‘Slow Horses’ Director on Season 6 and That Final Jack Lowden Scene: ‘We Had Two Endings and One of Them Was Happy’

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains major spoilers for “Slow Horses” Season 6, which had its season finale on Wednesday.

“Slow Horses” Season 6 ended with lots of bangs and a whimper, as a key character appeared to take his last breath.

First the body count: over the course of the season the Slough House team, led by Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb, lost the psychotic yet endearing Coe (played by Tom Brooke) and honorary Slow Horse Emma Flyte (Ruth Bradley) while numerous of their nemeses also came to sticky endings, including two Russian assassins and a couple of British hired hands who found themselves on the same job.

Season 6 also saw the return of Olivia Cooke’s character Sid Baker, who was presumed dead in Season 1 (although fans of the book have long been expecting her return), and the blossoming of her romantic relationship with River Cartwright (Jack Lowden).

But given “Slow Horses” has yet to showcase one functioning romantic relationship beyond Lamb’s love of fast food, viewers knew better than to expect Baker and Cartwright would get a night of passion let alone a happy ending. As Season 6 director Adam Randall tells Variety below, the actors did shoot a happier ending for the couple, which ultimately wasn’t used.

Instead, Cartwright returns to his deceased grandfather’s home thrilled to see Baker has successfully evaded both the Russian assassins and MI5’s own rabid dogs. As Baker showers upstairs, Cartwright faffs about in the kitchen, debating whether it’s better to woo her with tea or wine, before suddenly collapsing. The episode ends with him on the floor, struggling to breathe.

A teaser for Season 7, in which Lamb refers to Cartwright as sending a postcard from “the afterlife,” has fuelled rumors River has been killed off, especially with Lowden said to be in the running for the next James Bond. But as fans of Mick Herron’s book series know by now, things are rarely as they seem where Slough House is involved.

To dissect the explosive last episode, director Adam Randall, who is also returning to direct Season 8, sat down with Variety to talk spoilers, rumors and more…

What was it like to film those climactic scenes on the beach?

It was difficult. Trying to make sense of the geography on screen was the main thing. It’s all well and good on paper, and then you can never find a location that’s going to fit and make sense in the way that someone’s imagination can. So we needed to rewrite the sequence based on the location. But even then, you get to the location, and it’s still like, “Well, I don’t understand because surely Frank would just see them over there, and why are they hiding in a pipe over there?” and there’s all these sort of complications that come with it.

So there’s a huge amount of that which was solved with lots of different trickery, and then some VFX. We ended up having to put cliffs in and adding lots of tall grass and things like that because I just had to sort of make sense as to why they don’t just run off. Why is nobody actually escaping? Why are they stuck there? And actually, Moira falling down that hill and ending up with a sprained ankle, that was, I think, the morning of, or the day before, [we] suddenly came up with that, thinking “I’ve really got to slow them down.”

To slow the Slow Horses down even further…

Exactly.

There were some really beautiful scenes with the camera filming inside the pipe looking out onto the beach. How did you get the cameras in there?

We created that pipe, so that was another little trick. You’re very, very limited in how you can shoot inside that pipe. Because you can only really shoot into it and out of it. It’s very hard to do any coverage in there. The other thing is that the sun is just constantly moving, obviously. So when you’re looking out, the way the light is hitting the beach in front of it and the way the light is hitting into the pipe changes so dramatically that it really forces how you’re going to shoot it and when you can shoot it.

Was Diana’s house real or was that a set that you trashed?

That’s a real house. We spent so long trying to find this house because not only did we need a house, but we needed the whole environment around it. So we looked all over the country for that house and then we did a lot of work to the house. We changed a lot of the interiors. We brought in all our own furniture. We replaced the glass, obviously, so that we could smash it.

It maybe wasn’t the most sensible hiding place for the Slow Horses given how many windows it has…

It always felt like it was Lamb’s revenge on her for everything she’d done to send them over there, stick the Slow Horses in there. In terms of the glass, it was partly down to finding a good location, and it was partly down to how cinematic we can make it. I remember getting there the first time and as I’m looking at it loving the sort of doll’s house [look] because you put all these characters in it, and a lot of our experience in this house is just watching the Slow Horses rip each other apart before anything happens. You know, there’s a version of this story where no one comes, there’s no bullets fired, and they just kill each other anyway because they’re all so frustrated with each other, and so I really love that.

It just felt a great location for a set piece. Sometimes it’s a sort of logic versus cinematic-ness and that’s a struggle.

One of my favorite scenes this season was the Shake Shack scene, where Lamb and Reece (Lenny Rush) manage to escape Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving) by accusing him of being a child molester. What was that like to film?

It was actually one of the harder sequences to film because it needed to create such a sense of chaos that you completely bought that Lamb and and Reece could just walk out of there. And that relied on not only Gary being brilliant and kicking off [but] then it was “Okay. Well, we need more mayhem.” I remember talking to Lenny and saying, “Why don’t you shout some things out?”

Luckily, on that day, a couple of our writers were there, Mark [Denton] and Jonny [Stockwood], and I asked them to write a list of pedophile insults, and I gave them all to Lenny and I said, “Pick your favorites” and he was just launching into them. And then the SAs [supporting artists] who were the people eating in the restaurant, they were just incredible. Gary was going up to them, screaming in their faces, and they were all shouting back. So it was just this sort of slow ramp. You had this lovely long dialogue scene with two incredible actors, really quiet, and then it was just like, how high can we turn this up? How much mayhem can we cause?

Another stand out scene this season was Coe’s death. There has been some discussion about why he would go in solo armed with just a knife to face a Russian agent (Kyle Soller). Were there other ways you considered killing him off?

I don’t know if there were other options. In the original book, which is in a completely different location, he has a conversation with one of the hitmen, and then they have a knife fight. It’s very, it’s very similar in that way. There was never a question about “Why would [Coe] follow him in?” Because I think it’s a courageous thing to do. He’s going in to try and stop this villain who’s been hunting them down relentlessly. But I love Coe, and the hardest thing was now the show’s not going to have Coe in it, which just seems such shame. I’m feeling that in Season 8, it’s like I wish Coe was here because he’s just such an interesting, unique character. I had so much fun with Tom.

When we had the fight with Coe, I had this thought: “Would it be interesting to intercut that with Jack eating a sandwich really slowly?” It felt like quite a “Slow Horses” way of doing it. So rather than doing the sort of “Mission Impossible” toilet fight, [while] most of the fight takes place you’re actually with River trying to open a sandwich packet and a packet of crisps. So the edit was doing all of these things, but still trying to make sure that Coe had the ending that he deserves, and I feel really proud of it. Tom was really, really emotional watching it, and was really happy. A lot of the great little gems from it came from Tom. The smile when Jim says, “Is that a push knife?” And I think it was scripted that Coe dies on a toilet, and Tom was like, “Please don’t let me die on the toilet, please.” So it was like, “Okay, fine, we’ll find another spot for you.”

There’s also been some discussion about the scene in the church, where the surviving Slow Horses raise a drink to Coe and not to Flyte or their other dead colleagues and then Lamb takes a longer drink. Was Lamb’s a subliminal reference to Flyte or are fans reading into that too much?

Originally in the script they did a drink for every fallen Horse, and it went on for ages. In fact, we didn’t even film it. We got there, and it was like, “What, Lamb’s going to have like eight shots?” It just felt sort of ridiculous. And then we said, it’s not about naming any of them. It’s just about: this is a drink, and it was actually in post-production where it felt like Shirley should say “For Coe” because she had built up this relationship with Coe. But they’re not specifying “this one’s for Coe” they’re doing it for everyone that’s fallen. I mean, that’s what they say [in the scene]. And then Lamb’s obviously experienced more of that than the rest of them. He’s had a lot of death — and liked the whiskey a lot.

But Flyte dying was horrible as well because she’s such a great character, and Ruth is so brilliant to work with. And just in terms of the characters, I think it would have a massive impact, especially on Roddy.

Speaking of deaths, the season ends with River collapsing because of the nerve agent he’d touched on the crowbar earlier. There’s been a lot of speculation online he’s been killed off because Jack has been cast as James Bond, but there are photos on social media of him shooting Season 8 in London just last week and we know in the books River comes back. Can you talk about that at all?

I don’t know. I mean, it’s difficult to, isn’t it, because it’s supposed to be… — but it’s frustrating. I mean, I was there shooting [last week], it was in Walthamstow, and we’re out everywhere shooting. I was amazed no one saw Olivia when we were shooting Season 6 because that revealed Olivia, but we got away with that. But this one is much more public. We’re really out and about, and we’re about to go even wider out in London, so there’ll be a lot more spottings of Jack. So I don’t think we can keep that secret.

What I can say is that we had two endings [for Season 6], and one of them was happy, and it was a really lovely ending. Had it been the end of the series, it would have been just a magical end for River’s journey. It was almost like Spielberg-ian, the happy version of it. And we played with that for a while, but we knew, from the book and the next story to tell in Season 7, that we needed the other version of it. It’s difficult because it’s such a dark season and there’s so much death and tragedy in it then to end in such a dark way. I just was like, I hope we don’t lose everybody, really.

Can you comment about Jack and Bond?

I only genuinely know what everybody else knows, which is that he’d be great, and that I think he’s in contention, but I don’t really know, and he can’t say anything.

Are you allowed to say which other characters we might see in Season 8?

I don’t know. In the books, you know that there are new Slow Horses. You know, Lech [Wicinski] and Ashley [Khan] and whatever. So there are there are recurring characters. There are characters that are story-specific. So I’ve got no idea what I’m allowed to say. Probably nothing.