Sir Gary Oldman — he received a British knighthood in King Charles’ June birthday honors list — appears on Zoom at his home in Palm Springs in front of a display of his own black-and-white photographs. “I do all sorts of photography, but I also do 19th century wet plate,” he says. “I just like the process. I don’t do digital, I do film. I like the developing.”
Oldman’s been “doing film” of the silver-screen sort since the 1980s, but the phenomenal global success of London-based spy thriller “Slow Horses,” which returns for its fifth season on Apple TV+ next month, has changed everything for the Oscar winner (2017’s “Darkest Hour”). Emmy-nominated as lead actor in a drama series for the second consecutive year for his turn as slovenly Jackson Lamb, leader of an out-of-favor group of spies nicknamed the Slow Horses, Oldman could not be more thrilled. In fact, it’s virtually impossible to tell whether he’s more psyched about “Slow Horses” or being knighted. Either way, he’s full of the joys of his very hot summer. “Big sky, big mountain and 102 here at the moment,” he beams. He finds L.A. too chilly now.
“I’m thrilled with it,” he grins of his knighthood, “and no, I wasn’t angling for it. I mean, I’ve done some stuff for charity over the years, and I would like to think I’m a good export, an ambassador of Britain. I have a green card, but I don’t have American citizenship. I’m still a British subject.”
Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb in “Slow Horses.”
(Apple TV+)
He’s thrilled too about his Emmy nomination, but less enamored of relentless questions about “how you pull the rabbit out of the hat.” “Can’t it just be a bloody mystery? Why do we have to sort of take it all apart?” he asks. “I think half of the time I make it up. I don’t know, I just do. It’s like you have a facility for something. It’s like asking a tennis player, ‘How do you return the ball?’ ‘I’ve just been able to do it since I was 12.’ I don’t look up videos of Peter O’Toole talking about acting.”
Oldman notes he moved to Hollywood “completely by accident” because he “wanted to go to the place where they were making films so I could practice.” Film, he did, ad infinitum, particularly enjoying the spy genre in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” which garnered him his first Oscar nomination as lead actor in 2012, long before Jackson Lamb appeared on his radar.
It appears “Slow Horses” might satisfy part of his creative itch for some years to come. Season 6 is already in the can, and Season 7 is due to start filming this fall. “It is something I could just do. Can I see an end? I don’t know,” he says. “I love the people and the show and the character. But it’s nothing to do with that. Apple write the checks and have been generous in their check-writing. I mean, how do you feel? Do you think people would eventually just get fed up with it?”
I demur, along with members of the British royal family apparently. “The Queen [Camilla] said to me, ‘Are there any more?’ I’m led to believe that they like ‘Slow Horses.’ And in Palm Springs of all places, I’ll go to the hardware store or the supermarket and people will come up to me and say, ‘When’s “Slow Horses” coming back?’”
His facility for the simple stuff does, however, fail him occasionally. “Yes, suddenly you can’t walk in a room. Or get out of a car. I’ve walked into a room my entire life. I’ve got out of so many cars I couldn’t count and now, yeah, even just raising a cup. It’s the funniest thing, it will trip you up.” To date, he has not forgotten how to eat, which is fortunate given Lamb’s gargantuan appetite and Oldman’s impatience with eating scenes where actors push their food around. “I remember the noodles scene in Season 2, and you know Lamb is an eater; I’m always eating in the show, and you can’t fake it. So one morning I ate 17 or 18 bowls of noodles and then it was, ‘OK, we’re gonna break for lunch, can I get you anything?’”
“It’s nice to be in regular employment,” Oldman says of “Slow Horses,” which returns for its fifth season next month.
(Gisele Schmidt)
Oldman’s most recent “charity work” was his pro bono four-week run this spring of Samuel Beckett’s one-man play “Krapp’s Last Tape” at York Theatre Royal, scene of his professional stage debut in 1979 and his first U.K. stage appearance in 37 years. “I kind of got kidnapped by film and with all the other life experiences — kids, divorce, marriage, divorce, sobriety,” he says. “You turn around and think, ‘When did I last do a play?’ And I thought, ‘I’d really like to do it, let me put my toe back in the water.’” He wondered, “Well, will anyone come? Is anyone interested? I was worried whether we’d fill 700 or 800 seats, and then the day they announced the tickets, their computer crashed.” There’s that huge smile again, one suggesting he still can’t quite believe it.
Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t waste time worrying too much about his place in the Hollywood pantheon. “Maybe there are people somewhere in an executive office sitting around saying, ‘What about Gary Oldman for this role?’ and ‘No, he’s unavailable because he’s doing the show.’ But I like what ‘Slow Horses’ has afforded me over the last few years. I get some downtime, I got to do theater, I’ve got my photography and other things, rather than thinking about this or that film and ‘they want you but they don’t know if they can go this year.’
“I feel so privileged, so bloody lucky that at 67 years old, I’m in a show of this caliber, that people have really actually embraced. I’m so very, very blessed, and it’s also nice to know that you’re going to be working. Yeah, it’s nice to be in regular employment.”
