Hugo Weaving Is the Villain Slow Horses Deserves

The following story contains spoilers for the season 4 finale of Slow Horses on AppleTV+.

IF YOU NEED a good villain to parachute into your television series, there are worse people to call than Hugo Weaving. The 64-year-old Australian actor has turned in some of his most iconic performances as bad guys: superhuman evil-doers in big-budget Hollywood franchises (The Matrix, Captain America, Transformers), dystopian political terrorists (V for Vendetta, Mortal Engines); and the scariest of them all—a landlord—in last year’s psychological thriller, The Royal Hotel. So it was an easy decision for Will Smith, the creator and executive producer behind Apple TV+’s Slow Horses, to tap Weaving as the show’s next ruthless international baddie. Oh, and it didn’t hurt that Smith and Weaving are second cousins. “It was lovely to have a family connection on set,” says Weaving. “I loved the proposition.”

As Weaving binge-watched the show’s first three seasons, read the new scripts, and opened the Mick Herron books the series is based on, he realized that his character Frank Harkness was no run-of-the-mill spook. An ex-CIA and Special Forces operative, Harkness set up a compound call Les Arbes, on the outskirts of Lavande, France, where he spent decades fathering children who he then raised into his own small army of loyal mercenaries and killers. With his own personal—and off-the-radar—assassination squad, he’s made a living brokering secretive contracts with various governmental agencies looking to act with plausible deniability. But after a London shopping mall bombing sets off an MI5 investigation, Frank spends the majority of season 4 running damage control and scorching earth to cover his connection to the attack. That means pursuing Slough House’s River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) and his ex-MI5 grandfather (Jonathan Pryce)—the only people who can implicate him and expose his hidden operation.

As Frank’s bloody cleanup plan comes to an end in this week’s season finale, his biggest secrets are revealed to the audience: his connection to MI5 (his former client) and River (his son). And, in classic Slow Horses fashion, there’s a signature chase sequence. In the wake of this season’s conclusion, Men’s Health spoke with Weaving about the foreshadowing that led to Frank and River’s big reveal, how he embodies complex antagonists, and the process of getting his American accent just right.

MEN’S HEALTH: How did you approach Frank as you started reading the scripts for this season and the book it was based off?

HUGO WEAVING: Frank in the books is a little bit different. For example, the reason Frank sets up in Les Arbres in the book is because he believes that all intelligence agencies are going to be fighting terrorism with their gloves off, and that the intelligence agencies in Europe and America and all over the world need to really change the way in which they operate. This is a post-9/11 sort of idea. So he has the idea of training young men to fight in that way. He doesn’t father all of the fighters in the book; he’s a father figure to all of them and some of them are his kids, but some of them are not. The element [in the show] of the “guru”—the commune father who sired all these sons who then go out to kill for him—is a more extreme version of what Mick Herron wrote.

So I was very mindful of maintaining a humanity and a truth for Frank. Even though you can enjoy the playing extremity of Frank, you also need to tie him to a real place. I’m always wanting to find the truth and humanize someone, even if they’re an extreme creature.

MH: What was the most challenging part of that?

HW: The interesting thing about him is he’s lethal, he’s unsentimental, he’s highly experienced, he’s highly intelligent, he’s mercurial—but he can’t appear to be any of those things. He has to appear to be nice, polite, calm, measured, and thoughtful, or otherwise he’s not doing his job. He has to be able to disappear in a crowd. And most interestingly, he’s a father to our hero. He’s actually River’s dad. And his operation was set up by River’s grandfather, David Cartwright. The man River is chasing, the man who’s responsible for this bombing, and all these deaths—unbeknownst to everyone at MI5, he’d been licensed by agency before.

There’s something very real about that setup. Think how many organizations in the Middle East or around the world were set up by the CIA. Then 10 years later they’re at war with them. They armed them, set them up to fight off another threat, and then that organization has just grown and ballooned and become a massive problem for the country that originally helped set them up. Frank’s in that territory, a very real place in world politics. There are a lot of extreme truths in the world and Frank’s one of them.

MH: I love your American accent as Frank. It breaks up a lot of the Britishness—the sarcastic and quick-witted tone—of the show. It’s very slow, deliberate, and hard. What were you channeling with your voice? It’s not the same American accent as, say, The Matrix‘s Agent Smith.

HW: No, it’s not Agent Smith, because Smith’s a construct. So I thought I had license to be, in a way, slightly otherworldly or, as I said at the time, like a [news anchor]. There’s a certain measure and a certain enunciation that comes with reading the news, and I thought that would be right for Smith because his voice would have been constructed to be a human being. Whereas Frank is not a construct. He’s a human. But when he’s talking, he’s always hyper aware of taking in information, listening, watching but revealing little. He reveals only what he needs to in order to provoke what he needs to achieve. And yet I think he’s got a certain charm and intelligence. It was fun to develop. I was listening to lots of different voices trying to find the template for this man. And I sort of gathered it together from quite a few different sources. It interesting to listen to all those disparate voices and slowly find something that I thought was right for Frank.

MH: The season finale kicks off at a meeting between Frank and River, where the show reveals they’re biologically father and son. What was your initial reaction to reading the scene?

HW: That was really the most thrilling scene for me. When you look at the whole six episodes, it all leads to that. Everything leads to that reveal and then that conversation between the two of them. It’s a fabulous sequence on the page. I thought they were so, so well written, so provocative. It’s so funny, really, that Frank is offering River a job, and then in the next moment, he’s putting a hand grenade in his hoodie. He felt very prepared to kill his son, but he also genuinely wants to get to know him. There’s something about about it all that’s kind of preposterous.

MH: Jack Lowden said he was a little bit nervous about the initial greeting, “Hello, dad.” In some ways it’s not quite a huge reveal. If you’re an astute viewer, you’ve probably figured out that Frank is his father, but it does need to carry some weight.

HW: I think that’s absolutely right. We see him taking a photo of that mural in Lisbon. We don’t know what that means. Later on, we see him looking at it on the train. He’s obviously mulling over it. He knows why. He goes to his grandfather’s house. He pulls out of a box postcards that we assume are from his mother that are in the same sort of drawing style, and falls back on the bed, and so we don’t get to wallow in what it was. We may deduce from that: Oh, that’s his mom, therefor Frank is his dad. But I suspect most people wouldn’t quite have the time. So then you need to have the reveal. I don’t think there was a “Hello, son” written on the page, but I thought we needed it, so we put that in as well.

One of my favorite things about Slow Horses is how brilliant they are with the pre-credit sequence and how brilliant they are with the final sequence, which is the hook for you into the next episode. They’re really, really great. And that “Hello, dad. Hello, son” exchange is an absolutely brilliant kick into Mick Jagger singing [over the episode credits] if ever I saw one.

MH: When you share a scene like that with Jack, someone you haven’t really worked with before or shared many scenes with, how do you prepare to get on the same wavelength?

HW: That’s a very good question. I think we even talked about that actually. But the nice thing is those two characters had only met briefly in a fight where Frank has a knife to River’s neck. That’s the only time they’ve met. So really, it’s the first time they get to talk, and they reveal themselves to each other in that conversation. I remember saying to Jack, “Well, actually, we don’t know each other.” So Jack and Hugo don’t know each other any more than Frank and River do. We know what we’ve learned, but we don’t actually know each other. So we can start from there and explore what that process of getting to know each other is. In a way, it was perfect. We didn’t have to do a love scene where we’ve been married for like 20 years and have only just met each other today. We had to do a scene where we don’t know each other and we have to talk. So it’s not hard as an actor to do a scene like that, because you can rely on all the things you actually feel.

MH: Before Frank is ultimately caught and detained, you have these very physical chase sequences on foot throughout a lot of London landmarks. Was it fun to continuously shove people down escalators in St. Pancras railway station?

HW: It’s quite funny. And it’s a bit of a running gag with Slow Horses, isn’t it? You often see Jack running down escalators and the dogs [MI5’s internal security division] chasing him, pushing people out of the way. So it was quite fun to be doing that. They have such a great stunt team—everyone you’re pushing away is a stunt person. The only difficult thing about that is making it look seamless but real. I always want to try and go back and do it better.

MH: Throughout your career, you’ve dipped your toe into a lot of different franchises (The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Marvel) whose IP’s have obviously continued to evolve through different television and movie projects. As you get older, what is your philosophy on re-exploring your characters? When you close a role, is it closed for good?

HW: I think if there’s a good reason to keep going with something, you want to do it. Down the track, a studio might come to you and say, “Hey, we want to shoot another film because we think it’s going to make us money.” Well, that may not be the best reason to go back and do something again. With Lord of the Rings, we shot six films over a 10-year period and it feels like that’s something that’s very much done for me. I’m not interested in going back to that.

But what Gary Oldman says about playing Jackson Lamb—it’s not true for me, but I understand it—is when there’s a great role like Lamb and you’re playing it, “Well, I could just keep on playing that for the rest of my life.” I would feel the same way if I had a role like Jackson or if there was something that just felt like it could keep going. That would be my philosophy. If it feels like there’s a good reason for it, why not? If there’s more to find, if there’s more to express, if there’s more complication to unearth, then yes. If it’s a way of just trying to squeeze more dollars out of a franchise, maybe not.

MH: Have you nudged Will Smith about coming back to Slow Horses as Frank, then?

HW: Well, if you know the books, you know that Frank is in another book. I’m not nudging anyone, but…we’ll see. [Laughs]

MH: The way this season ends is pretty bleak. Frank effectively gets off and the British government covers everything up. There’s a lot of gray area here. What did you make of that ending?

HW: Well, I think the world itself is quite bleak. There are very few organizations that aren’t compromised. They still have ideals, and we still have ideals as individuals, and we all need that. You need to have a sense of morality and a sense of purpose and a sense of what your ideal world is. But the reality is that ideals are often compromised and organizations are often corrupted from within. All sorts of problematic things exist in human nature. But Frank’s an unsentimental dude and so is Lamb. They know how the real world operates and the dirty work they need to do so that the rest of us don’t have to. In one way, that’s why the services do what they do: because someone has to. It’s a murky world out there. That’s the truth of it.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.