After a meeting, they sent a few scripts to the director but without much hope, as he hadn’t done television before, Stephen Cornwell said in a telephone interview. To their surprise, Park agreed — with the proviso that he wouldn’t change his cinematic eye. He also said there was only one person who could play Charlie.

“We nearly burst out laughing when he said Florence, because we were huge fans of ‘Lady Macbeth’ and of her, and she was at the top of our list,” Cornwell said.

Pugh was shocked to be approached for the role. “‘The Night Manager’ had boomed, and this was the next one; everyone was talking about it, and I felt it wasn’t really in my reach,” she said in a telephone interview. “But it gave me a lot of confidence,” she said because Park “had faith in the Charlie I was going to bring to the table.”

She added that it was “rare to find a character who was just normal. There is something raw and wonderful and believably unlikable about her in the book, and I wanted to show that,” she said. When the series made its debut on the BBC in October, Pugh’s not-always-likable Charlie won raves from British critics.