The Talented Mr. Oldman

Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman finds unexpected liberation in television, embracing the disheveled brilliance of Jackson Lamb and examining the evolution of his craft. 

By Steve Pond
Artwork by Drake Carr

When Gary Oldman burst onto the scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, first in British theater and then in films like Sid and Nancy, Prick Up Your Ears and State of Grace, he seemed to be an unruly force of nature, imbuing an array of rebels and misfits with a steaming, magnetic intensity. People noticed—he was nominated for his first BAFTA award in 1988 for Prick Up Your Ears—and he was given plenty of opportunities to show his range by a formidable pantheon of directors. There was Tom Stoppard with Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Philip Kaufman with Henry & June, Oliver Stone with JFK, Francis Ford Coppola with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Tony Scott with True Romance, Luc Besson with Léon: The Professional, Wolfgang Peterson with Air Force One, Ridley Scott with Hannibal, Alfonso Cuarón and David Yates with three Harry Potter movies, Christopher Nolan with three Batman films and Oppenheimer, Joe Wright with Darkest Hour, David Fincher with Mank… He stopped being the angry young man somewhere along the journey, but he never stopped being fiercely watchable. 

And now here he is, six years after winning the Best Actor Oscar for playing Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, in a most unexpected guise. In showrunner Will Smith’s Slow Horses, based on the series of Slough House novels by Mick Herron, Oldman’s Jackson Lamb sports an unkempt mop of mostly unwashed hair and wears an ill-fitting raincoat, wrinkled trousers and a halfheartedly secured tie draped over a protruding belly. He looks like hell—and at times he’s a boss from hell, abusive and dismissive to the discredited British intelligence agents who’ve been exiled to the messy offices that Lamb soils with his miscellaneous profanities and his proudly unmuffled farts.  

But there’s more to Lamb than appearances, because Oldman wouldn’t be playing him if there weren’t. At the age of 66, the actor has found a dream role as a slovenly, grumpy man who also happens to be a pretty brilliant spy. Oldman’s hair was a little straggly and his potbelly pushed at his blue t-shirt as he sat down with TheWrapBook—but the actor, who was on a break during shooting of the show’s fifth season, shrugged off the physical requirements of the role. “When I’m not on the set,” he says, “it just is what it is.”   

You did some TV shows early in your career, but nothing like taking the lead in a series.

No. I did something when I was very, very young, and I can’t even remember the name of it, it was so many years ago. I did a film called Remembrance for Channel 4. And a guest appearance on Friends, you know? Not much.

Did you resist TV?

Yeah. Early on there was a sort of snobbishness, wasn’t there, about television? You were either a movie actor or you were a television actor. And like theater people who looked down on movie actors, the movie actors looked down on TV actors. Even though there were great one-offs on television, we tended to look down on television. Now, everybody wants to get in the game. They all want a show. We’re in this golden age of it now, aren’t we? 

What kind of satisfaction can you get from a series like this that maybe you couldn’t get from a film?

What I often found frustrating with film is that character is sacrificed. I get it; you’ve got two hours to tell the story, and you often feel like you’ve gotta wrap it all up and rush to the end. What I like about long form is that you can really get into the salts and minerals of the people, you know? 

As a viewer, as a fan, I’d watch these shows thinking it must be quite nice to be in a show and repeat the character and work with the same people. Going back in this business, you work with nice people, and you often say, “We should do it again sometime.” And for the most part, you never see that person again. Or you’ll run into ‘em at the Golden Globes or something, and you go, “My God, I haven’t seen you for 30 years!” So I’d always been a little envious of the opportunity to do a long form. 

And then this thing fell from the sky. I was on a plane with [longtime producing partner and manager] Doug [Urbanski]. I said, “What are you reading?” And he said, “I’m actually reading a character who’s about to become your best friend.”

I’d even said to him before that, “You know what, Doug? Wouldn’t it be nice to be in a series where there’s good writing but I don’t have to do an accent, where I don’t have to wear cumbersome costumes or have lots of costume changes, where I can just have my own hair and not have to wear prosthetics?” And I said, “And ideally, it would be great if it was an espionage story, but in the Le Carré way.” That was my wishlist. 

Slow Horses is pretty damn close to that.

Yeah. Quite. So I love it. 

It’s not like Jackson Lamb has a big character arc, but do you find yourself learning more about him as the seasons go on?

Yeah, things sort of fall into place. Mick Herron, who writes the books, is not particularly forthcoming with information. He says, “If it’s not in the book, then I haven’t really thought about it.” So there’s not a wealth of offscreen life that you can glean from. And the die is pretty much set for Lamb. I don’t see a big character transformation coming. But you do glean little pieces and get new insights into him. There’s a bit of a reveal in Season 5.

Is it as fun to say some of his dialogue as it is to watch it?

Yeah. It’s a tall order to put a book into six hours, and there are things that do slip by. So when the scripts come in, I’ll go to the book and pick up some lines and then say to Will [Smith], the writer, “This is a really good line from the book. Where could we find a place for it?” But yeah, it’s fun getting the scripts and then knowing the characters and the actors as well as I do. I think, “Oh, I can’t wait to see Jack Lowden’s face when I give him this zinger.” 

I mean, Lamb’s got no filter; he doesn’t care about being judged and there’s really nothing to lose, so he doesn’t give a fuck. There’s something very freeing and liberating playing someone who really doesn’t give a fuck.

In other ways, though, I think Lamb cares a lot more than he’ll ever let on. 

Yeah. I think he rides his team so hard because in the world of espionage, mediocrity and incompetence is dangerous. It’ll get you killed. He gets sent these rejects [who] might be very good agents. It doesn’t mean that they’re absolutely useless, but they may have slipped up once, and then they get pushed over to Jackson Lamb. So he weeds them out. He’s harsh with them and rides them hard—because ultimately, it’s life and death. It’s a serious business. 

Also, the whole thing with the greasy hair and not bathing very often and holes in his socks—it’s all designed to make people underestimate him.

Speaking of his general slovenliness, do they give you input into the volume and tone of Lamb’s farts?

[Grins.] I’m a fart consultant. It sounds ridiculous, but we do have emails going back and forth where we talk about the frequency and the robustness. I mean, come on: If we’re in the back of a Rolls Royce, that is really good leather we’re talking about. We need a more robust fart, and we could put a little bit of echo on that one. [Laughs.] I do have access to dailies and rough cuts and final presentations, and I have found myself writing to the director saying, “I love the choice of fart!”

That’s one way in which Slow Horses is both very funny and dramatic. And I wonder if the distinctions between comedy and drama are growing increasingly meaningless in TV. 

Well, I think we walk the knife’s edge very well. That was a big question initially: Do you get a director who’s very good at directing comedy? How much of the comedy do you play up? How much of the drama do you emphasize? Do you make the drama a little more like Killing Eve, which is ever so slightly heightened, or do you go very real with the drama and make the humor more incidental and more throwaway? I think that’s where we came down: There’s a lot of humor in the show, but we can’t ask for a laugh. 

I’ll be more specific. In the early days of Season 1, some of the feedback was that people were confused, because it opened with this Bourne Identity kind of airport chase. And then it cuts to this rather drab office and we slowly meet these characters. We were told that some people were confused and not quite sure what show they’re in. And I remember saying, “What if you see this Bourne Identity or James Bond kind of opening, and then you cut to Lamb waking up on a sofa, lighting up a cigarette, coughing my guts up, going to the loo, peeing, and while I’m peeing, I fart? You’ll know what show you’re in right there.” I said that off the top of my head between takes on the set, and it evolved into me waking myself up with a fart in the office and then having a cigarette. A little different, but much the same thing. And it seemed to work.⠁