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Gary Oldman received the Edinburgh TV Festival’s Global Icon Award on Wednesday and, unsurprisingly, spent much of the time in an on-stage conversation discussing his most famous — and current — TV character.
“For the
last six years, I’ve had the pleasure of inhabiting Jackson Lamb, a man who has single-handedly lowered the public’s expectation of personal hygiene,” he said of his increasingly iconic spy on the Apple TV series “Slow Horses,” a creation now known as much for his flatulence as his undercover surveillance skills.
“It’s been an absolute joy to play, and I owe that joy to our wonderful writers, our extraordinary cast, our our crew, our producers.”
It was a role Oldman said “fell from the sky” at just the right time in his life, adding that Lamb “has not filter, he is direct, he can’t be arsed with the social norms — that’s the fun of playing him.”
But Oldman also claimed that one of the key ingredients behind the success of “Slow Horses” was ensuring that there wasn’t a lengthy wait between seasons, noting that the production team worked hard to “keep the momentum of the show going.”
Speaking of other series, he said: “You invest in these people, these fictional people, and then the show ends, and you’ve got to wait two and a half years.” With “Slow Horses,” however, when Apple TV airs the next season next month, it’ll the sixth season in the space of just four years. But Oldman said it wasn’t easy and that it could sometimes be a “struggle and a fight” to convince people to return to ensure they were “keeping on top of the quality.”
As he noted: ‘You can’t just say, ‘Well, we can sort of fudge our way through this one because season 5 was successful.’ We’re going to make season 6 even better.”
