The prospect of playing a character who revels in a distinct lack of personal hygiene – not to mention a huge flatulence problem – would surely be an affront to the vanity of many Hollywood A-listers. Not Gary Oldman. His latest screen outing as the surly anti-hero Jackson Lamb may require having greasy hair, broken veins and sallow skin – all rendered via a 30-minute ‘make-under’ – but the actor, who has just celebrated his 66th birthday, insists that despite these indignities, the role was ‘everything I was looking for’.
Even so, Oldman could little have envisaged how his turn as Lamb in the hit Apple TV+ spy series Slow Horses would become so celebrated – no mean feat for a serial award-winner who has garnered plaudits for representations of historical giants such as Winston Churchill in the 2017 war flick Darkest Hour and renowned fictional spymaster George Smiley in 2011’s Tinker Tailor Solider Spy.
For while Lamb is also a spy, he’s cut from a rather different cloth than the diffident, stylish Smiley. Brought to life in a series of books by author Mick Herron (Slow Horses is the name of the first), Lamb oversees a team of spies who have been demoted from MI5 for making catastrophic errors on the job.