“As long as they keep it on air, I’ll do it”
Hollywood star Gary Oldman says Slow Horses is a career highlight – and he’s in it for the long haul
Apple TV+
- Mark Lawson
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in September 2024.
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When stars of a returning TV series start a new shoot, they expect fresh costumes, or at least the old clothes laundered. But for Gary Oldman – as shabby, malodorous disgraced spymaster Jackson Lamb in Apple TV+’s Slow Horses – the wardrobe department works hard to make everything look worse.
“Each time we come back,” he says, “there’s a new greasy stain or cigarette burn on Jackson’s rain mac. This year, they really worked on the shoes to make them scruffier. But, essentially, it’s the same shoes with the same holey socks and I just go, ‘Hello, boys!’ ”
The fourth season of Slow Horses (adapted from Mick Herron’s chart-topping novels about MI6 spooks sent into clerical-duty exile after mission failures) is a casting landmark for Oldman. After three appearances as James Gordon in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films and also a cameo trio in the Harry Potter movies, he has now played Lamb more times than any other character. A fifth Slow Horses has already been shot and Herron has written five more novels that, so far, have yet to be adapted.
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“I’m incredibly committed to Slow Horses and it keeps me busy,” Oldman says. “As long as they keep it on air, I’ll do it, although I won’t do it as long as Peter Falk did Columbo, however long that was.” Thirty-five years? “Right! I don’t have 35 years in me, but I do love the show and Lamb. I just come in and put the mac on and step right back into it. I really enjoy Lamb and being with this group of people we have.”
Those regular co-stars include Jack Lowden, Kristin Scott Thomas, Rosalind Eleazar, Jonathan Pryce, Saskia Reeves and Christopher Chung. “It’s been a real highlight of my career. It’s up there with anything else. We’re like a theatre company so it’s no hardship picking it up again. And the return of this cast every time.”
The returning cast... Ah. If not plot-spoiler, then plot-concern alert. An early publicity photo shows Lamb at what seems to be a funeral. And readers of the books will know that Herron has a Line of Duty attitude to big characters. Slow Horses has already lost two central figures: Olivia Cooke as Sid Baker and Dustin Demri-Burns as Min Harper. “Yeah. So somebody might cop it this time,” Oldman warns.
Jack Lowden and Gary Oldman in Slow Horses. Apple TV+
And we’re going to be very careful here but – if someone cops it – because they’re such a close company, that loss must be quite a thing? “It really is. Listen, I remember back in the day when Sirius Black died, we heard a rumour before that [JK Rowling] book came out that someone big died in this one. And there were a lot of rumours and all the cast were taking bets. And I’d only just come into the series. And I thought, ‘Well, they’re not going to kill Harry Potter’s godfather. It’ll be Hagrid or someone.’ But then it was me! Yeah, we lose someone in this series. But Mick Herron is great at that.”
When the remaining actors are playing the scenes after someone has gone, presumably the factual sadness at losing the actor from the company helps to play the fictional pain at the lost character. “Yeah. It’s very sad to see a friend go. Dustin is a comedian by trade and was so funny around the set that it was awful to see him go. You come back and regroup and there’s one of you missing. But, like you say, you can play that absence. Not that Lamb would care!”
Up to a point. In the books, when Lamb says something fantastically flippant after a colleague dies, we can think maybe there’s more grief underneath, but Oldman can – and does – show us that damage. “You’re right. There’s an interesting thing Lamb says to [Jack Lowden’s] River Cartwright early on: ‘You’re going to see a lot more deaths. If you don’t think it’s for you, get out of the car now.’ There’s a jadedness in Lamb but he’s very loyal to these misfits. When it really comes down to it, he probably cares more than most, although he gives the impression, as a protection, that he doesn’t.”
Evidence for that comes in season four. When Lamb is warned before entering a crime scene, “It’s bad in there!”, he replies, “I’ve…”
“I’ve seen bad before!” Oldman overlaps and completes the line in character. “Yeah. We drop these little breadcrumbs about his past. With that line alone, we sense a lot. In a scene I just did for season five – it’s not giving anything away to say – another layer of the onion is revealed, a little more about what happened in the old days when Lamb was in Berlin.”
As it happens, Herron recently published a novel, The Secret Hours, tangential to the series, that blows open the onion, revealing exactly what occurred in Cold War Germany to force Lamb into exile. Has Oldman read that book? “No. I deliberately only read each book before we film it. But someone told me that, in The Secret Hours, we know who they are but they are behind codenames?”
Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses. Apple TV+
That’s right, I say, but when an operative involuntarily farts during an undercover mission, we know at once that is Jackson Lamb. “Literally blowing your cover,” laughs Oldman.
In that context, when I talked to Oldman for Radio Times, ahead of the first series of Slow Horses, we drew a contrast with his other big spy, John le Carré’s George Smiley in the 2011 movie Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and I used the phrase “From Smiley to Smelly”. “Yeah. Very good,” says Oldman. “Amazingly, none of us working on the show had thought of that.”
It struck me, though, in this series, that the two spies came closer. Beneath George’s chosen (smooth) manner and Jackson’s favoured (rough) surface, there is a lot of pain and damage? “Yes! I think they’re both essentially good men. The North Pole of their moral compasses is more aligned than one might imagine. They despise the bureaucracy and corruption of spying. You could imagine Smiley – as a sidelined outsider at times – having ended up in Slough House.” And, unusually for spies, neither lies. Smiley by leaving pauses, Lamb by always saying exactly what he thinks. “Yeah, there’s subtext.”
I told Paolo Sorrentino I’d play a shadow on a wall for him
Between shoots of Slow Horses, Oldman still plays small film roles: as President Harry Truman in Nolan’s Oppenheimer and as the writer John Cheever in Paolo Sorrentino’s upcoming Parthenope. But the great role of Lamb must mean he’s turning down other parts; is that a frustration?
“No, I’d rather not know what else is coming in. There’s no point. I’m sure there are opportunities I’ve missed. Oppenheimer was basically one morning of filming – five hours. Parthenope – I love Sorrentino’s films and he said, ‘I’ve got this part but it’s tiny.’ And I wrote back and said I’d play a shadow on a wall for him. But it was a beautiful location – ten days on Capri, six of them filming – and so one basically couldn’t argue with the gig.”
Oldman lives in Palm Springs, California, with his fifth wife, art expert Gisele Schmidt. Having played President Truman and also presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), it must be fascinating for Oldman to be in America during 2024 campaign times in which one candidate (Trump) survives an assassination attempt and another (Biden) resigns eight days later.
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“Yeah. I think it was David Mamet who said we are living in times when he goes out of the room to clean his teeth and when he comes back the world has changed. It’s quite a circus.”
Authors
Mark Lawson
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