A Tale of Two Cities

The cast against the text

Who is who in the poem

The 3 actors announced for the limited series, and who each character is in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. All 3 parts exist in the novel under those same names; under each one you get which of the three books they appear in and what they do there.

• The «triangle» the series is selling does not exist as a rivalry in the novel: Dickens closes it in chapter 13 of Book II, with Carton giving Lucie up before Darnay has even proposed, and making her the promise that is the exact blueprint of the ending — «there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you». What the trailer sells as a contest, the book writes as a renunciation kept thirty chapters later. If the series turns it into a competition, that will be its decision, not Dickens's.
• The physical likeness between Carton and Darnay is not an easter egg: it is the engine of the whole plot, and it saves Darnay's life TWICE — at the Old Bailey confrontation (II, 3), where showing Carton without his wig is enough to wreck the witness, and at the cell swap (III, 13). That is why casting matters more here than in almost any classic: Harington and Civil are no doubles, and every adaptation has to decide whether the likeness is filmed or told. Giving the French aristocrat to a French actor and the English barrister to an Englishman is, at least, the exact geography of the book.

1. Kit Harington → Sydney Carton

   Books II and III

   The brilliant, wasted English barrister and Darnay's physical double: at the Old Bailey trial (II, 3) he only has to take off his wig to wreck the witness who swore he could identify the accused. He opens his heart to Lucie asking nothing back (II, 13), and the last page of the novel is his — probably the most quoted ending Dickens ever wrote.

2. François Civil → Charles Darnay

   Books II and III

   The French aristocrat who renounces his family name — Evrémonde — and earns his keep in London teaching French. Tried for treason in England (II, 3) and saved by his likeness to Carton, he returns to Paris at the height of the Revolution to help his old steward Gabelle (II, 24), and is condemned by the testimony his father-in-law left written in the Bastille (III, 10).

3. Mirren Mack → Lucie Manette

   Books I-III

   «The golden thread» that names the second book: the daughter who collects in Paris a father she has never known, imprisoned eighteen years in the Bastille without trial, and recalls him to life (I, 5-6, the shoemaker scene). Everything else is woven around her: Darnay marries her, Carton makes her the promise he keeps at the end, and even the echoing footsteps of her Soho parlour (II, 6) are a warning of what is coming from Paris.