Slow Horses star teases future plans for Claude Whelan after dramatic season 5 twists
"He's compromised."
After the explosive season 4 finale of Slow Horses, Claude Whelan is still feeling the after effects of his alter-ego being ousted by Moira to get her job back. And a raise.
Though his secret is still somewhat contained, James Callis has teased how that information may come back to haunt him and continue to unravel in season 5.
"In this season, it's a different thing,” he tells RadioTimes.com. "To be honest, they came to me with a lot of ideas, I had a rap sheet of potential Claude peccadillo's and we chose one that we thought was the most fitting.”
Before the actor teased: "He's compromised, but through his own actions, if he'd been smarter with the journalist at the very beginning [in episode one], he probably wouldn't be in this mess. So again, it's like you do it to yourself."
For his second season in the spy drama, Callis felt as though he was “cooking with gas” coming back to the “familiarity” of the cast, unlike Claude, who is still finding his feet in the cut-throat environment.
Even though he has a new-found confidence again this season, Callis warns it might not last.
“I think that’s, spoiler alert, a certain amount of misplaced confidence,” he says, “When you have one idea, you're basically like a kid on a bike with the training wheels, and then they take the training wheels off. It's like, ‘maybe we should have waited a couple of weeks. That's when you had that bad accident, when the bike took off down a thing and you went into a tree.’”
“It reminds me of a Radiohead song, which I think a lot, it’s like ‘You do it to yourself. You do. You and no one else. You do it to yourself.’ It's true, that's why it hurts.”
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In some ways, Callis is conscious that while Claude has an amount of integrity, he is also a man who doesn’t know when to quit, hang up his suit and call it a day.
He continues: “A certain amount of Claude's journey – I'm just realising so many things - is you’ve got to know when to call it a day, but in looking at the world, as we do, the amount of people who don't call it a day. They keep on going. It’s like how principled, what principles?”
“The reason you're in the service is because you love the country and you want to protect the people, you may not be the best person at it, mentioning no names, but you come at it with an intention to protect the country and serve the people in it and serve the best interests of the people in it. That's the idea.”
Slow Horses season 5 airs every Wednesday on Apple TV+ – sign up to Apple TV+ now.
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Authors
Jess Bacon is a freelance film, culture and TV critic and interviewer who is obsessed with everything from Marvel to Star Wars to the representation of women on-screen. Her work has been featured in publications such as Rolling Stone, GQ, Stylist, Total Film, Elle, The Guardian, Digital Spy, Dazed, Cosmopolitan and the i. She’s also interviewed the likes of Zendaya, Brie Larson, Amy Adams, Dan Levy, Aaron Pierre and Brian Cox. In between overanalysing her favourite new comfort watch or internet trends, she’s working on her debut non-fiction book.
