Slow Horses, the wry and flatulent anti-Bond espionage series streaming on Apple TV+, has been exactly the show its relatively cult following has come to love from the day the cast and crew began filming the first episode, says showrunner Will Smith. The British series, which debuted in 2022, follows Oscar winner Gary Oldman’s churlish and disheveled Jackson Lamb as the leader of a team of disgraced and disowned MI5 agents scrappily and shabbily getting the job done. In the season three finale, in what has become a bit of a recurring scene for the series, Oldman plays off the Oscar-nominated Kristin Scott Thomas’ character, MI5 deputy director general Diana Taverner. They dance around each other, revealing character motivations and insights as they revisit the actions that have put them where they are heading into the season to come.
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Lamb and Taverner have this respect-hate relationship built on a long history of working in the service together. Each season wraps with a similar scene of their back-and-forth, but Will Smith wanted to avoid the scene becoming stale. “In seasons one and two, we’ve had them always meet on the bench by Regent’s Canal. But in the final episode they both go to meet and the bench is gone. That’s partly because that’s the thing of TV, it has to be the same but different,” he says. “It’s just trying to freshen things up, and I just thought it was fun.”
Coming off a dramatic season ending involving shootouts, standoffs and explosions, it was crucial for the show to take a step back to examine how the characters are affected by everything that’s happened. “I enjoy the aftermath as much as the action because I want to see how it’s changed the characters, where they’re going, where everything has landed,” says Smith. “I love all aspects of the show, but what underpins it are the characters. And because we have one of the most phenomenal casts you could ever assemble, I believe everything. I believe every moment of the show.”
Lamb, while a brilliant spy, can be verbally abusive and beyond unpleasant, but Gary Oldman plays him with a heart that squeaks through. This scene comes after a blowup with Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves), a character he’s known for years who’s been kidnapped. “We know how important Catherine is to Lamb, and I have my own theories about what it is, but he’s just shrugging it off and he’s hiding his hurt within a joke,” explains Smith.
“Eating has become part of the Lamb character. One of the things I remember about this scene is Gary eating 12 ice creams, and the guilt I feel because of that.”
In the final scene, Oldman’s Lamb gestures to offer Taverner a bite of ice cream. She simply steps away from him in a moment that underscores how comfortable the two actors are playing off each other. “It’s two actors walking and talking, but it could be as electric as a shootout or a car chase,” Smith says. “They’ve got everything. It’s the rhythms, the looks, the energy. It is just sublime watching them.”
Initially this line didn’t work for Kristin Scott Thomas as a natural progression, Smith says. “Kristin, who is incredibly smart, incredibly sharp, pointed out, ‘Oh, we haven’t introduced happiness. That sort of comes out of nowhere, that happiness line.’ The solution was to put happiness as an idea into Lamb’s speech. So I think what we shot was him saying, ‘It’s you in the hot seat now, must make you happy. All bucks stop with you,’ which then leads to her line.”
Slow Horses follows these damaged, unhappy people who’ve been relegated and punted to the reject division of MI5, making their lives miserable. And though it’s been renewed already for a fourth season, dropping in September, and a subsequent fifth season, season three ends here with the perfect cap that could sum up the entire series if these characters never returned to the screen. “What I love — and I’m English, so it’s hard for me to say this — but what I’m proud of about that last line is that it’s both a joke and clearly an end line to the scene — you can distinctly feel that’s the end of the [season], and there’s a melancholic truth to the show. I think if I had to pick a line that summed up the series, it would probably be that line.”
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
