Gary Oldman is back on screens as the caustic Jackson Lamb for the fifth season of misfit spy thriller “Slow Horses,” as the critically acclaimed adaptation reaches Mick Herron’s book “London Rules.”
This week, the morning after he was invested with a knighthood by the Prince of Wales for services to drama on stage and screen, the Oscar-winning actor said Lamb is one of his all-time favorite roles.
“Where would he be in the canon, as it were? I think up there with you know, ‘Darkest Hour,’ ‘Tinker Tailor,'” he said.
The star won his Oscar for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in the 2017 film “Darkest Hour.” He was Oscar-nominated for 2011’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” and again for 2020’s “Mank.”
Oldman has played Lamb — the shabby, brash, seemingly uninterested leader of the group of MI-5 agents in spy purgatory at Slough House — since “Slow Horses” debuted in 2022.
In Season 5, suspicions are raised when the team’s tech nerd Roddy Ho is dating a glamorous woman. But as London is hit with a series of bizarre events, the Slow Horses spot an old agency technique to destabilize regimes.
“We’re getting a taste of our own poison,” explains Oldman.
With a sixth season shot, and production due to start on Season 7 in November, the 67-year-old star says Lamb has become the character he has “inhabited” consistently the longest.
From the start, he has made a physical commitment to Jackson’s worse for wear look — including putting on extra body fat, and living with “Lamb hair.”
He considers it a “small price to pay” to avoid adding to the “thousands of hours” he has racked up in the makeup artist’s chair over the course of his career.
“So it’s of my own choosing, really, that I’ve got to walk around with a terrible haircut and scruff on my chin and go to Windsor Castle, meet the future king, you know, and go ‘Sorry, I apologize about all of this, but, you know, I start work in a month’,” he said, with a laugh.
Season 5 of “Slow Horses” is streaming now on Apple TV+
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: Are you used yet to being addressed as Sir Gary?
OLDMAN: Now, it’s a little strange. I met some fans… I was told, oh, there’s some people outside, and I went out and signed some autographs and things, “Oh, yes, would you sign, like, Sir Gary?” You know, it’s a little odd, yeah. I mean — you don’t have to, you know?
AP: What do you love about playing Jackson Lamb?
OLDMAN: I love the fact that people think he’s sort of loafing off and yet, really, when his eyes are closed and he’s got his feet up on the desk that the mind is sort of working. That’s what I like about him. And it’s fun to come in and sling around those insults to people. He doesn’t have social norms in that way, does he? He doesn’t follow the rules.
I mean, I’ve played, I did James Gordon, that was over, God, that was over seven years, So I’ve played a character and I’ve returned to a character, but I haven’t had the opportunity to really inhabit someone like Lamb, consistently. I’ve got a real soft spot for him. I’m really, I’m quite taken with him.
Q: And it’s a physical commitment as well, isn’t it? You were talking about having to carry the extra weight.
OLDMAN: Well, you do get to a certain age where it’s a little harder to take off. It’s easy to put on, it’s harder to take it off. And I’ve got scruff and there’s not much I can really do with the hair, apart from sort of put it up, otherwise it’s — I do have, I have Lamb hair. And I just kind of, for the last five years, have just lived with it. Going into the show, I have spent thousands of hours in the makeup chair over the course of my career. It must be thousands now. And it was an opportunity to not spend hours in a makeup chair. I said, I want my own hair, you know, I don’t want wigs, I don’t want makeup.
Q: Season 5 is based on the 2018 book. Mick Herron does seem to have a knack for writing themes that stay relevant. Was there a particular theme in the new season that interested you more than the others?
OLDMAN: I mean, obviously, the more comedic side to it is the fact that Ho has a girlfriend. Thinks he has a girlfriend. But this time around, the whole destabilization, this group of terrorists, we’re getting a taste of our own poison. The underhand, slight nefarious things that these institutions get up to, and they do abuse, we know that they abuse their power, the sort of destabilization strategy that we had implemented was now being done to us. And I thought that that was an interesting sort of twist, that they had turned it back on us.
Q: So, ‘Moscow rules,’ ‘London rules’… What are the Gary Oldman rules?
OLDMAN: Friends — pick your friends by their character and your socks by their color.
