‘Slow Horses’: Gary Oldman Reveals How His Wife Changed Key Reveal About Lamb (VIDEO)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Slow Horses Season 5 finale “Scars.”]

Just how dark is Jackson Lamb’s (Gary Oldman) past on Slow Horses? The final moments of the Season 5 finale suggest very.

Earlier in the season, Lamb tells the story of a man who was brutally tortured for information he did not have — the woman he was involved with and who was pregnant with his child was as well and killed — but he says he made it all up when Standish (Saskia Reeves) asks. But in the finale, we see that his feet are scarred, suggesting that the story was true. So, was it true? Were parts of it? No one from Slow Horses is saying.

“We know that he was interrogated and he was somewhat tortured,” Oldman tells TV Insider in the video above (watch the full video for more). “In one draft of the script, it was Standish at the end who saw the scars on my feet. And we really thought about that. It was my wife [Gisele Schmidt] who said, ‘If we see the scars on the feet, it should be the audience that sees them and not the Slow Horses.'”

Executive producer Will Smith (departing the series after Season 5) agrees. “Something bad happened to him,” he says. He also shares that there had been some discussion about whether, if Standish had been the one to see his feet, Lamb should be awake for that moment.

Director Saul Metzstein thinks the story was about him, but allows, “The story he tells is so complicated, but has so many references to the things they’re going to do to get out of lockdown, it could just be a total fabrication made to escape.”

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Earlier in the finale, River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) saves First Desk Claude Whelan (James Callis) and thinks it’s his ticket out of Slough House and back to the Park. He asks Lamb to put a good word in for him; Lamb, instead, insists on keeping him when he talks to Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas).

“If I let him go, I wouldn’t have my punching bag, would I?” points out Oldman in the video above. “I think that Lamb sees potential in Cartwright. He’d never tell him. He just would never, ever let on. There’s a part of him that would like River to leave because ‘Get out, do something else. Look at me. Look how I’ve ended up. Get a better life for yourself.'”

He continues, “On the other hand, he thinks that he could be of use to the service and that somehow by some miracle, he would perhaps get himself back to the Park. But he also sort of despises him because he’s got a whole history of the older Cartwright who Lamb loathes. So that’s an interesting sort of cocktail of — I mean, he’s the whipping boy. So for now, I can have fun with him. I can have fun with them all. They’re my rejects.”

Smith echoes that. “It’s partly torturing him, but partly saving him,” the EP tells us. “River’s going to learn more from working for Lamb than he will working for Taverner. And I don’t think that’s why Lamb is doing it. I think Lamb’s a bastard and likes pissing people off, but then at the same time, it’s one of the things I’ve talked about with Gary is that part of Lamb’s ‘You’re s**t, you should quit, go do something else’ is an act of love and is kind of, ‘I’m going to save you from this life. Look what it did to me.’ And he’s never going to say that in that way.”

Lamb also insists that Roddy (Christopher Chung) keep his job, despite how he was tangled up and honey-trapped by one of the people behind the attacks in Los Angeles. According to Chung, that’s what Roddy would expect.

“Roddy knows as well that no one in Slough House can do their job without him. He’s the necessary evil within that office,” Chung says. “People have to tolerate him because he can do stuff that no one else can. But I think maybe from more of a sense of self-inflated ego, he probably thinks that Lamb respects him and is a bit more pally with him than is actually the reality.”

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For Smith, the appeal of having River save Claude was “to give him a win, but then in the Slough House, Slow Horses world, he gets the win, but he also takes a loss. So he gets to know he’s good, but nobody else gets to know it. And that’s part of the world, that the hope is cruelly snatched away. As Lamb says, ‘It’s not the hope that kills you, it’s knowing it’s the hope that kills you that kills you,’ which is [author] Mick [Herron]‘s, which is wonderful.”

That has left River in a “muddled, kind of compromised, messy” place, says Smith. “Going forward, it leaves River [thinking], ‘I should be back. I know I should be back there. And I actually was back there. I saved the life of First Desk. I mean, what more could I do to get back there?’ And then you start [Season] 6 and he’s still at Slough House. I just think that’s a great kickoff, hopefully.”

When River thinks he has a shot at getting out of Slough House, he calls Louisa (Rosalind Eleazar), who left at the beginning of the season, and leaves her a voicemail: “I know I’m supposed to be giving you space or whatever, but I actually don’t have anyone else to call because it looks like I’m leaving Slough House, too.”

That moment is River calling “the one person who’s told him they don’t want to hear from him,” Smith says. “It’s just sort of deliciously awful. It’s then just even more painful that the audience knows that’s not going to happen. And so I feel that then what would happen is she would be annoyed with him that he’s rung her when she said, ‘Don’t call me,’ so she wouldn’t call him back. And then by the time she does call him back, he’s realized he’s not going back to the Park, so he then doesn’t call her back. So I think they’re just kind of ghosting each other by that stage.”

What did you think of this season of Slow Horses and the finale? Let us know in the comments section below.

Slow Horses, Season 6, TBA, Apple TV