2 hours ago
1
In one of the early scenes of the new season of Slow Horses, recalcitrant IT pro Roddy Ho is dancing across the square near Slough House. Wearing a matching baggy tracksuit and with his hair tied in some kind of purple man bun, he is listening to Robert Palmer’s Simply Irresistible and looking unusually happy with the world.
That is, of course, until a van tries to run him over. He is saved by a colleague, but that doesn’t matter to Ho. His headphones have been crushed and his tracksuit ripped. “Replace my headphones, and we’ll leave it at that,” he spits at Shirley (Aimee-Ffion Edwards).
Ho’s boss, Jackson Lamb, played by the peerless Gary Oldman, isn’t bothered by the near miss. “I would hate to think of Ho being run over accidentally. It would rob the rest of us of the pleasure.”
Gary Oldman (left) as Jackson Lamb and Christopher Chung as Roddy Ho in season three of Slow Horses.
It’s a neat opener that swiftly tells you everything you need to know about Ho: he’s a narcissistic jerk who doesn’t play well with others. His face is caught in a permanent sneer, but that’s because he thinks he is hot and you – and everyone he works with – are definitely not.
“It would be so easy to play him as really unlikeable and really easy for the audience to turn off from wanting to know anything about him,” says Christopher Chung, who plays Ho. “And I assure you, there are definitely audience members that think he’s volatile and hate seeing him on screen, which is a great response, but I’ve tried to imbue him with humanity here and there.
“So you open up the door slightly, and then you close it away. You give a little bit, and then you’re like, ‘Oh, but he is human under all that.’”
Loading
The quietly spoken, 37-year-old Chung is sitting opposite me in Sydney. He is a much less imposing presence than Ho and his accent is all over the place. Chung grew up on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, but his accent betrays how much time he has spent in the UK. But that’s not all. His mum is Irish, his dad is Malaysian Chinese and his wife is Scottish. In other words, there is a lot going on.
“I grew up in a household where the Australian accent wasn’t the typical accent,” he says. “I went to school in Mount Eliza in Melbourne, and all the kids were very Australian there. But in my home life, there was such an amalgamation of accents, and it was never really that broad. And I come from quite a musical family, so listening to accents and the way they go into me, it’s like diffusion, and I don’t know that I’m doing it.”
Christopher Chung stars in Apple TV+’s Slow Horses.Credit: Steven Siewert
Chung has been with Slow Horses since the show’s beginning in 2022. Adapted from crime writer Mick Herron’s Slough House book series, the show follows the “rejects” of Britain’s MI5 security service who have been banished to the crumbling Slough House (hence their nickname “slow horses”) for crimes and misdemeanours against the service.
And while some of those problems are obvious – gambling, drug and alcohol addictions, ops-gone-wrong – Ho is there because he is, well, deeply unpleasant. And even though he relishes destroying the lives of those who have done him wrong (usually sensible women who have refused his advances), he still can’t quite figure out why he’s in Slough House.
Despite all this, season five, which is based on the book London Rules, does offer Ho some opportunity in the lady stakes – an actual, IRL girlfriend – and for Chung, the chance to take a bigger bite out of the role.
Loading
“She’s not a fake, not a bot, not any of that,” says Chung, laughing. “She’s physical, which is a win for him. No one can take that away because people physically see her with him. What’s really funny about Roddy is that, in this season, he’s still obnoxious, he’s still arrogant, but he’s still disconnected from the reality of the world because he lives in his own world.”
In the books, that internal world is written as an interior monologue – readers know what Ho is thinking – which is fine on paper, but presents a different problem on screen where much more dialogue is required.
“It’s really interesting because it’s so differentiated to how [Mick Herron] writes all the other characters,” says Chung. “And it’s one of the things that fans of the books really pick up. So I think one of the points that fans of the book will be looking at in this season is how they’ve managed to translate Roddy’s inner monologue onto the screen.
Rosalind Eleazar, Christopher Chung, Saskia Reeves, Aimee-Ffion Edwards and Jack Lowden in Slow Horses.
“And I think [showrunner] Will Smith has done a fantastic job of that. That was a question that I had before we had got the season five scripts, ‘How are you going to do this?’ Are you going to show this?’ It’s all internalised, but [Smith] does it in such a brilliant way and in ways that I wanted to pick up the script [and say], ‘I’m going to do that? Am I actually gonna do that? OK, it’s going to require something of me, but I can’t wait to throw myself into it.’”
While Slow Horses was Chung’s big break – apart from a small role on Neighbours, where his character sold drugs in Lassiters and had no lines – he does have another, highly anticipated role in the pipeline: as Harry Beecham in Netflix’s adaptation of Miles Franklin’s classic novel My Brilliant Career.
It’s a character made famous by Sam Neill in Gillian Armstrong’s 1979 film adaptation, that of a wealthy, handsome, charismatic gentleman who is in love with the headstrong Sybylla (played by Judy Davis in the film, and The Newsreader’s Philippa Northeast in the Netflix adaptation).
Chung has spent the past couple of months filming in South Australia – a world away from the grimy, cramped London of Slow Horses – where he texted Neill about horse-riding and hung out with his Slow Horses co-star Jonathan Pryce, who was also in Adelaide filming.
Loading
It was a role Chung lobbied hard for, going around his agent and contacting the casting director directly to make sure he was on the list (he was).
“[Showrunner] Liz Doran was so forward-thinking to bring a different ethnicity into that leading part, a Chinese man in an Australian outback in the 1900s,” he says. “And then also to integrate the First Nations storylines into the show. It’s everything.
“When I got cast, I was actually finishing filming season six of Slow Horses. I was on set in Suffolk … and I was a mess because I was like, ‘This is not this is not supposed to happen because I’ve not seen it [an Australian Chinese man in a leading romantic role]’. I feel in many ways – maybe I haven’t done enough research – but I feel in many ways this is the first time to see this on screen. So I’ve really fought and protected Harry as best I can, and I’ve had Sam Neill’s blessing.”
What more could you ask for!
“It’s the same kind of feeling that I had when I got cast in Slow Horses, but in a much more grounded way.”
Before we wrap up, I do have to ask about Gary Oldman, what is he like? He is a farting genius in Slow Horses.
“The first time I stepped on set with Gary, he was so open and warm,” says Chung. “I was so anxious and nervous, I always come into a job like, ‘I think I’m going to get fired.’ I’ve got to prove myself really quickly.
“And I think we were probably about a month-and-a-half into the first season shoot, and Gary had said to me because he watches some of the dailies, ‘I saw some of your stuff the other day’, and then he gave me that little punch in the arm, and then he walked away.
“I got on my phone and I messaged my wife. I’m like, ‘You’ll never believe what Gary Oldman said to me, do you think he’s just saying that?’ And Frankie, my wife, she’s like, ‘He doesn’t have to do that.’”
He certainly doesn’t. But he did.
Slow Horses (season five) streams on Apple TV+ from September 24.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.
