Chris Connor chats with Slow Horses star Joanna Scanlan…
With Slow Horses’ fourth season now well under way, we had the pleasure of speaking with one of its stars Joanna Scanlan about Moira, a new addition to the Slough House team. She discussed the dynamic Moria brings, acting opposite Gary Oldman and how she found reuniting with The Thick of It’s Will Smith, who is the Slow Horses showrunner.
There’s a Thick of It connection with Will Smith. How have you found going from acting with him to him as the showrunner here?
Will Smith, when we were doing The Thick of It, was the character and the actor and the person who made me laugh more than anybody else. I have a kind of delight in his ticklish comedy and his way of seeing the world. He can say literally half a sentence to me, and I find I’m on the floor. So, Will always has me in stitches at every point. He had this show when he was a stand-up, where he took questions from the audience about all the 176 episodes of Bergerac that he knew them inside, out and back to front, you could ask the audience, had to kind of try and get box him the question that he couldn’t answer. Bergerac of all the shows, that’s the sort of thing that really makes me laugh, that he should choose Bergerac, of all the TV shows of the 1980s to focus on. So, he just makes me laugh, massively.
Obviously, we then both went through the same school as it were, you know, the School of Armando Iannucci’s Thick of It, and it’s a very particular way of working and a very particular way of interacting with material. So, we had that together in the past, and then what I found with Will as a showrunner was that he would always be there. He was very much present on the floor and for all our rehearsals, very open to changing lines or adding to things. He was just funny. It felt like we were back in the Thick of It world, not as a place or a show, but just back in working together. He would make me laugh at every point, and I hope I made him laugh too. And we just kind of enjoyed a certain sort of hilarity around the Moiraisms of Moira.
What does Moira bring to this season of Slow Horses? The rest of the team’s quite established at this point, and she’s kind of a newbie.
I went round to some friends the other night and they said, “oh, I think she’s a baddie, I think she’s in there for a bad reason, a nefarious reason”. So, I think that’s what she brings. There’s an element of, “have they got somebody inside the building who is dangerous to them?” You know, is she spying on them for other purposes at the park or elsewhere? You know whether it’s from the Americans or whatever. So, I think she brings something of that. Who is this woman? Is she friend or foe? And I think that’s a bit hard to judge, actually, for quite a long time, I don’t know whether she’s friend or foe.
She seems like a sort of idiot to a certain extent, but then you can can see this more to her than that. So, I think she she adds something of that. I think she also gives us this interplay between Slough House and the park. It’s always really important to have that into play. And she also is a way of getting to, ultimately, to get to Whelan who seems so Teflon and so impossible to kind of dislodge. So, in that way, she’s sort of operating for Taverner to kind of benefit her. But having said all that, I think Moira is only in there for herself. She is quite amoral. I think she’s she doesn’t have anybody else’s good at heart other than her own. Keeping herself nice and tidy.
You share a lot of scenes with Gary Oldman. How have you found the interactions between Moira and Jackson Lamb?
Really lovely and very enjoyable and it’s a great honour and a privilege to play with somebody who is, frankly, as good as Gary. He gives you a huge amount. He just embodies Jackson in a way that I think that’s what people love, isn’t it? When they watch the show, it just is that farting, belching brain. In the end, you know that he’s going to find a way through things. So, I think there’s something very enjoyable about playing with him as an actor and a character, and I could do that all day long for the rest of my life. You know, 24/7, 365, it really is such a pleasure. With that kind of material underneath, both the books and Will’s writing underneath the machines. You know, it’s like an iceberg. I’m just there on the very, very, top, but underneath it, we’ve got so much strength and ballast that you don’t have to do that much, because it’s the last bit of the story. Playing it with Gary is, as I say, it’s just heavenly.
You mentioned the books there. Had you read the Mick Herron books before joining the show?
No, I hadn’t, but I obviously did for this. In theory, they would have been up my street, because I liked them a lot. I read quite a lot of spy fiction. I love it. During this I was talking to Will, actually, and we talked about the debt that Mick Herron has to le Carré and then I thought, “oh gosh, well, yeah”, I’ve never actually read le Carré because when, although I’m the right age for it when it was all coming out, it felt like it was very much like it was the reading that boys would do, and not girls. I don’t feel there was an entry point for me as a female reader.
So, I never read any of them. Then whilst we were shooting this, I started to read the le Carré books, and now I’m just obsessed with them. That was really strange that it felt so much of a closed door to me as a young reader because I’m a voracious reader. I just didn’t think that. I just thought I was only allowed to read certain things, or not allowed, but interested. You know, it felt like a world removed. Now I realise the absolute literary genius that le Carré is. Then I’ve been reading the Mick Herron books and seeing how this, this kind of literary Interplay that we have in British spy fiction, which is where you get something that’s solidly of literary value, that’s not just, you know, plot-driven, although I like a plot-driven spy thriller too.
How do you think Moira differs to Catherine Standish?
She’s much better at her job. I think Moira thinks she’s better at her job anyway. She thinks that the job is all about the administrative skills rather than the human people skills. Standish has got quite a lot of humanity about her and a lot of perhaps instinctive understanding of frailty, and I think Moira just really doesn’t go into any of that at all. So, she sees herself as infinitely superior to Standish, also with poor Standish’s drink problem, things like that. She would just see it as a weakness. I think she pities her in the most arrogant way. But then, on the other hand maybe we need more Moiras in the world who just get on with their job and do it very well and are not trying to look for glory. Not that Standish ever looks for glory, but she’s almost got the glory of the other end of the drama, the glory of the victimhood.
Who do you think would be a tougher boss? Malcolm or Jackson Lamb?
Well, interestingly to Terri Coverley, I never had a cross word with Malcolm. He never criticised Terri if you go back, you clear through every episode, you will not find him saying a negative word to Terri, and that is because Terry was right about things, and everybody thought she wasn’t, but she was, and he saw it. Actually, we were quite in sync. That said, I think as in terms of bosses, I think by preference Jackson probably picks it as being the worse boss. At least you don’t have the stench to deal with Malcolm Tucker, he doesn’t actually smell.
Is there anything else you would like to tell us about Moira’s arc in the series?
For readers of the books I think Will kind of altered Moira slightly from Spook Street; he took the plot strand, but I think he then added elements to her that aren’t in the book, particularly, you know, he gave her a certain polish. In the book, she wears cardies and seems a bit sort of Mrs Tiggy Winkle. She is not really that in the show at all. She is a bit more of a kind of 80s career girl, but who’s ended up, you know, being a super administrator. I thought that was a very interesting development, and I think it was perhaps more modern than the version of her that we have in the novel.
I think it is also partly to make sure that there was a physical visual difference between her and Standish, so that there’s no confusion that they’re the same type of person at all. It really chimed with me. I thought, yes, women of my age and generation who started their careers in the 80s, 90s, they couldn’t afford to look as if they didn’t do a good job. So that sense of like presentation, even where it is a little bit eccentric looking, but she’s not downbeat. I thought that was very interesting, and I think that’s in the way they characterise her as well.
Many thanks to Joanna Scanlan for taking the time for this interview. You can read our reviews of Slow Horses here.
Chris Connor