🎧 Gary Oldman Has Spies on the Prize
The 'Slow Horses' star explains why his TV experience reminds him of theater and reveals his makeup secrets. Plus: Awards season controversies on the horizon
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Gary Oldman has filmed five seasons of television in the past four years, and he’s not sure why everyone else isn’t working at the same pace. “It means that the audiences are not waiting two or three years between seasons,” he says with the enthusiasm of a fan who’s used to those kinds of interminable waits. “I mean, I loved Severance. I just thought it was fantastic. And where is it?”
Severance will at last be returning to Apple TV+ in January, sitting on the service alongside Oldman’s Slow Horses, which debuts its fourth season next month, just a few weeks before Oldman and several of the show’s creatives will attend the Emmys as nominees. On this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, I talk to Oldman about earning his second Emmy nomination — his first was for a guest role on Friends, believe it or not — and the joy he takes in working alongside the Slow Horses cast season after season.
“I’ve been a fan of long-form TV for a long time, and I would watch it sometimes with a little envy of coming in every day, and the family aspect of it,” says Oldman, an Oscar winner who’s been a movie star for three decades now. His work on Slow Horses, he says, is “more akin to a theater company than anything I’ve experienced.”
Oldman plays the slovenly spy Jackson Lamb, whose disheveled appearance and endless cutting remarks allow him to hide his cunning spycraft in plain sight. The actor has grown his hair long for the part — “I kind of have to carry him around with me and dress it up to try and look less Lamb in my normal everyday life.” In our conversation, he shares the process in the makeup trailer to turn him into Lamb, but given what he’s been through for other roles, he insisted to me, “I’ve got it relatively easy on this one.”
This week’s podcast also includes a conversation with my guest co-host Tyler Coates, a veteran of covering awards season. Tyler helped me break down just how essential awards campaigns are to the Hollywood ecosystem — and predicted the drama that might be ahead this time around. Hear it all on this week’s episode, and subscribe here.