Flyte and fight
Ruth Bradley reflects on joining the cast of Slow Horses for the fourth season of the Apple TV+ espionage drama, her role as MI5 agent Emma Flyte, fight scenes and starring alongside her acting hero Gary Oldman.
Growing up as an aspiring actor, Ruth Bradley wanted to be Gary Oldman. After watching films including Sid & Nancy, Prick Up Your Ears, Dracula, Leon and The Fifth Element, she knew from an early age that she wanted to emulate her acting hero on screen.
So when she got the chance to appear alongside him in Apple TV+ series Slow Horses, it was a dream come true. “I was his biggest fan, so it was so much bigger than just a job because it’s been like a lifelong dream for me,” Bradley tells DQ. “It been a bucket-list thing for me since I was about eight.”
Yet when she first auditioned for the role of Emma Flyte ahead of season four of the award-winning, darkly funny espionage drama, she had no idea what the show or the role actually was, or that she might soon be standing alongside Oldman in character as Jackson Lamb.
“It was a standard audition with hidden sides [audition script pages] so I didn’t know what it was,” Bradley remembers. “I wasn’t initially sent a full script, but I was just blown away by the dialogue and that two-hander in the opening of the first episode with me and Gary.
“[Then] I didn’t know who this character was, but I was like, ‘This dialogue is amazing. It’s so sparky, what’s going on between these two people.’ So that was my introduction to it, and just based on that three- or four-page scene, I was like, ‘I’ve got to do this show.’”
Bradley (The Gold, Guilt, Humans) admits it’s rare for a single scene to grip her in the way that audition piece did, especially when she didn’t know exactly what she was auditioning for. But she says it’s testament to the show’s creator and writer, Will Smith (Veep), that she was immediately drawn to Slow Horses’ “sparky dialogue.” “There’s so much going on. That’s a real rarity,” she adds.
“The scripts are so amazing and they’re just such page-turners – and they’re just as great to read as they are to watch. Everybody in each department is at the top of their game and it really is genuinely one of the best shows on TV.”
Debuting on Apple TV+ in 2022, Slow Horses is based on the Slough House novels by Mick Herron and follows a team of British intelligence agents who find themselves in MI5’s dumping-ground department (known as Slough House) following career-ending mistakes. Led by their brilliant but irascible leader, the notorious Lamb (Oldman), they navigate the espionage world’s smoke and mirrors to defend the country from sinister forces.
Season four, which is again produced by See-Saw Films and is adapted from Herron’s Spook Street, opens with a car bombing at a shopping centre – an event that detonates personal secrets, rocking the already unstable foundations of Slough House.
The returning cast includes Kristin Scott Thomas as Diana Taverner, Jack Lowden (River Cartwright), Saskia Reeves (Catherine Standish), Rosalind Eleazar (Louisa Guy), Christopher Chung (Roddy Ho), Aimee-Ffion Edwards (Shirley Dander), Kadiff Kirwan (Marcus Longridge) and Jonathan Pryce (David Cartwright).
New faces joining S4 include Hugo Weaving (Frank Harkness), Joanna Scanlan (Moira Tregorian), Tom Brooke (JK Cole), James Callis (Claude Whelan) and Bradley, who plays Flyte, the new leader of the team known as the ‘Dogs,’ MI5’s internal security force.
Serving as a link between MI5 and Slough House, Flyte is described as a “straight shooter” and someone who is committed to doing the right thing. But her by-the-book attitude often puts her at odds with Lamb, Cartwright and the unconventional methods employed by “the rejects.”
“She’s come from the Met [London’s Metropolitan Police] and now she is head of security for the Dogs,” Bradley explains. “She’s come from the Met, which is very obviously a male-dominated world and now she’s taking over this position that would also have been a traditionally male role. She’s wholly aware that she’s a trailblazer here and that this is a really important moment in her in her life and in her career. She probably has designs on one day being Taverner [deputy director general of MI5 and head of operations] when she grows up, really making her mark, and that’s how she starts. But it all crumbles pretty fast. This whole season is set in 24 hours so it’s really a huge fall from grace.”
Unfolding in a non-linear structure, the events of season four see Emma start the day buoyant at her arrival in her new role, having worked her whole life to get there. “Then it just keeps getting taken from her,” Bradley says. “The stakes are so high for Emma on this particular day, so it was really fun leaning into that and it not being linear. Sometimes she’s like, ‘I’ve got this back’ and then it falls again and then, ‘I’ve got this back,’ and then it’s gone. But during the course of the day, she loses maybe a little bit of cockiness from the beginning and her vulnerability comes in, which actually I think is her strength deep down.”
Coming into an established series as a new character, Bradley found her own position on the show replicated that of Emma as an outsider and someone who isn’t a Slow Horse but can meet and interact with the members of the team.
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“But for Emma, I really felt like it was all about Taverner. She wanted to be Taverner and she wants to impress Taverner – that’s her goal,” the actor says. “I also thought that for the audience when they’re watching this, Emma will be a way in for them as well. Obviously, they know these characters so well and it’s fun to see somebody wholly underestimate Lamb and underestimate all the Slow Horses. I fed into that.”
Before the audition, Bradley wasn’t familiar with Herron’s novels and hadn’t watched the series. But once she knew what show she was joining – season two was about to launch – she caught up on the series and read all the books. “I was totally enmeshed in the world by the time we were filming,” she says.
Bradley believes each season is “really faithful” as an adaptation of Herron’s work. “I really don’t think it’s an adaptation that fans would be disappointed by. They’re wholly faithful and they retain the humour of the books for this show. Will is an absolute genius when it comes to dialogue, and he’s also very respectful of the source material. I find it very hard to pick and choose what the differences are.”
As for acting alongside Oldman, Bradley found working with someone she so admired to be a “surreal and incredible” experience. “He’s such a generous person, actually. On set, he’s just a brilliant, normal actor without any of the huge ego that sometimes can come with huge stardom or any of that pretence,” she says.
The broad variety of characters Oldman has portrayed also influenced Bradley to emulate that range within her own career by “not just playing a Dublin girl,” she says. “I very consciously tried not do ‘girlfriend’ parts in my early 20s because I was like, ‘What if I do that? Then I’ll just do that story.’ I’ve based so many of my choices in my career on Gary’s career.”
Meanwhile, Slow Horses is “a very well-oiled machine that has been the same incredible crew since the beginning,” the actor says. “And even though the scripts are so tight and perfect, there is a little freedom around them. You can still play a bit, ad lib a bit. Everybody is very open.
“Everybody’s having fun and there’s a sense of trying things. There’s a real fearlessness on the set, which I think is conducive to doing good work, really, because you’re not staying small because you’re scared. Everybody’s brave to give it a go.”
Filming the show involves shooting interior scenes from Slough House and other buildings inside a studio, before the action moves on location. “London is a huge character in the show,” Bradley notes. “Loads of it is location, which I love. Studios are fine but I’d pick a location any day. There are also bits of London in this show that I don’t generally see on film or television, but I know really well. Londoners know these bits.”
Slow Horses also offered Bradley the chance to take part in her first on-screen fight – a scrap between Emma, River and an assassin Bradley compares to the Terminator. “I’ve done stunts before, but never anything like that,” says the actor, who undertook lots of stunt work to prepare for a sequence that was choreographed like a dance.
“I did work with a personal trainer doing weightlifting, which I’ve never done before, but I just had this feeling I should look like I can actually do this fight,” she says. “Then I ended up going to costume and I was in a big, baggy jumper and I was like, ‘Guys, I’ve got guns under here!’ I remember early on saying to the costume designer, ‘Maybe I should be wearing a muscle tee for that.’ He was like, ‘No, it’s not Edge of Tomorrow.’ So I had my muscles but hidden underneath my jumper – but that was good just to feel like I can do this stuff, and I did feel strong so I wasn’t terrified.”
Shooting the scene, which appears at the end of episode five, took place over four nights. “Adam Randall, the amazing director, was like, ‘This is great, but it’s so stylised – you look so relaxed everybody doing this fight.’ So I remember him saying to me and Jack, ‘You’re going to die. This is actually life or death, so play that.’ That just made it so much more fun,” she says. “We still did the same moves; it was all the same things we’d rehearsed again and again, but it became about wanting to not be killed. The Terminator is so terrifying because it’s so clear in his eyes that he’s just got one mission, which is just to murder you, and that’s it. There’s no reasoning with this person.”
With her screen fight debut out of the way, Bradley is now looking for more firsts. “I’m desperate for someone to offer me a musical or something wild like that,” she laughs. “I’m always up for doing something [new], because it’s scary. I haven’t worked with guns a lot. I haven’t done huge fight sequences like that. So anything that seems uncomfortable is always fun for me.”
As DQ speaks to Bradley, she’s filming season five of Slow Horses – a sixth season has already been commissioned – while she’s also plotting her next move outside of Slough House. “There are always directors I would want to work with. I have a list that I’m desperate to work with,” she says. “But I’m interested in groundbreaking stuff, things that are new and different and challenging and thought-provoking. Not boring girlfriends, basically.”
tagged in: Apple TV+, Ruth Bradley, See-Saw Films, Slow Horses