Buckle up, “Slow Horses” fans.
Season 6 of the beloved Apple TV spy series is a “darker” and “heavier” season than what’s come before, with the gang reckoning with the fallout from a plot to destabilize the entire country that involved a honeytrap for Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung).
It is also the first season without longtime executive producer Will Smith overseeing the production, but in an interview with Jada Yuan at TheWrap’s studio at the Toronto International Film Festival, star and EP Gary Oldman explained “Slow Horses” has never had a traditional showrunner and the transition to Season 6 was seamless.
“We have a team of creative producers that have never changed, and there hasn’t ever been an official showrunner,” he said. “The way that this show is made is it’s really collaborative.”
When asked if it felt different without Lewis at the helm, Oldman pressed TheWrap’s interviewer if they’d seen Season 6. “Yes,” Yuan replied. “What did you think?” Oldman asked. “It seems the same,” Yuan said. “Well, there’s your answer,” Oldman said with a laugh.
But Season 6 is different in tone – both visually and thematically – than past seasons, as “Slow Horses” often does. Seasons will shift visual palettes based on the story at hand, and director and executive producer Adam Randall, who won an Emmy for his work on Season 4 and returned to the series for Season 6, wanted to set a darker tone rooted in the emotion of the characters.
“I was lucky enough with Season 6 that I was involved from the very beginning, so I was there before the writers’ room and I was able to help shape it and sort of figure out what the story was,” he said, adding that he’d developed a deep fondness for the characters. I wanted to make sure, and this was in the room and on the day, that everybody has something that they’re coming to set to be excited about. That they’ve got a really definitive emotional interest in art. That’s the first place, and everything comes from that. Everything comes from character. So there’s all the action and all the fun, but it only works because it’s coming out of the character. It’s a darker, heavier season, and I wanted to do that from a character and emotional point of view, but also visually.”
That darkness is connected to what the characters went through in Season 5.
“Everybody’s afraid for their lives, for sure. But there’s also other things happening,” Randall explained, with Season 6 introducing anamorphic lenses and a bleach bypass film emulation that offers a washed out look for the show. “River’s going through grief. Catherine’s going through alcoholism, and that’s always present, but it certainly surfaces in a different way. And I think every character has deep things that they’re going through in this season. So the heaviness of the sky and the weather is representing that as much as it’s representing them being hunted.”
Rosalind Eleazar is back as Louisa in Season 6, and she said it was fun to figure out her character’s dynamic with the women, with whom she shares most of her screentime this season.
“Season 6 just has a quality to it that is dark and and at the same time, tender and complicated, and still is really funny. It’s just sort of got everything,” she said.
And when it comes to everyone’s favorite (fake) Ladies’ Man Roddy Ho, Chung said Season 6 sees his character finally taking things seriously. Kind of.
“Ho has such a fallout of his having had the wool pulled over his eyes. So comes into Season 6 with more of a holistic point of view about how he actually has life experience now,” he said. “It’s a huge moment for him where he’s like, ‘Oh s–t, it’s not just playtime anymore.’ So that kind of arc for me was one of the most interesting things to explore with him.”
With the show already renewed for Season 7 and returning on a yearly cadence, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, who plays Shirley, said it’s not lost on her how lucky she is.
“I think we’re all aware of how lucky we are and how special it is, and just to come back every year and have a lot of the same crew, just the familiarity, it’s amazing,” she said.
Oldman put it bluntly when talking about his castmates during the hiatuses between seasons: “I miss them.”
“Slow Horses” Season 6 premieres on Apple TV on Sept. 16.
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