Who is Rex in The Night Manager? Douglas Hodge's character explained
If you've started watching series 2 of The Night Manager and you're wondering who the bloke in the three-piece suit is — that's Rex Mayhew, played by Douglas Hodge. He's a bigger deal in the story than he might first appear, and his fate sets the entire series in motion.
Who Rex is
Rex Mayhew is a senior British intelligence officer. In series 1, he appeared briefly as a Foreign Office official connected to Angela Burr's (Olivia Colman) operation against arms dealer Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie).
In series 2, set ten years later, Rex has become Jonathan Pine's (Tom Hiddleston) direct supervisor. Pine now leads a surveillance unit called the Night Owls, monitoring suspicious foreign guests at London hotels. Rex is his boss and, by all accounts, his friend.
Hodge has described Rex as a "dandy" — the sort of man who cycles to work in a three-piece suit. He's eccentric, old-school, and provides a thread of dry humour in an otherwise tense espionage plot.
What happens to Rex (spoilers)
Rex contacts Pine after spotting intelligence linking MI6 Chief Mayra Cavendish (Indira Varma) to a Colombian arms dealer named Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva). He arranges to meet Pine the following morning, saying he has something to show him.
Pine never makes it in time. On the way to Rex's house, he sees an ambulance heading in the same direction. Rex is dead. The official explanation: he took a handful of pills and washed them down with alcohol, alone in his barn while his wife was away. Ruled a suicide.
Pine doesn't buy it. The timing is too convenient — Rex had just uncovered a connection between a senior MI6 figure and an arms dealer, and he's dead before he can share it. Pine concludes it was murder, made to look like suicide.
Why Rex matters
Rex's death is the catalyst for the entire series 2 plot. It's what pushes Pine back into the field, sends him undercover in Colombia, and sets him on a collision course with Teddy Dos Santos — who turns out to be Richard Roper's illegitimate son.
Without Rex dying in the first episode, Pine has no reason to go rogue. He'd still be watching hotel lobbies.
Douglas Hodge
Hodge is a stage and screen actor with a long CV — he won an Olivier Award for La Cage aux Folles in the West End, played Inspector Rusk in Penny Dreadful, and appeared as Rolo Haynes in the Black Mirror episode "Black Museum." Given that Rex dies early in series 2, Hodge is unlikely to return unless future episodes include flashbacks.