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EXCLUSIVE: There was a top-secret code name on the sides Ruth Bradley was sent to prepare for an audition. “I didn’t know who the characters were, I didn’t know what the show was, but I was like, this dialogue is some of the best dialogue I’ve ever read.”
Bradley immediately emailed her agent: “Who wrote this stuff? It’s amazing.”
Smiling, Bradley recounts: ”They said, ‘Well, actually, it’s Slow Horses.”
That was Bradley’s prelude into the world of Slow Horses and Jackson Lamb, the Falstaffian slob who came in from the cold to oversee intelligence service agents exiled to serve out of harm’s way — they think — in a dilapidated dwelling known as Slough House.
Bradley, at that point, had vaguely heard of Mick Herron’s series of award-winning thrillers upon which the show is based, but she hadn’t then seen any of the Apple TV+ drama starring Gary Oldman as the disheveled Lamb and Kristin Scott-Thomas as Diana ‘Lady Di’ Taverner, his duplicitous nemesis over at MI5 headquarters.
After two months of further auditions, Bradley landed the role of Emma Flyte, a former Metropolitan Police detective, known as a straight-shooter, who crosses over to work as Top Dog, head of internal security, for Taverner.
Bradley was introduced as Emma Flyte in the show’s fourth season which wraps up with its sixth, final, episode streaming on Wednesday, October 9, with a flummoxed Flyte trying to fathom what she’s got herself caught up in as bullets fly.
Those troubles are for Flyte to sort out. Bradley couldn’t be happier.
When she was a little girl, she saw a trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Dracula starring Oldman. “I was always drawn to really Gothic dark things, and then I was obsessed with Gary Oldman and Dracula. I was seven or eight years old so I had to go by the trailer and wouldn’t see the film until I was older.”
As time went on, Bradley would see more and more of Oldman’s work. And then she sought out the work of other actors who were also chameleons, like Peter Sellers and Daniel Day-Lewis. “I was like, ‘Oh, I can’t believe that’s the same actor in that. They’ve got a different accent. They look completely different They move differently.’”
Bradley decided that when she became an actor “I never kind of wanted to be known for me.”
She didn’t attend acting school. “I just studied Gary Oldman and Daniel Day-Lewis,” she says, although it’s clear that Oldman was her idol growing up.
“Sometimes it’s weird doing a scene looking into his eyes and thinking: “I’ve seen every performance you’ve ever given.” He was my absolute idol,” she says laughing as we go on to weigh up his acclaimed performances in Sid and Nancy and Prick Up Your Ears and rhapsodize over his masterpiece direction of Nil by Mouth.
Bradley moved from her native Dublin to try her luck in London, winning her first major role, when she was barely 21, in director Simone North’s 2009 Australian crime movie Her Skin, where she had to gain something like 56 pounds to portray real-life Caroline Reid Robertson, who was convicted of murdering a 15-year-old girl.
Piling on the pounds was the easy part. “The most difficult part was getting into the mind of somebody who would want to murder a child,” Bradley recalls.
The production had hired a criminologist who rehearsed Bradley and another girl. “He told me to grab her by the neck and wring her like a fish. I started crying. I was like, ‘I can’t rehearse this. This really happened.’ I promised that I could do it on the day of shooting, but I couldn’t rehearse it.”
It took five days to shoot the murder scene. Bradley remembers waking up in the middle of the night with her head full of outlandish thoughts. “That’s what happens to your brain. That’s the job. You kind of lose yourself and then you come out the other side.”
When the film wrapped she took a long , hard look at her increased girth in the mirror. “I had just completely disappeared.”
Roles that followed weren’t quite as extreme, but she reveled in becoming unrecognizable.
It was only when I was preparing to interview Bradley, that I realized that she played Leanne Bowen, the teacher who gives Brett Goldstein’s Roy Kent a piece of her mind in Ted Lasso.
Similarly, with The Fall, Humans, The Gold, Doctor Who: Dark Eyes, and others. That was Bradley in those as well. The actor was excelling in all these roles but it was like she was hiding in plain sight.
I also watched her give an extraordinary performance as a sexual surrogate in Christian Cooke’s film Embers. Again, I knew she was its star, but it took me a moment to realize I was staring her in the face on screen.
I confess to Bradley that I’ve been watching her performances, her whole career, but half the time, I had no idea it was Ruth Bradley.
“That was the plan,” she responds.
However, she remarks that initially with Slow Horses she was a bit uncomfortable. “Usually, I’m like, let’s do something wild. Let’s change my hair, let’s do a mad costume. But physically, I don’t look that different in that.”
It’s the first time that she’s looked more like herself.
She’s a wizard with accents, and it’s only when we meet for tea at the Union Club in Soho that I hear her Irish cadence. For a long time, she didn’t seek out roles set in her native Ireland. “For years I was trying to hide my Irishness because there were no trendy Irish characters on telly then like there is now. There was no Derry Girls and all these cool things. I think I hid it initially because I didn’t see people with an accent like me playing leads…Now it’s different.”
Bradley and Oldman are well-matched. Both like to bury themselves into a character plus, in Slow Horses, their comic moments are rib-tickling, even in the darkest and bloodiest of circumstances.
In their first scenes together, Lamb ends up running rings around Flyte at a grisly murder scene . “She’s like, ‘This stupid, unkept, old man passing wind.’ You take no notice of him. But that’s Lamb’s genius, isn’t it? His behaviour’s so distracting. What a great character.”
So is Flyte. When Herron introduced her in his fourth novel Spook Street there was something about her earnestness that struck me and fans of the books were delighted when she reappeared in other tomes in the series.
“Flyte has a real through line of truth and good morals. And that moral compass she has overrides everything else,” says Bradley in a perceptive summing up of Flyte.
How Flyte navigates these conundrums and her loyalties is fascinating, and Bradley captures her discombobulation superbly.
She has completed season 5 of Slow Horses and will soon film season 6. She’s loving her time on set working with Oldman, who she fondly describes as “ a consummate professional.”
“They say never meet your heroes but with Gary that’s absolutely not the case. He couldn’t be a nicer person either,” says Bradley. “He likes a cup of tea and he likes a Hobnob biscuit. We don’t have tea parties as such but we have a few biscuits and a cuppa with a few of us and Giselle,” she says referring to Oldman’s wife, art curator, and photography artist, Gisele Schmidt.
Ruth Bradley is a further example of what sets Slow Horses apart from other TV dramas: The infinite attention to detail is exemplified in how show-runner Will Smith sets the tone with screenplays that blend lines of dialogue from Herron’s novels with stellar output from his writers’ room. The gold-standard hallmark is evident with every name on the credit list whether it’s Daniel Pemberton’s score; Choi Ho Man and Tom Burton’s production design; or Danny Cohen and David Chizallet’s cinematography, and so on in the See-Saw Films production.
But what’s immediately apparent is the overarching brilliance of Nina Gold’s casting.
It’s possible to be thrilled and tickled with laughter-when Jack Lowden’s 007 wannabe River Cartwright goes all derring-do and leaps into action; howl when Christopher Chung’s slow-witted Roddy Ho gets his comeuppance; or cheer when Saskia Reeves’s haunted Catherine Standish discovers her backbone; or you wanna run for cover when Shirley Dander as played by Aimee-Ffion Edwards, gets her dander up and guns blaze; and you lean in with delight when you see Kristin Scott-Thomas’s eyes narrow and you just know her Diana Taverner is about to crush an adversary with a withering glare and a cut-glass put down.
One marvels at the comic timing. There’s Rosalind Eleazar’s Louisa Guy joshing with River and there’s glee in her eyes, and there’s a comforting nature when she trie to persuade Kadiff Kirwan’s Marcus Longridge from gambling away this month’s mortgage.
Jonathan Pryce, as the retired spy-master, David Cartwright-River’s grandfather- has been giving a masterclass this season in how dementia ravages.
Oldman’s supreme as Lamb, the most compelling character, but the star gives his fellow actors room to breathe, room to thrive, room to shine.
That’s what Slow Horses stands for, and Bradley fits well into such stellar company.
The beauty of Slow Horses is its dark British humor laced with show-runner Will Smith’s The Thick of It sensibility. “Will’s the secret sauce,” Bradley declares.
“It’s so perfectly pitched,” she says. “Will’s there every day. If something’s not quite working, if a joke’s not quite landing, he’ll come in and help.”
Before signing on for Slow Horses, Bradley completed Embers.
The film is based on Christian Cooke’s play Experience, in which he also starred when it played on Hampstead Theatre’s Downstairs stage in 2017. The story explores how sexual surrogacy can work as a form of therapy. Cooke adapted his play for the screen, renaming it Embers.
Cooke’s in the film too, playing a psychiatric patient, whom his medical team decides can only open up and confront his violent past through intimacy with a sexual surrogate — Bradley’s role.
Bradley met with a real-life therapist who guided her through the psychological thickets of sexual surrogacy to prepare for the role. She was attached to the film for two years while Cooke and his producers raised funding.
“Christian rang me when I was about to go into labor, saying, ‘We’ve got the money. Let’s do it.'”
Four weeks later she brought her daughter on set. Her mother-in-law came every morning at 5am “so my daughter was in the next room. It was wild. I was doing this film about sexual surrogacy and all that that involved, and then running off to breastfeed.
“I was like, whoa! My whole body is just my art. There’s no veil between the two,” she says as two Union Club members at a nearby table edge closer in the hope of better understanding what they figure must be a racy conversation.
Bradley, now the mother of two kids under four, was in a kind of post-partum blur shooting Ember’s, but has memories of helping to move sets, doing her makeup in the back of a bus, and “breastfeeding your baby on the side of the road,” she announces. “It’s real gorilla filmmaking.”
It’s certainly one of her best roles.
I’ve rewatched many of Bradley’s past TV shows, including Humans and Love/Hate and further back than that, and her movies from Flyboys to Daphne and The Wonder, and more. And, as if any excuse was needed, thanks to the Apple TV+ preview site, I looked at season 4 of Slow Horses again, just to see Bradley and the other thoroughbred actors.
I’m ready for season 5.
