Joanna Scanlan is back in Season six of Slow Horses and teased what might be ahead for her character
Joanna enjoyed working on Slow Horses and also revealed in a new interview how horses played a huge part in her childhood.(Image: Getty Images for BAFTA)
She is an award-winning actress who has graced the red carpet of Cannes Film Festival and partied with Lady Gaga in London after picking up a Bafta. But away from the cameras and stage, Joanna Scanlan says the one thing she longs for is feeling full of life whilst sat in her old clothes after getting her favoured slot at the local tip.
The down-to-earth 64-year-old says: “To be honest with you, I quite like a sort of two-thirty slot. “Yeah, I quite like a two-thirty slot. And that was my slot yesterday. Partly because I’ve done whatever I need to be doing in order to get it ready to go to said tip in the morning. So there’s always, our life involves a dog walk and you know various other bits and bobs and then the job of the day and it’s all prepped.
“Then I sit down and have a bit of lunch or something, cup of tea, and then just at the point when I really don’t want to do anything, I’ve had it now, that’s it I’m done and it’s only maybe by this point 2:15, I think, I better go to the tip. And that’s going to be a bit of a cheer up you know, it’s an energiser, it’s an energiser.
“I got a wink off the head of the tip because I’m quite a regular. And then the driving away. There is simply no better feeling in my life than driving away from the tip with an empty car.”
It’s fair to say Joanna and her career is not down in the dumps at the moment. She is well known for her known for her roles in The Thick of It, The Larkins, and Riot Women. Her Bafta win came in 2022 for the film After Love.
And she returns to the thriller Slow Horses on September 16 playing the part of strict Moira Tregorian, a competent former administrative worker at the MI5. She ends up at Slough House, the infamous dumping ground for disgraced or agents deemed not good enough and led by Jackson Lamb (played by Gary Oldman). She joined in Season 4 and is back for the sixth season which launches later this month and it is a job that she clearly adores.
“Oh, it is the best job in television. There is no doubt,” she says. “I mean, do you call it television? Sounds like too small a word- for the experience because it is, you know, Apple make things in this very, almost sumptuous way. And it’s not just what ends up on the screen. It’s the process.
“They’re extremely generous in terms of their way, and that’s going in the opposite direction from most other TV experiences. So there’s a sense of kind of creative largesse about it, and that is a joy to be part of. Of course, coming back after having been there before, knowing everybody a little bit more.”
“I was so, so overawed and frightened the first time. Second time, coming in, I felt familiar and I knew how this was going to play out. And the shape of most Slow Horses seasons is, well, it culminates in a huge f*** off event towards the end.
“Sometimes there’s one in the middle as well. But, you know, and without saying too much, that pattern is replicated.”
Joanna is also keen to stress that for all his sloppy and stinky looks, leading star in Slow Horses Gary Oldman in the role of Jackson is not as hard to work with as it may seem. For starters his aroma is not as bad as it looks.
“No, he doesn’t smell, and that’s so weird, isn’t it?
“Truth be told, because he’s so f*****g good. And it’s really hard when you meet an actor who just can convey enormous riches within, you know, a tiny phrase. Or within a bearing or something. It’s really difficult. And I have to watch the desire to meet it with, you know, overplay back. You know, trying to like, okay, I now have to be like, you know, the pixelation of my performance has to be huge to match his because then it just is crap. So I have to just try and keep it in my little vocabulary, as it were. He’s very admirable as well on the set. I mean, not just as a performer, but as a presence.”
Speaking in an interview on nature podcast Outsiding, Joanna also looked back on her childhood growing up for many years from the age of three in Wales in what she described as a rural idyll, in a house with around 20 acres of land next door to a farm.
Her parents moved there from the Wirral to breed horses and growing up Joanna also became an animal lover.
She said: “We moved to a different house and it was just on the edge of the Clwydian range of mountains.
“And this particular horse, I was in love with that horse Suzie, really in love with it. And I had a dog, Belle, who was a small terrier, and we would set off regularly on our own. There were no roads between us and the mountain and getting to the other side of the mountain where I had a friend.
“And we would spend all day crossing the mountain alone. And the dog, being a terrier, liked to go off and chase. So she would disappear at the beginning of the ride. And, you know, that feeling of the ash tree was back on that mountain. I was just on my own. The horse, the air, the mountain, the beautiful landscape, everything about it. The dog would disappear. And then two hours, maybe an hour later, I’d hear a crying sound from a valley beyond, a very long way away, and think, well, I hope she’s okay.
And then about an hour after that, she would [makes panting noise] come and find me. And I’d get off the horse, put her on the front of the saddle. And we’d go back home with her kind of flopped in my arms. And it was that little triumvirate of me, the horse and the dog. I don’t think my life ever, ever got better.”
These days Joanna lives in Croydon with accountant Neil Bicknell, who she married in 2009.
Although not as grand as her childhood home, she still takes pride in her garden. She says: “I love a winter garden probably more than a summer garden. There’s nothing to my mind more beautiful than frost on a tight yew hedge. On a January morning. There’s nothing more beautiful because there’s not much going on. And when you see that, it’s like, damn, it’s absolutely wonderful.”
* The full interview with Joanna is on the latest episode of the nature podcast Outsiding, available on all podcast providers and YouTube. Season six of Slow Horses launches on Apple TV on September 16.
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