"I would be a brilliant spy"
Bafta-winner Joanna Scanlan joins the Slow Horses cast as part of an espionage sisterhood for season four. But what's it like to work opposite Gary Oldman in character as the odious Jackson Lamb?
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Slough House is a repository for MI5’s failures. Find yourself posted to the Barbican branch of British intelligence and you might naturally question your abilities. But not Moira Tregorian, played by Joanna Scanlan. Sent down from MI5 headquarters at The Park to replace Catherine Standish as Jackson Lamb’s personal assistant, Tregorian arrives with such untrammelled self-confidence that one of her first acts is to clean up his disgusting office – a crime that Lamb cannot forgive.
Joanna Scanlan as Moira Tregorian in Slow Horses season four. Apple
“It’s a form of egalitarian misanthropy, isn’t it?” says Scanlan of Lamb’s rudeness. “He despises and dislikes in a very natural way. He doesn’t try to conceal it. He’s probably the inner version of most of us, but we cover it up politely.”
There are no limits to people's gross private habits
Lamb’s behaviour around Tregorian is appalling but somehow he always gets away with it. Can Scanlan imagine a woman being so rude and repellent “Oh, yes! I can easily see a character I play farting and smelling bad. There are no limits to people’s gross private habits, and everybody knows that, deep down.”
One of television’s more recognisable faces, Scanlan’s previous shows include the BBC’s The Thick of It and ITV’s The Larkins, and although a Bafta winner herself for her lead role in the 2020 film After Love, she admits that working with Oldman is a big deal. “I’m obviously hugely in awe of Gary Oldman as an actor,” she says. “But Moira is so obtuse in relation to other people’s feelings, and other people’s demands and needs, that it felt like a shield that let her enter a little battle royal with him. I was able to subsume any of my own feelings of huge awe at being in Gary’s orbit into Moira’s disparaging feelings towards everything that was going on at Slough House, including the boss.”
Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. Apple
Scanlan was pre-warned about the series because she had worked with showrunner Will Smith on The Thick of It. “I’d known about the project for a long time so the first night that Slow Horses dropped on Apple TV+, my husband and I sat down to watch it out of loyalty and all the things one would do for a friend. And we were absolutely blown away, from that very first moment of watching it. We have been massive fans ever since. And I couldn’t believe that I was invited into that world. It was almost like, ‘Oh no, don’t spoil it. Because I’m a punter here, and I enjoy it so much, I don’t want to know what goes on behind the scenes’. But in fact, it was the reverse. What a stupendously enjoyable job.”
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Would she make a good spy? “I think I would be brilliant. Seriously. I hope it’s not too late. I don’t know if I’d pass the exams, but I would be terribly good in the field, I feel. When I was four, I decided I wanted to be an actor and I pretty much stuck with that. But I did have a wobble when I was about 11, when I thought, ‘Actually, I would like to be a spy’. Acting is part of being a spy. A big part…”
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