![]() Over the past 20 years, working with his Los Angeles-based business partner and manager Douglas Urbanski (an executive producer on Slow Horses), Oldman has kept busy across the spectrum of Hollywood filmmaking. He also wrote, produced and directed Nil By Mouth, a powerful London-set drama that won him Baftas for best screenplay and best British film. In the 1990s, Oldman, who still lives in the US, took on Hollywood, with challenging roles in Oliver Stone’s JFK and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as well as appearances in commercial hits such as Air Force One. Oldman’s 2011 performance in Tinker Tailor - a gutsy new take on the Smiley character first played to acclaim by Alec Guinness in the 1979 TV miniseries - is one of the high points of a career that began in the Royal Shakespeare Company and theatre work at London’s Royal Court before moving to the big screen with 1980s UK features such as Sid And Nancy and Prick Up Your Ears. He’s sort of Smiley if everything had gone wrong.” Career strides “He is often the smartest man in the room and has disdain and disgust for the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of the service. “The brain is sharp,” Lamb’s portrayer insists. ![]() “He gives the impression that he doesn’t care - but he probably cares more than most. “Lamb wants to give the impression to the world that he sits in that office on his arse all day, with his feet on the desk,” says Oldman, whose fellow cast members include Kristin Scott Thomas, Jonathan Pryce, Jack Lowden and Olivia Cooke. ![]() But he also found - and gradually reveals through the series’ six episodes - that his character has a hidden side, one that makes him closer than at first appears to Tinker Tailor’s outwardly serene and well-mannered Smiley. Slagging off other characters in something close to his own original south London accent, Oldman admits he found it “freeing to be so obnoxious” in the role. Scripted by UK writer and stand-up Will Smith, known for his work on The Thick Of It and Veep, the six-episode series casts Oldman as Jackson Lamb, the unkempt, unfiltered and flatulent leader of the sidelined spy team, who appears to have nothing but contempt for his underlings at the shabby department HQ called Slough House. “There aren’t many laughs in Le Carré, and I just thought the humour in this was so interesting.” “ has taken a genre that we’re so familiar with, and somewhat turned it on its head,” says Oldman. So when an adaptation of UK author Mick Herron’s 2010 novel Slow Horses - about agents in the dumping-ground department of the UK’s MI5 domestic intelligence service - came his way, the London-born Oscar-winner was primed to sign up. Some of the best acting I’ve seen in recent years, and best directing and best cinematography and best storylines and characters, has come through the small screen.” Oldman says he has been “a fan of long-form TV series forever. For another, the series - produced by the UK’s See-Saw Films for Apple TV+ - offers a decidedly different take on the espionage business. But things are a bit different than they were when Oldman embodied George Smiley in the 2011 feature version of John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.įor one thing, Slow Horses is a streaming series, Oldman’s first project for the home screen outside of a few TV guest-star appearances. Gary Oldman is not playing a spy for the first time in Slow Horses.
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