Offended agent Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) and his team — who showed off the real M15 in their own spy game in the spectacular first season — return with the first two episodes of “Slow Horses” Season 2 of Apple TV+, and Oldman Secrets Says Lamb will be front and center this season.
Prior to the premiere, Oldman told TheWrap that some of his character’s secrets “will be out” in the form of expressions. Despite the fact that her character is one of those kept in the dark by Catherine Standish Lamb, Saskia Reeves insists that those secrets are essential to spying on both sides of the game in the “Slow Horse” novels by Mick Herron. .
In the Season 1 finale, Lamb confides in Standish that, in the apparent suicide of former MI5 Director General Charles Partner, he “gave him the gun.” However, we learn that it was Lamb who actually shot the partner and staged the scene as if he had taken his own life.
The Wrap: Lamb has lied to Katherine enough, hasn’t he?
Gary Oldman: I have, yes. I’m not too forthcoming with my past. this will pass. It will evolve as we go along. But, yeah, I do hide some real dark secrets. I guess that’s who they are, right? It’s the people we play. They are full of mysteries.
Is it fun to handle that tension?
old man: Yeah it is. We had a terrifying scene at the end of Season 1 where Katherine confronts Lamb and says, “I really want to know what happened.” And I find it funny, because I lie. I lie I do. and me too [tell the truth] in a lie I mean, if you want to see lines like, “I gave him the gun,” when he gave her the gun, literally. So those scenes are layered. And they’re great fun. And if you have an amazing actor you’re working with, that’s what gets you out of bed in the morning and that’s why we work, right?
In this season, you come face to face with a former KGB agent. Did you learn about the KGB from John Le Carré’s Cold War novels? (Oldman received his first Oscar nomination for playing one of the Spymaster’s most famous agents in 2011’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.”)
old man: It’s kind of, what’s the word… epochal experience? We grow up, are we not familiar with the KGB or have no idea about it?
Saskia Reeves: It’s amazing how we really aren’t that different. You know, all “on a need to know basis,” what you said was lying to Katherine. It’s also on a need-to-know basis, without upsetting Applecart or upsetting the status quo. That’s what Russians do. That’s what the Chinese do. We all do it in an attempt to dominate each other. And then there are the similarities, that these people have gone through the same traumas, the same problems: losing friends, being dominated by certain kinds of bosses… They share a lot, even though they’re Russian and we’re English. They are like two sides of the same coin. (Laughs) I think there’s probably a Russian Catherine Standish somewhere. Katrina.
old man: (smiles and adopts a heavy Russian accent) Katerina broz-nos-ni-vech.
Reeves: And she lives in Moscow. (laughs)
The drama’s six-episode second season premieres globally on Apple TV+, with the first two episodes airing on Friday, December 2, followed by a new episode each Friday.
