The new season of Slow Horses is “a huge step up in terms of the scale and the level of action” fans can expect to see from the new season, according to the show’s showrunner, executive producer and writer, Will Smith.
Smith, who also wrote for The Thick Of It and Veep, told NME ahead of season three’s release that despite the increased action, it was still important that Slow Horses “felt like the same show” and that it “didn’t suddenly go off into feeling like it was just generic action.” He continued: “We still felt like it was our characters involved in it, and it still had the humour and the drama: it still felt like our show.”
The group of disgraced MI5 rejects are back in a new series which sees the addition of Gangs of London star Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, whose partner is killed in mysterious circumstances while both are working for MI5. “Oh I love Ṣọpẹ́, he’s an amazing actor,” Smith says. “What he did particularly for the series was incredible because it’s all motivated by [his character’s] grief and guilt at the death of the woman he loves and wanting justice and vengeance for her.
“All the things that happen in the series to him could be outlandish if they weren’t grounded in the grief Ṣọpẹ́ portrays. You understand why he’s doing what he’s doing and the lengths he will go to. You feel his pain and anguish.”
Gary Oldman’s cranky but wise old spy Jackson Lamb is back too, and Smith says he loves writing outrageous lines for Oldman in the same way he did for Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It.
“It gives you license to do and say all sorts of things,” he laughed. “There’s probably a similarity in the sort of swearing and the kind of floridity of insults,” he said of Malcom and Jackson.
He continued: “You also get to know how the actors deliver things, what they like, what they want more of. You start to write to their rhythms… I know Gary wanted the scene in the show where he’s washing in the sink, squirting Fairy Liquid in his armpits,” he laughs, recalling a scene in the new season that highlights Lamb’s famously grubby habits.
“Gary will go for it because he’s got no vanity about it,” Smith continued. “He just loves inhabiting that character and being that guy. I’m waiting for the moment he tells me you can’t give me any more food to eat because he really commits to the eating,” Smith said of Oldman’s character who has plenty of unhealthy eating habits. He said Oldman had to eat close to “12 ice creams” during various takes for one scene. “I don’t know where he puts it,” Smith laughs.
Smith says he and Oldman are both huge fans of the books by Mick Herron on which the show is based and Oldman offered his thoughts on how to develop his character often.
“He’s hugely collaborative,” Smith explained. “He’s probably absurdly deferential towards me in terms of his input. We get together and we talk and it’s small things like ‘I could say that quicker, change that word.’ A lot of his notes will be like ‘oh I can do that with a look.’ Hopefully he feels that we have a great creative relationship in that regard.”
Indeed, Smith says his barometer for the success of the series is if Herron and Oldman are happy with his work. “The two reviews that matter to me the most are Mick Herron and Gary Oldman,” Smith said. “If they’re happy, it will be good. Everyone else will be happy. They’re the litmus test.”
Like other seasons, the action in each episode is tightly packed into each episode.This is something Smith credits The Thick of It creator Armando Iannucci for teaching him.
“It’s a bunch of stuff I learned working for and with Armando Iannucci really. He always wanted the scene to be doing two things at once. You couldn’t have just two people talking. There had to be some other thing kind of coming into it… it’s about making it feel alive and giving it drive and never feeling like we’re settling… it’s got to feel dramatically real, but it’s also got to be moving the story on.”
Elsewhere in the season there are some major character deaths, something Smith thinks will shock fans.
“I think the rule on it for me is that if you kill off a character and the audience isn’t upset, then you’ve left it too late,” he laughed. However, Smith had reservations about killing off one major character this season. “I was torn with it” he explained, saying he agonised over “all these ideas” to keep them alive.
“I like to think the show is good at surprises in that way and it makes you feel like ‘oh God no!’ but that’s a good feeling because you’re reacting and engaging, which is what we want. I mean I’m still not over Ned Stark,” he said, saying some of the deaths this season might have a similar punch to when Sean Bean’s character was killed without warning in Game of Thrones.
Jonathan Pryce is also back this season, as the ex MI5 spy David Cartwright, grandfather of agent River Cartwright (played by Jack Lowden). This storyline, Smith thinks, is one of the most emotive in the show’s history as Pryce’s character starts to suffer from dementia.
“One of my favourite scenes we’ve ever done is the scene of Jack and Jonathan where River starts to realise his grandfather is losing it and his grandfather realises it too. There was such tenderness and sadness and sort of anger from Jonathan’s character in those scenes. I thought he pushed the show to a different level and different area.”
Watching the scene gave him “an idea for what we’re going to do in season four” and he went off “and wrote the scene pretty much straight away… I’m really proud of what [will] happen with that.”
The show also has a political edge this season too, Smith explains. “It probably confirms people’s suspicions that the people in charge maybe don’t know what they’re doing and are just in it for themselves,” he said. “It’s probably all the kind of stuff we’ve seen from the COVID enquiry which is obviously more serious than our drama.”
In the future, Smith “loves the idea” of there being a Slow Horses film and thinks there are lots of “different places” you can take the show. He also loves the fact The Rolling Stones are back as we once again get to hear Mick Jagger sing the show’s theme song.
“When they said ‘let’s try and get Mick Jagger’, I was like ‘no, that’s a waste of time, he’ll never do it’. But then he read the books and agreed,” he explains. “He gave us a stamp of quality because I think subliminally if you hear Mick Jagger singing on a TV show, you think ‘this is probably alright’ because he’s not going to waste his time with something rubbish. Also, because he read the books, the lyrics are perfect… he starts singing ‘surrounded by losers, misfits and boozers,’ and he’s told us what the whole show is about – it sets up the show.
“It’s of the world [too]. Mick is obviously London and this show is London. So I can’t imagine anyone else ever doing it.”
‘Slow Horses’ season three streams on Apple TV+ from November 29