With long stringy hair, matching facial stubble, a perpetually sweaty brow, a rotund paunch, and disheveled clothes that look like they haven’t been washed in years, Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb is a TV spy one can almost smell—a notion accentuated by his trademark habit of farting in company.
A spook who affects a façade of disenchanted disgust with his professional lot in life, the B-teamers he’s tasked with overseeing, and the powers-that-be who fancy themselves his superiors, he’s a rumpled, ragged one-of-a-kind brought to brilliant life by the Oscar-winner. As a result, he remains the main (if not the sole) attraction of Slow Horses, the Apple TV+ adaptation of Mick Herron’s series of novels about a collection of rejects with a knack for stumbling into the center of big-time espionage trouble.
(Warning: Some spoilers ahead.)
