Slow Horses

Director James Hawes on See-Saw Films' 'anti-Bond' espionage series for Apple TV+.

With a world around them firmly established, the actors and I could experiment. There was probably more discussion, and certainly more opinions, on the music than any other element of production. And it is all realised in the colours and tones of 70s/80s movie palette. This is when the director needs to become a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad. We land a brilliant group of rooted, light touch actors who feel honest to the script. And it has a very particular DNA. Oozing with the influence of Le Carré, but with a pedigree all of its own, thanks to author Mick Herron’s clever touch, a scene can switch from an intense exchange about a threatened hostage to a juicy lamb korma and a fart.

Gary Oldman plays a washed-up version of his Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy character in AppleTV+'s sharp spy thriller Slow Horses.

Herron’s novel was forward thinking in 2010 as it looked beyond the heroic stories of thwarted Islamic terror threats that dominated the genre following the Sept. 11 and 7/7 attacks, turning instead to examine corruption within security agencies, the rising threat of white nationalism, and the general feeling that Britain’s best days may have already passed. Their uselessness and despair feels physically manifested in the dark and dingy Slough House as compared to the sleek glass of MI5 headquarters, where the regal Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) commands agents who actually get things done. Oldman’s Jackson Lamb is a flabby and flatulent desk jockey leading a team of MI5 rejects.

The Apple TV+ series' opening delivers on a spy show promise without betraying the deceptive nature of the story to come. [Interview]

We had a day for the Wembley part, a day for the train, and a day in the [MI-5] hub. You find a file, you find a sock with holes in it. But I imagine on some level, you wanted to put in a few details that, if people went back and watched it again, might clue them in the fact that what they’re watching is actually a training exercise. It’s always a balance between how much you feel the need to give the story geography to the audience and how much you want to keep them working. Most of the police that you see in the airport are real policeman telling you, ‘This is what I’d do.’ Most of the stewards in the high-vis jackets, they’re the real airport staff responding as they would. If you’ve thought it through properly, and the actors will always test you on this, there’s a logic to how they’re running and behaving and what they’re reacting to and against. And to be honest, they weren’t terribly keen on the scene, which was a terrorist attack. INDIEWIRE: This had to be the biggest logistical challenge of the season. When you get through baggage reclaim, I wanted to continue building out our world and moving towards a climax, and Stansted didn’t [offer] me that. This discussion of the scene below has been condensed and edited for clarity. The opening scene of “Slow Horses” is something of a magic trick. First, Cartwright’s chase and the team of MI-5 officials guiding him — led by Kristin Scott Thomas’ steely Diana Taverner — has to provide an entry point for viewers unfamiliar with the source material.

Gary Oldman leads an all-star cast in the new new Apple TV Plus series Slow Horses. Here's how to watch it free online with a 7-day Apple TV+ trial ...

Apple TV+ is available in over 100 countries. Slow Horses, a grimy British espionage thriller starring Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas, premiered on Apple TV+ on Friday, 1st April 2022 and all five episodes are now available to watch in full. Slow Horses is based on author Mick Herron’s award-winning crime novels, and the theme is sung by Mick Jagger no less.

Real intelligence agents are not like James Bond or Jason Bourne. You can't go all rogue and still go unscathed. Sometimes, if you fail, you are sent into ...

“Slow Horses follows a team of British intelligence agents who serve in a dumping ground department of MI5 – Slough House. Oldman stars as Jackson Lamb, the brilliant but irascible leader of the spies who end up in Slough House due to their career-ending mistakes. When River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), a newcomer to Slough House, discovers a crime and reports it to Lamb, the young agent is instantly discouraged by the grouchy boss-man. In other words, Slow Horses is a story of underdogs, agents who the world never hears of, unless they prove themselves. But when he finds out about a hostage situation, he decides to look further into it and get back on the field, so he can right the wrong and prove his merit to MI5. Every new episode will release weekly on Fridays. The final episode of Slow Horses will be released on April 29, 2022. Jackson Lamb – Played by Gary Oldman, Lamb is the head of Slough House and boss of a bunch of failed agents. Lamb is a disenchanted and disgruntled employee and as miserable as a boss can be. The video introduces the audience to Slough House, and we see a bunch of demotivated employees, who have turned up in this dumping ground of failed MI5 agents, otherwise called the slow horses. The trailer also introduces us to the department’s boss, Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman. Lamb seems to be the most miserable of all, bored to death with this life and job, and has absolutely no interest whatsoever in improving it or that of others. That is to say, you’ll probably see a very dull and drab side of MI5 but one that is equally thrilling once you get into it. The plot follows an MI5 agent, who fails his training mission and is sent to the Slough House in a paper-pushing, keyboard-thumping role until he discovers something dangerous that could threaten the entire nation. And if you want to know everything there is to know about this all-new series, check out our handy guide with all the latest information on the release date, plot, cast, characters, and more of Slow Horses.

Gary Oldman's new Apple TV Plus series Slow Horses explores the seedy underbelly of Britain's intelligence services and is based on the Mick Herron books.

Which is fascinating to me that he was going to be an off-stage character." There are currently seven books in the Slough House series, with an eighth coming out on 10th May 2022. However, in an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com, Oldman recently revealed that Herron hadn't always intended it to be that way.

Slow Horses, streaming on Apple TV Plus, and adapted from the book by Mick Herron, follows a crew of underachieving spies as they get in over their heads.

What it needs is twists that are carefully placed and not overplayed, a sense of urgency, a sense of place, and charismatic characters. Slow Horses is a solid, purposeful spy thriller that hits all the notes you want it to hit. While Oldman may have been cast for his buttoned-down Smiley, here he’s back in a mode he spent much of his early career in — cursing obnoxiously in a thick London accent — and he’s clearly relishing playing to type. River resolves to do something, and the other “Slow Horses” get dragged into it — including Lamb, who, as Tavener warns darkly, is “burned out for a reason” and may not be as incompetent as he seems. Finding out, one by one, what fatal flaw condemned these losers to Slough House, and watching them overcome those flaws and build a reluctant family, is a great formula for uncomfortable comfort TV. Slow Horses uses MI5’s domestic agenda to look inward at the fault-lines in British society and the way unscrupulous journalists, politicians — and, yes, spies — are exploiting them for their own ends. Slow Horses is a fairly close adaptation of the 2010 spy novel of the same name by Mick Herron, the first in Herron’s “Slough House” series about a crew of underachieving spies in MI5, the domestic arm of the British intelligence services. The producers surely cast Gary Oldman, in part, to summon the memory of his performance as George Smiley (scientifically proven to be the greatest British fictional spy) in the 2011 film of Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Slow Horses is written and produced by Will Smith (no, not that one), a former stand-up comedian who has worked closely with Armando Ianucci on UK political satire The Thick of It and Ianucci’s follow-up take on U. S. politics, Veep. Apple may be hoping that, in Smith, it has found its version of Succession creator Jesse Armstrong: another Ianucci-adjacent British writer with a cynical worldview and taste for bitter absurdity. Chafing at the menial tasks he’s given, and itching to serve his country, River’s curiosity is aroused when his deskmate Sid (Olivia Cooke) is sent to steal files from a right-wing journalist. But when a training exercise ends in disaster, River finds himself banished to Slough House, a dingy purgatory for the Service’s unwanted strays, overseen by slobby has-been Jackson Lamb (Oldman). They’re not bad enough to give the sack, but not good enough to give anything important to do.