Jack Lowden

The first episode of Slow Horses (2022) spends its opening minutes running River Cartwright through a mistake at full tilt, so that we know how good he might have been, and then sits him at a desk going through a journalist's rubbish. Jack Lowden plays the rest of the series from that desk. River is the one officer in Slough House who still thinks he might get out, and Lowden plays the hope as faintly embarrassing, a thing River would rather nobody had noticed. It is the right choice, and it is the choice he keeps making.

He came to the screen from the stage: Black Watch in 2010, Oswald in Ghosts in 2013, then Nikolai Rostov in War and Peace (2016), which is where most people first saw him. The film parts followed: Collins in Dunkirk (2017), Vaughn in Calibre (2018), Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction (2021), Terence Davies's last film and the one time he has been handed a whole picture to carry. Since 2022 he has been River across several runs, opposite Gary Oldman, with theatre in between. Nothing about this was fast, and he does not seem to mind.

What he is good at is frustration. The men he plays are sarcastic, flawed, a little short of the full article, and he has said as much himself: "I never trust those people that are a complete package." In Slow Horses that is the whole job. Oldman's Jackson Lamb is the reason the series works, and the office around River is cast with care and given the best lines; Lowden holds the middle and lets them have it. We were on his side within those opening minutes and stayed there through six episodes of being told he was a failure, and we think it is because he never once plays for our sympathy. He plays a man who wants to be better, is not, and is annoyed about it.

Small Axe (2020) shows the other thing he can do, which is take a small part and not push. In Mangrove he is Ian MacDonald, the barrister who takes the rest of the defence once Letitia Wright's Altheia Jones and Malachi Kirby's Darcus Howe have chosen to speak for themselves, and he gets the film's dry lines. He knows he is not the story. Shaun Parkes is the best thing in that film, and Lowden's part is to make Parkes's man look less alone in the courtroom, which he does, and then gets out of the way.

The question is what comes after River. He has spent a decade playing men who are not quite the complete package, and he is now very good at it, which is exactly when an actor should be worried. Start with Slow Horses, and watch the office rather than the plot. Then wait, as we are, for someone to give him a film where he has to be the whole thing.