‘Slow Horses’: Jack Lowden Says He Doesn’t ‘Envy’ River’s ‘Pretty Awful Situation’

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Slow Horses Season 3 Episode 4 “Uninvited Guest.”]

River (Jack Lowden) is about to regret saying yes to Ingrid (Sophie Okonedo) on Slow Horses.

The First Desk (the Director-General of MI5) enlists him to take Sean Donovan (Sope Dirisu) to a facility to see files he’s so sure will prove that MI5 killed someone he loved for leaking classified intel in exchange for handing over Standish (Saskia Reeves), whom he and his team kidnapped. But then Ingrid tells Duffy (Chris Reilly) that anyone who went inside cannot make it out, given what Sean is really there to see. That means River and Louisa (Rosalind Eleazar).

TV Insider spoke with Lowden about River’s Season 3 so far, including that one-man heist he tried to pull off, what’s going on with his grandfather (Jonathan Pryce), and what’s next.

Let’s start with River’s attempt to pull off that heist at the Park on his own in the second episode. He did quite a good job and a lot on his own despite failing.

Jack Lowden: Like everything on Slow Horses, it was an incredible amount of fun, also sort of knowing that it was ultimately going to be a failure. Although I will stick up for him, and he does stick up for himself in it — he pretty much did it and managed to get out. So, whatever his flaws are, River does manage to do quite a lot of good things and things that seem fairly impossible. That whole stuff obviously was shot across weeks and weeks, but it was a lot of fun.

And then the following episode is the one where River gets that brutal beating from Duffy. So it was quite a rough two episodes in a row there for River.

Yeah, yeah, definitely, pretty rough. He looks dreadful. I saw it the other day. The guys did such a great job with the makeup. But yeah, he really does get put through his paces in this one, big time.

Then, after those two physically taxing episodes for River, you get more of an emotional one with the fourth episode because he finds out about Spider’s (Freddie Fox) death and remarks that they were friends once. Talk about the complicated feelings surrounding Spider’s death for River.

Yeah, I think, ultimately, he doesn’t feel great about it. The great thing about every single one of these characters, even Lamb, is that none of them lack empathy at all. That’s why I love them all. None of them are horrible people; ultimately, they just have very funny ways of putting across their true feelings, which is a very British thing to do, I think. So, I think River does feel a lot about his death. They came up together, they came up the ranks together, and he was a great foil for him. He really didn’t get along with him, so to speak, in a sort of a professional sense. But I think, yeah, it does hit him hard.

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Then he has to go help his grandfather at the club because he forgot that he stopped paying his membership. How does River feel about what’s going on with his grandfather?

That’s horrible for River. I imagine it’s probably horrible for anyone that has to deal with that, with an elderly relative, if they begin to show signs of losing their memory, and that can trip into other things like dementia and things like that. And so I think that is really the emotional undercurrent to River as we keep going with this is his relationship with his grandfather, who’s his hero and has always been his hero. He’s literally trying to emulate him, and I think watching someone that you love and admire slightly disintegrate in front of you like that is horrible. A lot of people obviously have a lot of experience of that, and so I think people will understand or not want to understand. It’s a horrible thing when it happens.

At the end of the episode, Ingrid tells Duffy that Sean Donovan and anyone with him can’t make it out of the facility, so to kill anyone who went in. Would that surprise River?

I think it does. It definitely does. I think after the amount of time he spent in Slough House and the sort of very, very low esteem that the rest of the agency holds Slough House in, it’s probably ultimately not surprising that kind of order would be given and sort of the fact that everybody’s sort of in it for themselves. But that is a fairly shocking moment, but I don’t think he’s got enough time to think about it at that point because he has to get out of there and complete what it is he was trying to do in the first place.

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What can you preview about what’s to come for River and Louisa as a result of that order? Because now they’re going to have to fight their way out.

Yeah. I can’t say too much other than they’re in a pretty awful situation, probably the tightest situation they’ve ever been in so far. And it does look fairly grim for them. It really does. I don’t envy them at all, and I didn’t when I was doing it either, but I do always believe in them. I believe in all of them, which is what’s fun about it.

Slow Horses, Wednesdays, Apple TV+