Breaking Baz: Gary Oldman On How ‘Slow Horses’ Picked Up Speed To Score Its Emmy Nominations

EXCLUSIVE: Gary Oldman says that that the nine Emmy nominations, including for Outstanding Drama Series, received by the wry spy drama Slow Horses “puts an added boost and a spotlight on the show.”

Slow Horses first trotted onto Apple TV+ in April 2022, gathering audiences as it cantered into second and third seasons. Now it’s galloping into a fourth season launching September 4.

A fifth season is in its final weeks of shooting in London, and there are strong hints of Slow Horses returning for a sixth series that would go before cameras later in the year.

Seasons seven and eight are also at the starting gate, though obviously in very early stages of preparation.

The series’ Oscar-winning star Oldman was recognized in the Lead Actor In A Drama category for his sly turn as shambolic-looking British intelligence officer Jackson Lamb for the third season of the show, which debuted last November.

“It’s like the little show that could,” he marvels. “I run into people saying, ‘Oh my god, we love the show. When’s it coming back?’ And I say, ‘Well, Season 4 drops in September and we’re filming Season 5 right now.’ You leave them happy and they come back.”

Slow Horses is based on a series of acclaimed novels by Mick Herron. Lamb’s duty to his country is to oversee a group of outcast UK secret service operatives sent out to pasture at a rickety outpost known as Slough House.

They’re the lowest of the low and Lamb disdains them publicly, though privately he’s intensely loyal. He’s also incredibly loyal to his castmates and creatives, and proud of them as well.

He’s happy that other members “of the gang” were also cited in Wednesday’s Emmy nominations.

Jack Lowden, who plays 007 wannabe River Cartwright, was nominated in the Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama category, while Jonathan Pryce, who plays River’s grandfather, ex espionage chief David Cartwright, was nommed for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama.

Oldman expressed “surprise” that Kristin Scott Thomas, who plays Diana Taverner — known as ‘Lady Di,’ the deliciously regal queen-bee spy — was overlooked. He says he “loves” doing scenes with Scott-Thomas, noting that they portrayed Winston and Clementine Churchill in Darkest Hour.

They did a superb nine-minute scene in Season 1 where they had a conversation on a riverside bench. “We’re hoping to get another big scene like that again,” Oldman tells me in London after we bumped into each other Wednesday night.

He tells me that he wrapped his scenes for Season 5 on Tuesday.

“They’ve got more to do, but I’ve done all mine and we’re off home,” he adds, referring to the house he shares with wife, Gisele Schmidt, a noted photographic artist, and their family in Palm Springs.

He may return to London if Season 6 gets the go-ahead.

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Herron’s working on his ninth Slow Horses book, but Oldman refuses to discuss galloping that far into the future.

However, he admits to being fascinated to see how Jackson Lamb progresses in forthcoming tomes.

“It’s a wonderful character that Mick’s come up with,” he says, while observing that Lamb’s unkept appearance and appalling social behavior are a “sort of defense mechanism.”

It’s done to put people on the left foot, Oldman says. “Adversaries, even colleagues, have an expectation of someone in that position, he’s like a senior operative, and you can’t quite work him out immediately. It’s someone who deliberately goes out of their way to make themselves unlikeable, as a cloak to disguise who they really are.”

Pondering for a moment he adds, “It’s sort of a veil, isn’t it, that he wears?”

Herron writes about how Lamb sees it as odd to have friends. “Jackson doesn’t get it about having friends so he’s very much a loner. Well, originally I suppose, he was a loner when he worked in Berlin during the Cold War,” he says.

Oldman famously played George Smiley, John le Carré’s eminent fictional spy, in the feature Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

The late author and the actor were close friends, and Oldman remembers “le Carré talking about being a spy in Berlin, and he said it was long, long, long periods of just everyday life hanging around and the boredom of it. But he said he never slept very well because he said you were always waiting for the footsteps on the stairs, and whether your cover is blown, they find out that you are not really who you say you are.”

Oldman adds that people like Lamb are “very wary of letting people in. It must be a very strange occupation.”

Originally, the Slow Horses creatives played around with the idea of maybe giving Scott-Thomas’ Lady Di a family, where we would catch the odd glimpse of photographs in a purse. But Herron ruled that out, decreeing that Diana was married to the job with no husband and no kids.

Slow Horses‘ other nominations in the Drama Series categories include showrunner Will Smith for writing, Nina Gold for casting, Saul Metzstein for directing and Zsófia Tálas for picture editing. Daniel Pemberton is nominated in Outstanding Music Composition for Drama Series.

Oldman is full of praise for his colleagues and made a point of noting the work done by Smith and original director James Hawes in establishing and “creating the brew,” as Oldman, a keen tea-drinker, put it.

Hawes was followed by Jeremy Lovering, Metzstein and Adam Randall who directed forthcoming Season 4.

Smith, See-Saw Films and the producers including Oldman’s longtime producing partner Douglas Urbanski meet with prospective directors and, says Oldman, “it ultimately all falls on their shoulders.”

Oldman has a say, too. He watches all their work “and I meet them, eye them up. I look them up and down. But really, I mean, thus far, I’ve had a wonderful time with all of them.”

There’s chatter about Metzstein, Lovering and Randall possibly returning to direct further seasons should they be greenlighted by Apple TV+.

Regular cast members include Saskia Reeves, Christopher Chung, Rosalind Eleazar, Aimee-Fiona Edwards and Kadiff Kiwan.

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