INTERVIEW
Actor Gary Oldman, 66, has won widespread praise for his portrayal of spy Jackson Lamb in the acclaimed drama Slow Horses. Now, with season four due for release later this year, he tells us about finding happiness with fifth wife Gisele and winning an Oscar for his mum
The prospect of playing a character who revels in a distinct lack of personal hygiene – not to mention a huge flatulence problem – would surely be an affront to the vanity of many Hollywood A-listers. Not Gary Oldman. His latest screen outing as the surly anti-hero Jackson Lamb may require having greasy hair, broken veins and sallow skin – all rendered via a 30-minute ‘make-under’ – but the actor, who has just celebrated his 66th birthday, insists that despite these indignities, the role was ‘everything I was looking for’.
Even so, Oldman could little have envisaged how his turn as Lamb in the hit Apple TV+ spy series Slow Horses would become so celebrated – no mean feat for a serial award-winner who has garnered plaudits for representations of historical giants such as Winston Churchill in the 2017 war flick Darkest Hour and renowned fictional spymaster George Smiley in 2011’s Tinker Tailor Solider Spy.
For while Lamb is also a spy, he’s cut from a rather different cloth than the diffident, stylish Smiley. Brought to life in a series of books by author Mick Herron (Slow Horses is the name of the first), Lamb oversees a team of spies who have been demoted from MI5 for making catastrophic errors on the job.
While the ragtag bunch still work for the service, they are treated with lofty disdain by their peers, viewed as misfits who must be tolerated rather than helped.
‘He turns a genre that we’re all very familiar with, but it’s sort of anarchic,’ as Oldman puts it, admitting that he thought the author’s writing was ‘just fabulous’ when he read Herron’s first book. ‘And he gives you characters that are relatable. They are spies but we recognise them as human beings. I thought it was just wonderful stuff.’
And, it seems, so do viewers and critics alike. Since its premier in April 2022, the five-time Bafta-nominated series has become a massive critical and commercial success, hastily recommissioned with the third series released at the end of 2023, a fourth coming later this year and a fifth being filmed.
No one could be more delighted than the south London-born Oldman, who was nominated for a Golden Globe this year for his portrayal of Lamb. The actor, who stars alongside a cast including Kristin Scott Thomas, Saskia Reeves, Jonathan Pryce and Jack Lowden in the series, confides he’s pleasantly surprised by the way television is at the forefront of some of the most celebrated writing and performances.
‘This in
