Gary Oldman talks 'Slow Horses' Season 4 and how he chooses roles 'by just saying no'

The list of characters played by Gary Oldman over the past four decades seems like a clerical error.

Surely the same actor could not play Dracula, Winston Churchill, Sid Vicious and Lee Harvey Oswald. And let’s add to that motley crew Jackson Lamb, the impossibly disheveled supersleuth in Apple TV+'s “Slow Horses,” which just returned for its fourth season (new episodes streaming Wednesdays).

Far from self-important, Oldman can’t resist a delicious joke at the expense of his latest character, who seems like he could be James Bond’s cagey boss M ... if he was big on flatulence, alcohol and never showering.

“Some wit somewhere said, ‘Oldman played (spy) George Smiley (in the 2011 movie “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”), and now he’s playing George Smelly,” Oldman tells USA TODAY. “I wish I’d thought of that one.”

But ol’ George Smelly hasn’t lost his touch. In the new season, Lamb, who leads a group of talented rejects from Britain’s spy agency MI5, has to use his instincts, contacts and sometimes a large taxi to battle a new foe that is endangering one of his agents.

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As Season 3 unfolded, the Slow Horses team discovered that a secret group of killer operatives was working for the head of MI5. The new season finds Lamb’s young operative River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) in France, and in the clutches of a mercenary group with ties to both the Horses and his familial past.

“It’s a season that becomes more personal (for Lamb), it’s now very close to home,” Oldman, 66, says from his Palm Springs, California, home, after recently wrapping production of Season 5 in England.

“We’ve now got a villain who is directly connected to influencing the Slow Horses,” he says. “But overall, I’d say we’ve got the same chefs on the show, we’re just switching up the menu.”

After four seasons, the ‘Slow Horses’ gang are ‘all a family,’ says Gary Oldman

Oldman says he’s enamored not only of the show, which is based on novels by Mick Herron, but also his cast, which includes Kristin Scott Thomas as Diana Taverner, his MI5 sparring partner, and Jonathan Pryce as his former boss David Cartwright. (The show is a nine-time Emmy nominee this year, competing for best drama.)

“At this point, we’re all a family, the cast, the crew, and we see each other often,” says Oldman.

Asked how he chooses the characters he'll play, Oldman says it is usually the rest of “just saying ‘No’ to almost everything, truly. I’ll think, I can’t play Churchill, that’s ridiculous. And then if it keeps coming back, I know maybe it’s something that is meant to be.”

Oldman’s attachment to "Horses" resulted from a comical list of demands he made to his producing partner, Douglas Urbanski.

“I said to Doug, and I swear this is true, ‘Please find me something where I can use my own accent, I don’t have costume changes and I’m not rolling around in blood and mud,” he says. “Oh, and it should be a longform TV series, and the writing needs to be fantastic.”

Fast forward a few weeks, and the two men were sitting side by side on a plane, and Urbanski just started to laugh while reading a script.

“I said ‘What’s so funny?’ and Doug said, ‘I’m reading a character who’s about to become your best friend,’” recalls Oldman. “It just fell from the sky.”

For Gary Oldman, Jackson Lamb is a joy to play because he 'cuts through all the crap'

Oldman says what he loves most about playing Lamb is his unfiltered directness. “He cuts through all the crap, which is wonderful,” he says.

For now, Oldman is content to inhabit Lamb’s rumpled clothes for “as long as Apple will let us do the show,” and has no big movie parts on the horizon.

That’s not to say he doesn’t have fond memories of some of those. He took on the title role in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992) both to work with the legendary director and for one singular line reading. “I read, ‘I’ve crossed oceans of time to find you,’ and I thought wow, it’s worth making a movie just to say that line.”

He has similar high praise for Oliver Stone, his notoriously demanding director on “JFK,” and David Fincher, a longtime friend whom he finally teamed up with to play blacklisted screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz in “Mank” (2020).

One of his most enduring memories is playing opposite Anthony Hopkins, a mentor and friend, in Ridley Scott’s “Silence of the Lambs” sequel “Hannibal” (2001), one of the few movies he accepted on the spot to play Hannibal Lecter’s surviving victim, Mason Verger.

“Tony (Hopkins) is an inspiration, and while he may come off as someone who says (here Oldman leaps into a Hopkins impression), ‘Oh, acting is easy, you just learn the lines and try not to bump into furniture,’ he’s not being truthful; it’s all about hard work."

Oldman says he brings that same work ethic to “Horses” to set a standard for younger cast members. “You get there early having done your work, you know your lines, you’re ready, and then within that, you try and have some fun,” he says.

Although there is plenty of death and destruction in “Horses,” it's clear Oldman is having a ball, whether it’s skewering underlings with wicked barbs or insisting that his office remain a garbage dump.

“I’m always being mistaken for a delivery man or a tramp or a homeless person,” he says with a cackle. “But then again, it’s all part of the spycraft, isn’t it, the whole judging a book by its cover thing. People will underestimate you, and Lamb uses that to his advantage.”

All very true. But, honestly, can’t the guy take at least one shower?

Oldman laughs. “Well, in Season 3, I did wash my armpits,” he says. “Good enough for you?”