Jackson Lamb is the most unkempt, foul-mouthed and famously foul-smelling spymaster on television. Sir Gary Oldman, the man who plays him, would like everyone to know the resemblance ends at the costume. Ahead of the September 16, 2026 premiere of “Slow Horses” season 6 on Apple TV, Oldman used a virtual press conference to draw a firm line between himself and the head of Slough House.
The session, reported by Tom’s Guide on September 13, 2026, took place while Oldman was in Edinburgh to receive the Edinburgh TV Festival’s Global Icon Award. Over roughly half an hour he talked about the character, his castmates and why a steady, year-on-year release rhythm matters to him.
No smoking, no drinking, no confrontation
Oldman has played Lamb since 2022, which raises a fair question: after that long, does some of the character rub off? “Well, I would hope not,” Oldman said when asked whether he had picked up Lamb’s bad habits. “[I] don’t smoke. I don’t drink anymore. I’m much softer than … Jackson Lamb has no filter. So he’ll be very, very direct with people. And I don’t want confrontation. Life’s too short.”
He did concede he was not always so gentle. “Maybe I liked to sort of, you know, rough it up a bit when I was younger,” he said, adding that he now doesn’t want to hurt people’s feelings or make them uncomfortable. Lamb, by contrast, “does a bit. There’s a side of him that actually takes pleasure in that.”
The smell is fake, the headline quote is not
Lamb’s odour is practically a supporting character, and Oldman says his co-stars regularly get quizzed about it. “I don’t smell,” he said. “People ask Kristen Scott Thomas and Jack Lowden, ‘Does he smell?’ Well, I don’t smell. It’s all smoke and mirrors, you know. It’s all makeup and hair gel.” He then delivered the line that inevitably became the headline: “I haven’t farted since 1971.”
That said, Oldman admitted Lamb is never far away. “It gets some of your skin a bit,” he explained. “It’s not that you’re conscious of Jackson Lamb in your everyday life, or when I’m not doing it. But he’s there.” He compared it to returning to long-running roles in the Harry Potter films and Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, noting that those were “sort of infrequent” and “not as continuous as this.”
What season 6 brings
According to Apple TV’s press materials, the new season runs to six episodes, released weekly from September 16, 2026 through the finale on October 21, 2026. It adapts Joe Country and Slough House, the sixth and seventh novels in Mick Herron’s book series, and sends the Slow Horses on the run as Diana Taverner drags them into a high-stakes game of retaliation and revenge.
- Returning: Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Jack Lowden, Saskia Reeves, Christopher Chung, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Rosalind Eleazar, Joanna Scanlan, Samuel West, Ruth Bradley, Tom Brooke, Jonathan Pryce, Hugo Weaving and Olivia Cooke
- New face: Lenny Rush
- Behind the camera: produced by See-Saw Films, directed by Adam Randall, adapted for television by Gaby Chiappe
For a show built on a hero who is proudly repellent, it is oddly reassuring to hear that its star is, by his own account, a softie who showers. Viewers can judge how convincingly he fakes the rest when the first episode lands on Apple TV.
