The search for the next James Bond has been long. It’s already been five years since Daniel Craig hung up the tux and the Walther PPK in No Time To Die (or – spoiler alert – was blown to smithereens with them), sparking a half-decade of speculation over who’ll be appointed next to 007. It seems that race is finally nearing its end; according to a loose-lipped Gary Oldman, of all people, the new Bond overlords at Amazon/MGM have narrowed down their top choice. And since Oldman’s Slow Horses co-star Jack Lowden is chief among those rumoured top names, Oldman’s knowledge nods towards Lowden being the Chosen One.
Let’s get it out the way: Jack Lowden would be a great Bond, if it is indeed him. He’s young, charismatic, has a physical presence. He’s warm, but there’s an edge to him too. He’s Scottish, which helps in a 007 context. He’s in his mid-30s, so could have significant mileage for a run of Bond movies. And we’ve already seen him as a spy, as Slow Horses’ River Cartwright; a man who has, along with the the rest of the Slough House team, saved the skins of the country, boss Jackson Lamb (Oldman) and his colleagues several times over. The qualifications are all there.
River Cartwright isn’t James Bond. He’s James Bond if he was a bit shite.
Except, the delicious irony of it all is, River Cartwright isn’t James Bond. He’s James Bond if he was a bit shite, all the skills but little of the suaveness, prone to fuck-ups, drowning in the undertow caused by the more senior people around him. This is a guy who wishes he was James Bond, who went into MI5 hoping to be James Bond, and who found himself shipped off to Slough House for his grave errors. (Or was he? There are many underlying references in Slow Horses to indicate Cartwright was set up to fail by his conniving superiors.) James Bond wouldn’t know what a Colin The Caterpillar cake is; River Cartwright definitely does.
Across its soon-to-be-six seasons, Slow Horses has become a massive Apple TV hit, a word-of-mouth smash. And it’s easy to see why: gripping, propulsive, extremely funny, incredibly well-defined characters. The milieu it’s playing in is definitively post-Bond; it’s about subverting the expectation audiences have of the Intelligence world as something slick and smart and cool. While we see glimpses of MI5, it’s full of power-hungry managers and ruthless agents who don’t care about crossing their own people; the Slough House team might be all the rejects, each with real issues and flaws to face up to, though they’re more morally wholesome. The thing they’re definitively not is cool, or slick. Their office is disgusting, their resources lacking. Jackson Lamb – the smartest guy in any room – spends much of his time farting, or insulting his own crew.
Of all Lamb’s people, Lowden’s River has always been the most capable. You can feel the fact that maybe he’s not really supposed to be in Slough House. (That said, he didn’t manage to stop the mayoral candidate he protecting from being killed by a falling paint pot in Season 5; a genius bit of Looney Tunes slapstick.) For all that Cartwright is the anti-Bond, it’s easy to see why the new 007 producers – Harry Potter and Paddington mogul David Heyman, and Spider-Man overseer Amy Pascal – would see Bond in Lowden; there’s a steely determination to him, a physical scrappiness. A little bit of melancholy too, and yet a lightness that makes him a delight to spend time with.
Who knows whether Gary Oldman has correct intel. You never know when it comes to Jackson Lamb. But it would be a relief for Bond to finally be cast, to finally get the cameras rolling on the next era of 007, and if it is Jack Lowden in the role, Slow Horses is – in its own weird way – the perfect proof-of-concept. Let’s just hope it wouldn’t stop River Cartwright mid-flow.
