[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Slow Horses Season 4 premiere “Identity Theft.”]
Agent down! Actually…
The consistently excellent Slow Horses begins its fourth season with a bombing at a shopping center and a shooting that results in Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) being called to identify the body of one of his own. River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) is at first unsure about going to see his grandfather, David (Jonathan Pryce)—he has dementia and thinks he’s being watched—but Louisa Guy (Rosalind Eleazar) convinces him otherwise. Despite being told he’s his grandson, David shoots the man who enters his house. Jackson then is brought in and identifies the body as River’s. However, Jackson then goes to Catherine Standish’s (Saskia Reeves) because he knows River’s alive and there—his car is outside. River’s no longer there, but David is.
Below, Reeves talks about that gesture of trust, Jackson and Standish’s tense dynamic, and more.
Why do you think River trusts Standish at this time when he wants the world to think he’s dead and with the person he cares about most, his grandfather?
Saskia Reeves: Yeah, that’s something he does, isn’t it? It proved to me—when I read it, it’s like, okay, she is very loyal. He trusts that she is going to be able to protect David from Lamb or the Park, that she will be able to create a safe environment, look after him. She won’t ask too many questions. She won’t be scared. Yeah, it says a lot about Catherine, doesn’t it? I mean, the fact that Lamb outplays her is actually quite funny, but yeah, it’s a great way to start off the series for my character.
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How much did Standish love that she had one over on Jackson, even just for a little bit in the time that she doesn’t know he realizes what’s going on? Especially considering how complicated and tense things are between them.
That’s a very good point. I’m sure that first moment of, I don’t want you here and I can be as brittle and crisp and rude to you as I want because you’re going to be leaving now and I don’t have to put up with your rubbish anymore. So yes, I’m sure there’s that thing. And also I think she’s like, oh, damn, of course he’d be the first one to turn up, even though he’s not—He’s pretty smart. He’s smarter than most. Eventually, people will start probably asking the same questions as he’s done.
It’s funny—sometimes when I talk about the character or the story, you suddenly become very conscious of decisions or thinking that actually when I was doing it, I wasn’t thinking about that, but I was definitely enjoying being rude to him. And then as one talks about it, one becomes a bit more aware, a bit more self-conscious about what’s happening.
What do you enjoy most about Standish and Jackson’s dynamic? It is so rich.
He can be so rude, and that means that you can be rude back, but in your own way. That’s always good fun. To hold those two things of actual very deep respect and real disdain is an interesting contradiction, and it’s lovely to have contradictions to play as an actor. To have something to push against is really enjoyable.
There’s no dynamic like it on the show. The things he says to her, no one would say to her, like about drinking, but she just responds right away. She knows that he will go there.
He can be incredibly straight with her, too. He can tell her things and share things with her that he doesn’t with other people, too, and she knows that as well. We’ve seen that through the series before, how he’ll do that, so she can ask him a direct question because they have a working relationship, which is she’s his personal assistant. She runs the office with him. She’s his deputy artistic director, say like a theater if you were running a theater or if you’re running a production company.
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She is trying to quit. She talks about sending the same letter to HR multiple times. But she also loves the job. Does she really want to leave if maybe that might be best for her and put her in a better position, perhaps even to come back if things change?
I don’t know. I think when you’re trying to leave a relationship that isn’t good for you and you’re like, oh, I should leave… I mean, I’m sure she’s thought that many times. What am I doing here? I need to leave. Why am I putting up with this? And then finally something happens and she’s like, right, that’s it, all of you, I have had enough of this. This is terrible. But then maybe you walk out the next day, your anger subsides, another few days go by and your anger’s gone and you go, oh, hang on a minute. What do I do now? But I don’t think I have to worry about that as an actor yet because the world comes to her. So I’ve been sort of saved from having to work that problem out or what would’ve happened if because she doesn’t have time to think about that.
What do you think Standish would think of her replacement, Moira (Joanna Scanlan)?
I’m sure she’s a little bit jealous, but I think she can tell pretty quick that Moira is not going to last in a place like this. Nobody could last in a place like this. You need a particular type of talent and a particular type of personality to manage this. And I think maybe Catherine learns how fond people are of her a bit, that she does have a place. But I think that’s what I love about the scripts for this show. Nothing is black and white. They do tend to live in the gray areas of the unknown, and nothing is absolutely definite. So she definitely quit and yet she’s been sort of dragged in again and you make a decision and then you change your mind. It’s quite complex and subtle in that way, actually, for a TV drama about spies. It has many complexities, I think.
When you said that she has a place, that made me think it is really kind of like a family of misfits, but it’s not a family in the sense that you usually see on a TV show because of everything that everyone is going through. You can see that they have a place together, but they’re not that close-knit.
You know the film Seven Samurai? They made another film called the Dirty Dozen, and it’s about all these misfits coming together and then they bond and then they create this incredible force and good wins out, doesn’t it? You see the stories that bring them all together and how messed up they are yet they come through, and I think Slow Horses flips that a bit on its head. It’s like, yes, as you quite beautifully described, they come together, but they’re still not a family. They’re bickering. I think it’s because they’ve been pushed out by the Park and they all want to go back because that’s where the work is. And there’s that competitive element of, well, I want to go back there. I’m going to be a spy again. I don’t want to stay in this dump. I don’t want to work for him. And yet they end up in all these situations together. But as you say, they’re sort of pulling in the opposite direction. It is all these dichotomies, isn’t it?
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What can you preview about what’s ahead with the mystery this season and Standish’s role in it?
The personal element of series four is an unusual story detail. We see River with his grandfather who’s very ill. We see Catherine at home. We see some really interesting new characters. We see Diana Taverner [Kristin Scott Thomas] in a different position. She didn’t get the job she wanted to. How’s that going to play out? Something is seriously wrong. There’s problems they have to solve that are very scary problems, bombs in shopping centers. But the personal element of River still having to manage his grandfather and Catherine at home struggling with all this—Is she working for them? Isn’t she working for them?—gives it a very interesting step into the rest of the series, and I think people will find it incredibly satisfying, actually. I think it’s a really strong series, and I know I’m biased.
I like the moments we get the season of Standish and David together. She approaches him in such a different way than Jackson does.
Absolutely. But there’s so many details that I love about this story. There’s another character that comes in and Catherine knows him of old, and all you need is a couple of lines for you to realize they’ve got history. It’s so much history. These people know each other. They’ve been working in this industry together. I mean, you can imagine it in a publishing house. I imagine writers who are failed or who have drunk away their success and new ones coming in, the tension.
Slow Horses, Wednesdays, Apple TV+
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