Why Slow Horses’s Jack Lowden would be a perfect James Bond
When Jack Lowden made his debut as River Cartwright in Apple TV+’s Slow Horses last year, the cry immediately went up: have we found the next James Bond?
The hit spy drama shows that the 33-year-old knows how to handle a gun and can rattle off exposition about moles and terrorists without sounding like he’s memorised a script. Most importantly, Lowden has a leading man’s charisma.
Since the third season began last month, the bookies have further lowered Lowden’s odds – he now ranks among their top ten potential Bonds alongside Regé-Jean Page, Henry Cavill and James Norton.
River Cartwright is not necessarily the first role an actor might pick if he wanted to show off his Bond credentials. He is one of the “slow horses”, the washed-up spies who’ve been chucked out of MI5’s HQ and spend their days pushing paperwork instead. With his hoodies and half-hearted beard, Cartwright doesn’t look like he’d be at home in Bond’s tuxedo either.
It’s true that Cartwright soon gets to see some action, but a jump from a mezzanine in the MI5 building leaves him limping for most of the rest of the series – whereas even tumbling the length of the Millennium Dome left Bond unscratched. And when it comes to prowess with the ladies, Cartwright’s attempt to comfort his colleague Louisa Guy ends up in the most awkward hug I’ve ever seen on screen. There’s even a scene in which he fails to negotiate a revolving door.
But it’s just this kind of thing that makes me think Lowden would be a great Bond. He manages to convince you Cartwright is a hero despite his haplessness, and that decency and determination are enough to see off the bad guys. Lowden has that quality essential for all Bond actors: of making the viewer trust in his ability to prevail.
As season three of Slow Horses comes to an end with a shoot-out in an MI5 storage facility housed in a disused nuclear bunker – a climactic battle that knocks most Bond finales into a cocked hat – we know that Lowden’s Cartwright will win out and save the day. And if at one point during the battle he has to look sulkily emasculated when Louisa Guy refuses to return his gun to him – “No, you’ve had your go” – that’s all to the good: it’s unlikely that the days in which Bond acted the saviour while the ladies swooned around him will be making a comeback.
“It’s very flattering to be asked about it,” Lowden said when Esquire put the Bond question to him. “I’m still trying to get over the fact that Daniel Craig’s not doing it anymore. I think he should still be doing it, to be honest, and he was my Bond.”
But although, as Lowden has put it, anybody “who runs around with a serious face” on screen immediately gets touted as the next Bond, it seems likely that that audition call will come through sooner or later. As his Slow Horses co-star Kristin Scott Thomas told him: “It’s a very, very tough job. But you’d be very good at it.”
It seems about time, 60 years after a certain ex-milkman became the first cinematic Bond, that we had another Scots actor in the role of the “Scottish peasant” (as Bond describes himself in Ian Fleming’s novels).
Lowden’s original ambition was to be a footballer but he was inspired to become a professional actor after being wowed by Gregory Burke’s play Black Watch, in which he eventually took the lead in a production in 2010. It was on stage that he initially made his name, and in 2014 he won the Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Richard Eyre’s production of Ibsen’s Ghosts. Lowden’s first screen role to garner serious attention was the callow Nikolai Rostov in Andrew Davies’s hit BBC dramatisation of War and Peace in 2016.
His most memorable film roles have included the pilot Collins, displaying a Bond-like stiff upper lip when his Spitfire is shot down, in Christopher Nolan’s epic Dunkirk; and contrasting poets in a pair of biopics: Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction and Morrissey in England Is Mine. Although not perhaps as eye-catchingly handsome as a Pierce Brosnan or a Daniel Craig, his looks have suited him to a more protean CV.
Lowden’s not such a huge star that he’ll overshadow the part. He also has a fine line in self-deprecating charm which will work well when he’s promoting the films, as anyone who saw him last week on The Graham Norton Show – poking fun at his own accent and confessing to his passion for crafting miniature Christmas villages – can testify. And it’s in his favour that he seems a clean-living chap (Eon don’t like their Bonds to be too Bond-like in their personal lives), and in a steady relationship with actress Saoirse Ronan.
Lowden would be terrific as Bond whatever the conception of the next iteration would be. It might be an idea, though, if the franchise were to adopt more of the wry comic tone of Slow Horses, in contrast to the dourness of the Craig years. It’s worth noting, incidentally, that a year before Daniel Craig debuted in Casino Royale, he appeared in the moody espionage miniseries Archangel, which seems in retrospect like an audition for his Bond; will Slow Horses come to be seen as Lowden’s try-out for a more everyman-style Bond?
Working on Slow Horses has made Lowden more eligible for Bond in another sense. “I have a shockingly bad run, a sort of windmill run,” he admitted in a recent interview. “That was one thing that James [Hawes] the director prides himself on, the fact that he – quote – ‘fixed’ my run.” So now he’s all set for Bond – as long as he steers clear of revolving doors.
The final episode of Slow Horses season 3 is released on Apple TV+ today