Gary Oldman is one of our most versatile working actors, becoming widely beloved for villainous turns from Leon: The Professional and The Fifth Element to his work as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter franchise and James Gordon in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy, or his Academy Award-winning performance as Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour. Since then, he’s made major waves in his portrayal of Jackson Lamb, the gruff head of MI-5’s house for wayward spies, Slough House, in the excellent Apple TV+ series Slow Horses.

Slow Horses, adapting the Mick Herron novel series about a group of spies sent to MI-5 spy purgatory at Slough House after making significant mistakes or major enemies, is currently in its excellent fourth season. The series stars Oldman as well as Jack Lowden, whose character, River Cartwright, learns a lot about his own family history while pursuing the source of a deadly bomb in Season 4. It’s a tense, revealing season that cements Slow Horses as top-shelf spy TV and paves the way for an incredible fifth season.

Collider sat down with Oldman about Jackson Lamb’s more unique attributes as an MI-5, his antagonism versus the agency, and more. You can read the first part of our interview below, and stay tuned as Season 4 rolls along for a more revealing discussion of one of its most exciting scenes.

Reliability Makes Jackson Lamb Fun To Play for Gary Oldman

COLLIDER: Jackson Lamb is such an interesting character because he’s effective and intelligent, but he weaponizes slovenliness, and he doesn’t easily fit the typology between hero/antihero/villain. Coming into Season 4, how would you define him? How has your understanding of him evolved?

GARY OLDMAN: Well, he’s in a way your mainstay, but the thing about coming back to each season… the dye is set with the lad. I don’t expect to read a script… elements of him are revealed, slight little reveals where we get a sense of who he maybe was in the past. We’ve just wrapped Season 5. There’s a lot more Jackson Lamb that we learn there, but I think, every time we come back to it, we know what we’re gonna get. We’re gonna come back and revisit that character. I’m not gonna open the script and read some crazy character arc… he’s a constant.

If you like, like you say, the slovenliness, the directness, the crudeness, the flatulence, it’s all weaponized. If you enjoy that, then you’re gonna come back and get more of that. Then we see that set guy each time in a different scenario… I don’t read these scripts every time and think, “Oh, that’s a leap.” We certainly jump on things if we think “No, he would never say that.” It’s the reliability, it’s the familiarity of it that I embrace, that I enjoy playing each time.

Who Is Jackson Lamb’s Most Persistent Adversary, According to Gary Oldman?

His mindset allows him to be a step ahead of a lot of other characters at discerning secrets and figuring out the shadier things that are happening. What is it about his mindset that makes him so effective?

OLDMAN: I think he probably does his best work when he’s got his feet up on his desk and his eyes are closed. Again, they talk about him being slovenly and lazy: he’s up there snoozing, phoning it in, but actually, he’s working probably harder than they are. He gives the appearance, a persona, in a way, he’s put together. He’s sort of created this character, in a sense. It’s almost like he’s found the way to do his job better. What better way to say, “I’m off to this place, Slough House, I’m kind of really taking a back seat, and I’m packing it all in.” And, in fact, you’re really not taking a back seat, and you’re up against the machine.

Oddly, yes, these events happen, and there’s an adversary and a villain that comes through each time, but who is the bad guy that he seems to always be up against every season? It’s MI-5. It’s the bureaucracy, it’s the corruption. It’s the narcissism of all of that, which he, in a way, has turned his back on… and in his own weird, small, smelly way, he can sort of chip away at it… or at least piss them off. At least he could get some joy from winding [Taverner] up. It might even appear childish and petty, but I think he takes great pride in ruining her day.

Slow Horses Season 4 is available to stream on Apple TV+, with new episodes premiering Wednesdays.

Watch on Apple TV+