NEW YORK, Oct. 9 (UPI) — James Callis told UPI the Claude Whelan, the MI5 director he portrays on “Slow Horses,” means well, but is in over his head in the spy agency’s top position.
“He’s learning on the job, but he’s not really learning fast enough and should have come to the job better equipped,” Callis, 53, told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.
Based on Mick Herron’s novels, the darkly comic thriller wraps up its fourth season on Apple TV+ on Wednesday.
The show follows a ragtag team of MI5 agents — dubbed “slow horses” — who are exiled to a remote location and given busy work after making mistakes or annoying their bosses.
Reluctantly guiding them is the curmudgeonly Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), who answers to Whelan’s second in command Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas).
Callis compared Whelan’s relationship to Taverner to “chalk and cheese” because of their different personalities and approaches to their jobs, which are respectively called “first desk” and “second desk.”
“Whenever Diana is with Claude, she’d prefer to be almost anywhere else,” Callis said.
There is also some tension because Whelan leap-frogged Taverner for promotion after the ouster of ruthless and duplicitous director Ingrid Tearney (Sophie Okonedo).
“He has great admiration for Diana, and coming from whatever sector he would have come from in the security service, he knows who she is and she’s formidable,” Callis said. “She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, or at all, and she takes no prisoners.”
Taverner’s experience and Whelan’s lack of it make for a complicated dynamic.
“He knows that she’s very capable and he’s got to learn the ropes,” Callis said.
“Claude Wheeler is like a reaction to Ingrid Tearney. Essentially, the reaction to what we had before,” he added.
“We’re going to have something totally different. We’re going to have somebody who’s going to be accountable and we’re going to have somebody who’s going to have a slightly more humanistic approach to it all.”
Whelan initially tried to win Taverner over and solicits her opinions and advice, but she couldn’t care less about what he thinks.
“He started off his charm offensive,” Callis said. “But that just is not a good look. Claude just doesn’t have enough cold steel, which is something you would really need to be the first desk.”
He points out that Taverner and many of her agents aren’t squeamish about doing morally wrong things in the name of the greater good, while Whelan always tries to go by the book.
“He might be too mild-mannered for his own good, essentially, and for this job,” Callis said. “Claude is doing the job. Diana loves the job.”
Known for his roles in Bridget Jones’ Diary, Battlestar Galactica, Austenland, Star Trek: Picard and Castlevania, Callis said he was drawn to Slow Horses, in part because of Herron’s brilliant books, which Will Smith recently won an Emmy Award for adapting.
“There are so many points where I will wake up laughing because of something that Will Smith has written — priceless!” Callis said.
“We Brits do that kind of excruciating discomfort very well,” he added. “The tone is really, really important, and it’s a kind of a micro-macro view of attitudes in the U.K. It’s a bit downtrodden, very grounded and snarky as hell. You know what? Actually, I’m going to develop a new word right now — it’s ‘snarkastic.'”
The cast also includes Jack Lowden, Saskia Reeves, Rosalind Eleazar, Christopher Chung, Jonathan Pryce, Hugo Weaving and Joanna Scanlan.
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