Gary Oldman: cinema’s master of disguise returns as Slow Horses’ seedy spook

Photograph: Kate Green/Getty Images

There are bad bosses, and then there’s Jackson Lamb: rumpled, smelly, discouraging and mildly corrupt. Yet for fans of Slow Horses, the returning Apple TV+ series based on the espionage fiction of Mick Herron, this is a character that reliably emits a magnetic, congealed gleam. Like a day-old doner kebab.

Lamb, rendered in grimy perfection for the small screen by Gary Oldman, is the underachieving spymaster who has been mysteriously placed in charge of a sidelined team of defunct spooks.

In Oldman’s capable hands Lamb carries with him the burden not just of his own failures but the failures of the entire viewing audience. He drinks, he swears, he farts and he undermines his staff. For Lamb there is no dawn untainted with pessimism and no joke without a bleak truth at its core, courtesy of dialogue honed by showrunner Will Smith, late of The Thick of It and Veep.

It is a role that has brought Oldman an appreciative box-set fanbase, admittedly not quite yet rivalling his cinematic turn as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter franchise. And playing Lamb also appears to have let the actor draw deep on a career of off-beam, frequently unsettling performances. In 1988, he was a football hooligan in Alan Clarke’s 1989 TV film The Firm and playwright Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears. Then he was the punk Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy, the infamous assassin in Oliver Stone’s JFK and Dracula for Francis Ford Coppola in 1992.

In the years since, Oldman has become an admired Hollywood fixture, with recurring performances as Gordon in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films and an almost unrecognisable appearance this summer as President Truman in the director’s latest, Oppenheimer.

But Oldman has earned the most entertainment industry acclaim so far for playing a duo of contrasting and particularly British heroes. First he was George Smiley, John le Carré’s careful secret service maestro, in the film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and then Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. The former won him an Oscar nomination, the second secured him the gilt statuette itself. And two years ago he was nominated for a third time for an eponymous role in Mank, David Fincher’s paean to a past era of great American film-making.

‘Rumpled, smelly, discouraging and mildly corrupt’: Oldman as Jackson Lamb in season 3 of Slow Horses, starting in December. Photograph: Jack English/Apple

Every actor regularly changes shape to some extent, with the aid of costumes and props, but for Oldman this holds a special appeal. “I do love a disguise,” he admitted to Hollywood news website Deadline while he was in England filming an earlier season of Slow Horses. He had found it challenging, he went on, to divest himself of fake trappings for Fincher on the set of Mank. “You know, I do like to hide, but I’m hiding because it’s all my baggage and all my stuff, and so that was my problem, that wasn’t Fincher’s problem, and when he said: ‘No, I just want no veil between you and the audience’, it wasn’t that I resisted it, it made me a little anxious because, hey, even George Smiley has those glasses, you know – at least I could hide a little behind those glasses.”

Among the items of personal “baggage” that Oldman is referring to are probably his difficult childhood and a previous addiction to alcohol. He also has some failed marriages behind him – four, in fact, including one to British screen favourite Lesley Manville, the mother of his eldest son Alfie, and a brief one with the young Uma Thurman. He also had a relationship with Isabella Rossellini.

The nature of his childhood sorrows is commonly thought to have been explored to impressive effect in the film Nil By Mouth, which Oldman wrote and directed in 1997. Oldman, however, regardless of audience assumptions, has distanced the gritty story from the truth of his own family life. For the critic Nick James the film, which is set in Oldman’s native south London and depicts a violent father, is a highlight. “He’s a hero for me simply because of that film,” he said in 2014. “Put aside all his acting achievements and he’s still the person who has made the most authentic working-class Cockney movie ever.”

Oldman was born in New Cross in 1958 and his real-life father, Leonard, was a welder and former sailor who left home and Gary’s mother, Kathleen, when his son was seven. The teenage Gary, a Millwall fan, was initially drawn to the idea of a life in music, but he gravitated towards the theatre instead after seeing Malcolm McDowell on stage. He went on to drama school, appearing later at the Royal Court and with the Royal Shakespeare Company and then winning television roles, including parts in Mike Leigh’s film Meantime, as well as Clarke’s acclaimed football gang TV drama.

Film actors inevitably accrue their own bespoke flavour over a long career. The people they have portrayed before on screen begin to matter, despite their varied props and chameleon tendencies. A back catalogue of work slowly builds up a visual and emotional network, something which is linked to them whether they like it or not. Good casting directors know this and often let an actor play against their public image, so a villain is suddenly a hero or vice versa. Unfortunately, a star’s image is also affected by associations thrown up by their private life. In the golden days of Hollywood, the studios understood this risk and protected reputations ferociously as a result.

In the 1990s, the press picked up on rumours of Oldman’s hard drinking and unruly behaviour. More recently he has faced down accusations that he was violent to his third wife, Donya Fiorentino, the mother of his younger sons, Gulliver and Charlie. He denied her claims, which came out in an interview while he was being venerated for Darkest Hour in 2018.

Prior to that, in 2014, Oldman issued an apology for offending Jewish people. He had been quoted in a Playboy magazine interview sympathising with Mel Gibson, who had made antisemitic comments when he was stopped for drunk driving in 2006. Oldman was “deeply remorseful”, he said, for the way he had spoken and had really only meant to expose common hypocrisy. “I have an enormous personal affinity for the Jewish people in general, and those specifically in my life,” he added.

The chance to pick up a fresh set of props and a new, rich identity could become addictive for an actor with a “past”, whatever the audience might think they know of them. Oldman certainly appreciates the plum parts he has enjoyed down the years. “Some of the roles that I’ve played, I look back and think, you know, I was very lucky – I’ve done pretty well,” he has said. “I’ve had a few special ones come in and land on the desk.”

Film lovers can only hope that good scripts keep dropping down in front of Oldman. And if the desk he is sitting at when they land is the one Lamb occupies inside the set of grotty Slough House in Slow Horses, it will, fans know, be covered in dead whisky glasses and cigarette butts.