Jack Lowden: Star of ‘Slow Horses’ And New BBC Drama ‘The Gold’ Says Actors Should Act And Keep Political Opinions To Themselves

EXCLUSIVE: Jack Lowden, star of forthcoming TV mini-series The Gold, and Apple TV+ hit, Slow Horses, believes that actors should stick to what they know best and to not allow their political opinions to get in the way of their work.

As far as he’s concerned, ”you’re not an actor ” when “you’re sort of political.”

However, it’s crime, not politics, that’s at the center of the rollicking BBC One and Paramount+ six-part real-life heist thriller The Gold. The show is inspired by the imfafous Brinks Mat gold robbery of 1983 — on of Britain’s most storied crimes ever.

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Lowden, partner in a film production company with Saoirse Ronan (Lady Bird, Little Women) and Dominic Norris (Benediction), tells us that he’s not an actor with “a cause,” although he admits that he has played a lot of characters “that have a cause.” Lowden cites Ian Macdonald, the campaigning attorney he portrayed in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe: Mangrove.

“But that is absolutely not why I take jobs. It’s actually always the last thing that I think about because I think of myself as an actor and the privilege that I have is being allowed to piss about playing different people and to see what I can get away with convincing that I am,” he says, convincingly. 

Everybody’s entitled to their opinion, but people get annoyed when actors give their views, Lowden adds. He believes, passionately, “that actors should be actors, and actors should be where they are because of their acting, ability and skill.”

Lowden acknowledges that Macdonald was indeed an incredible man, but says he took the job in Small Axe: Mangrove first and foremost because he wanted to work with McQueen. “I think Steve is my favorite director and I had heard about the way he worked with actors. And I know that if anyone is going to make me a better actor it’s someone like him. He did make me better.”

He’s sincere in his beliefs about thespians. “I always want to respect acting as a skilled profession because that’s what it is. It takes a lot of skill to do it well and there are so few good actors — the good ones are worth their weight in gold,” he says.

This brings us back to the precious metal at the heart of The Gold, in which the 32-year-old portrays cocksure south London villain Kenny Noye, who had the gargantuan task of arranging for the laundering of three tons of gold bullion [and diamonds and cash] valued at £27M ($33M) stolen during an audacious, headline-grabbing robbery at the Brinks-Mat security depository near Heathrow airport in the early 1980s.

The glittering heist was on and off newspaper front page pages for years as tidbits emerged about the masterminds, and the series will see cops desperately seeking to apprehend them before the treasure is melted down.

Lowden is superb as the smarmy, seemingly easy-going, crime lord-of-the-manor Noye, who is actually lethal when cornered. “The more interesting thing for me was that he was sort of a chameleon. He had this charm and got on with everybody,” says Lowden.

Noye believed nothing could harm him, something that Lowden captures superbly, though he says that’s down to the screenplay by executive producer Neil Forsyth (Guilt). “I found a lot of the script very, very funny,” says the actor admiringly.

That The Gold shines is due to the passionate social awareness,and, yes, wit that underpins Forsyth’s writing and Aneil Karia’s direction. Karia shared an Academy Award with Riz Ahmed for best live action short for The Long Goodbye, which he directed and co-wrote with Ahmed. Lawrence Gough (Gatecrash, The Last Bus) directed three of The Gold episodes.

The directors and their production team worked with a top ensemble of actors playing an assortment of cops, robbers and other miscreants. They include Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey), Emun Elliott (The Rig) and Charlotte Spencer (Sanditon), Dominic Cooper (Preacher, Mamma Mia!) and Tom Cullen (Becoming Elizabeth).

 Lowden tells us that he relished playing the notorious crook Noye and refuses to judge his moral vacuity. ”I’m playing the guy on the page and it’s not really my business what peoples’ perceptions of him are.” I do what I do on the page but obviously it’s all make believe,” n” He adds the story is clearly dramatized for effect “so that you’ll want to watch it — and it’s not just a newsreel.”

Noye tells one character that “people like us, we have to fight twice as hard to get anything in this world,” and that his justification for poaching on a titled landowner’s estate is that “we fight to get it, and they fight to keep it.”

The us and them of it all is down to class, though Forsyth also takes aim at what various characters term “the system” — slippery nods, winks and secret handshakes that certain bent high-ranking police officers, government officials and local council mandarins offer to the masterminds in return for, we presume, a share of the shiny proceeds.

The actor marvels at how cleverly Forsyth has bound the script all together, treading delicate tonal line, while doing so. “It’s trying to make everybody make their own mind up about the sort of morality of the crime — If there is a question of morality ever in crime,” says Lowden.

He adds that if there are moments where “you feel for them [the crooks],and you sympathise with them. It’s to provoke you into thinking, ‘Christ, what is it I actually believe in?’”

“I’m not going to lie, I really enjoyed playing the character that Neil put together on the page.I absolutely loved playing it. It was so bizarre  and very different to what I’ve played in the past.”

Lowden says he likes the “mad romanticism of east and south London crime” and observes that The Gold has a “flashiness”  and “cinematic” verve  that is “quite menacing.” Yes, it’s brash “but it’s tastefully brash,” he adds.

He had “some big shoulder pads” to fill in the double-breasted suits and the casual Jack-the-lad t-shirts he sported to show off his bulked-up physique, which he built up thanks to fitness instruction from Chris ‘The Bull’ Baugh, an ex-pro boxer who got him to feel “heavier and feel a little bit more threatening.”

The trainer, says Lowden, gave him an understanding of “presence” and of how Noye should carry himself. “It was quite fascinating to learn about presence in the terms of when someone’s been in the ring. It was fascinating how he talks about movement and what the difference between how you stand like this and how you stand like that,” he says puffing out his chest and straightening his shoulders for emphasis. Lowden remembers training for wrestling comedy Fighting with My Family where he was hurled around a wrestling ring by Florence Pugh. I was on set for that main event.

Another key aspect of creating Noye was the “shit ton of hair. That was a lot of hair.” Shaking his head so his locks flow and flicking his quiff for more effect, he notes that in the early 1980s it wasn’t just that there was “so much bloody hair” but “everything just seemed a little bit more ridiculous,” in general. 

And that includes some of the Cockney slang. In one scene he tells an associate to “lose that syrup.” 

Answers on a postcard if you know the answer to that. Don’t wanna wait that long? Remember, it’s Cockney rhyming slang.

Got it? Lemon squeezy: easy.

Forsyth undercuts the darkness, the grime and “the threat” in the tale with humor. Lowden meets the razor-sharp wit with a willing funny bone. The actor assures us that he’s always been game for a laugh though there was a period early on in his career where he seemed to play incredibly serious roles. “I did an Ibsen [Ghosts directed by Richard Eyre at the Almeida Theatre in 2013] where I died of a syphilitic stroke,” he recalls. The part won him an Olivier award.

It was the same with Terence Davies’ film Benediction, where he portrayed Siegfried Sassoon.

However, he confesses that it’s his natural instinct to make anything funny and that’s why he wanted to be an actor. “The joy of being on stage and making people laugh  because that’s the only immediate reception you get to be laughed at and so that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. I’m just constantly trying to find the funny moments.”

He points to his childhood, mentioning that he was a shy kid, who grew up watching “hours and hours of BBC comedies from the 70s and 80s.”

He was glued to Only Fools and Horses,“ which helped with his portrayal of Noye, andFawlty Towers. “I watched them all — it was almost like a comfort blanket, every night. I couldn’t watch a Midsomer Murders, for Christ’s sake, because I found it too serious and scary.

Later he relates some of the giggles he shared with Dorothy Atkinson on The Gold set. ”I’ve loved her since seeing her in Mum.”

 There were hijinks to be had as well with Gary Oldman, who plays the outrageously brilliant Jackson Lamb in the Apple TV+ miracle that is Slow Horses. Lowden calls the Oscar winner “a hell of a funny guy”.

“We just spent most of our time on that set when we were together thinking about what could make it funnier,” he says.

Many of the scenes involving exiled MI5 officers overseen by Jackson Lamb, a whip-smart slob played by a scene-stealing Oldman with Lowden as his sidekick River Cartwright, a 007 wannabe, are comically inventive — more agents of mirth than secretive operatives.

The Slow Horses series is based on Mick Herron’s acclaimed series of novels. Season 3 is already wrapped and will stream later in the year. The fourth shoots in three and a half weeks.

Lowden has plenty to occupy himself with until start date. The Reiver Pictures (Benediction, Kindred) production company he set up several years ago with Norris has been shuttered and folded into Arcade Pictures, and is run equally with Norris and Ronan. They met on director Josie Rourke’s Working Title film Mary Queen of Scots.

The team’s currently in post on Arcade’s first film The Outrun starring Ronan and directed by Nora Fingscheidt, one of many directors “we’ve admired from afar.” Once they’d watched Fingscheidt’s 2019 film System Crasher “we knew she was the best fit.”

Lowden explains he got into producing because “I wanted to force myself into a corner” to make shows held talked about for years. “I just wanted to end the sort of talking about it and really go for it and force myself to do it and really be involved.”

“It’s about improving my knowledge, and Saoirse is exactly the same. We’re taking our time about who we want to work with picking what we want to do… we’ve got to convince people it’s incredible to get an independent film financed.”

They’re developing other pictures and plan to announce a new film project soon.

Lowden and Ronan keep a low public profile though they’re often to be found at off West End theaters checking out hot productions such as their friends Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran in the unforgettable revival of A Street Named Desire at the aforementioned Almeida.

You don’t see them in nightclubs or any of the restaurants, where bold-faced names regularly hang out.

There was one little escapade, however, that garnered attention two years ago when he was captured by photographers emerging looking somewhat overwatered at the launch party in London for the first season of Slow Horses.

He gently deflects the topic of inebriation. “That was the first party after lockdown. It was a big night. But Gary and I do have a lot of fun. It’s quite nice not to take yourself seriously for a large part of your career.”

As he prepares to scoot away I mention that I’m allergic to gold. He’s not but he’s also not an expert. “Not even sure if I’ve ever held real gold,” says the actor who portrays a man who wanted to be as rich as Croesus.

The Gold starts on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on February 12.

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