"Sexism is Flyte's driving force"
MI5’s new addition on workplace misogyny and why you can’t judge a person by their smell…
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"Slow Horses is like The Thick of It mixed with James Bond — it’s not comedy and it’s not drama. There’s a magic about the show and I genuinely think it’s one of the best things on television at the moment,” says Ruth Bradley, who joins the cast this series having previously worked on C4’s Humans and the BBC’s Guilt.
Her character, Emma Flyte, is the new head of MI5’s security unit, the Dogs — a squad of unsmiling musclemen in black Range Rovers. Answering directly to MI5 deputy director-general Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), one of Flyte’s first jobs is to visit a gruesome murder scene at the home of retired spy chief David Cartwright. Here Flyte, played by 37-year-old Irish actor Bradley, meets the man who will be an even greater challenge to her authority than the assassins murdering their way around London and the Home Counties — Jackson Lamb.
Gary was my acting idol. This is a huge moment for me
“That was actually the first scene that I looked at,” says Bradley of the script. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, what is this show? It’s the best dialogue I’ve read in years’. It’s so brilliantly written and that’s the genius of [Slow Horses showrunner] Will Smith, really. It was all there on the page.”
As he is inclined to do, Lamb — whose inappropriately personal taunts would have him up before HR at most modern companies — uses sneering sexism to undermine Flyte. “She’s in a role that is traditionally a very male-centric role,” says Bradley. “And I was really interested in how much of that sexism she must have encountered on her way up to get to this place, and how she’s dealing with it. It’s her driving force.” You would be right to assume there is a level of tension in Flyte and Lamb’s encounters.
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Presumably acting opposite a male with Lamb’s appalling habits is a first for Bradley? “It’s such a simple thing and an amazing conceit, funny, but also so clever because it’s totally disarming,” she says. “People underestimate him because of his smell and because he passes wind all the time. No one takes him seriously, and particularly Flyte in that first episode; she really thinks nothing of him and then she learns that she was severely wrong.”
Bradley first encountered Gary Oldman at a hotel in Oxford ahead of filming. “He was going to his room and I was coming down the stairs. And it was just, ‘Oh, hi!’ But it was a pinch-me moment where you’re thinking, ‘I’m hugging Gary Oldman’. He really was my acting idol growing up and all of a sudden, you’re looking into his eyes, playing a scene with him. It was, and continues to be, a huge moment in my career.”
Was it nerve-racking, to work with her idol?
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“Before I met Gary and Kristin, I would have been terrified of both, but neither of them ended up being scary at all. And Gary doesn’t smell, it’s all in the makeup and the costume and the performance. Kristin only smells of perfection and beauty.”
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