TV Week chats up Oscar-winner Gary Oldman on the latest season of his darkly comedic, utterly enthralling spy drama
The man has made a career playing characters that never leave you. Who could forget corrupt DEA Agent Norman Stansfield from Léon: The Professional, Luc Besson’s 1994 action thriller that launched the career of his young co-star Natalie Portman? He crossed oceans of time to be with Winona Ryder’s Mina Harker in Francis Ford Coppola’s reimagining of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Having made himself known as a versatile and highly intense thespian, he took home the Academy Award for Best Actor in 2018 for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’s war drama Darkest Hour. Yet, after 45 years of building a solid portfolio, here we are, talking job security with Gary Oldman.

“You’ve got to be optimistic about it, but it’s just the weirdest thing when you finish and you go, will I ever work again?” muses the 66-year-old. “I mean, it crosses your mind. Will the right thing come in? And then, along the way, you have writers’ strikes and actors’ strikes, which affects the ecosystem. So there have been moments in my career where I thought, maybe that’s it. That’s the scary thing about the profession, and the wonderful thing — that you could be out of work on a Friday and on Tuesday, Darkest Hour can cross your desk.”

It was, in part, the volatility of a career in the arts that led Oldman to Slow Horses, the espionage thriller series with comedic undertones, based on the novels by Mick Herron. In the television adaptation, Oldman plays Jackson Lamb, the wretched boss of Slough House, a sort of purgatory for MI5 agents who have failed at their jobs and been relegated to paper-pushing rather than being fired. In series creator Will Smith’s material, Oldman has found plenty of beats to play. But the initial pull to join the series, which just wrapped its fourth season, was knowing what’s next. “It’s an odd career, in as much as you are constantly out of work. I mean, you might not be out of work for very long, but you finish a job and then you hope that the phone will ring,” he reflects. “It’s been a nice thing to know that you finish [one season] and you get the word, ‘Oh, we’re doing the next season.’ It does lessen the anxiety of knowing that you’ve got a job to go to.”

Lucky for Oldman, the flatulent, hard-drinking, smarter-than-everyone-else-in-the-room intelligence officer has been a thrill to return to creatively, for half a decade now. (And the series has already been renewed for a fifth season.) “I enjoy playing his directness. He cuts through everything. He cuts through the crap. Yeah, he is an alcoholic, but he uses it to his [advantage]. And he doesn’t really have a filter. It’s just kind of fun to play. When I get the scripts for a new season and I get a zinger of a line, I often chuckle and think, ‘I can’t wait to see Jack Lowden’s look on his face when I throw this at him,’ or a testy scene between me and Kristin Scott Thomas. There’s an anticipation where you think, ‘I can’t wait to get on the set and throw this one at her.’ That’s part of the joy of it.”

Jackson Lamb is also not a character Oldman can just phone in, with Herron’s antihero presenting something of a multitasking challenge for the actor. “A great deal of it is he doesn’t raise his voice very much. There’s the furnace going on inside, while not revealing and not showing it. That, at times, is a bit like patting your head and rubbing your stomach, you know what I mean?” he says. “Your instinct, sometimes, would be to turn up the frequency of it. And with Lamb, you keep the simmer, you keep the gas a certain temperature, and that’s kind of challenging.” Still, Oldman credits the author of the books for doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to character development. “This is an incredible creation by Mick Herron. All the signposts were there for me. I guess you bring talent and some imagination to it, but a lot of the work really was done for me. Mick has created this whole group of people, and the cast just come in and do sterling work.”
It is, above all, his working environment — and a cast that, in addition to the aforementioned Lowden and Scott Thomas, includes Jonathan Pryce, Saskia Reeves, Rosalind Eleazar and, playing the season-four Big Bad, Hugo Weaving — that brings Oldman joy. “I love the people,” the actor effuses. “I love the crew and the cast. It’s been such a treat to be in a troupe, of sorts. The writing is good and the response to the show is good — all those things of why you did the thing in the first place. But I had no idea, going in, how lovely these people would be and how much I would just enjoy hanging out with them and being in their company. That’s the biggest takeaway, really.”
Also see our previous article on Slow Horses here.
Slow Horses, streaming on Apple TV+