
They had me fooled because I swear I recognized parts of Cartagena. The show is so gorgeous (like the cast!)
Fantastic interview. Building an entire jungle environment at the end of production sounds likea nightmare but the detail work paid off brilliantly. I've worked on tight deadlines myself and the misting trick for reflections is genuis, those small touches often seperate passable from cinematic. Really dig how the character psychology drove the design choices rather than just flexing opulence.