When Jack Lowden was in his late twenties he thought about quitting acting. “I just didn’t want to do it any more,” he says. “I didn’t feel like I fitted into the persona of an actor.” But then, in 2017, he got a job on the film Mary Queen of Scots. He had been cast as Lord Darnley, the petulant second husband of Queen Mary, who was played by the Irish actress Saoirse Ronan. “There was me at 27 thinking about stopping because I felt self-conscious or like I didn’t know how to do it. And then watching this 23-year-old carry the weight of a huge film like that with ease and grace and majesty. It was remarkable to watch. She makes it look so easy, like breathing. It was totally inspiring.”
Lowden didn’t quit acting; instead he went on to play a leading part in one of the UK’s most lauded dramas, Slow Horses, adapted from Mick Herron’s books about a ragtag band of second-tier M15 operatives, for which Lowden has been nominated for Emmy and Bafta TV awards. And last summer he married Ronan in a small ceremony in Edinburgh. The night before we meet the couple were at the film Baftas — Lowden in Dior, Ronan in Vuitton — with Ronan up for best leading actress for her performance in The Outrun, an adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s addiction memoir, which the couple produced together (the award went to Mikey Madison for Anora). “It’s weird, like essentially The Outrun sort of finished its journey last night. We woke up this morning and it was like, right, what are we going to do next?”
Lowden, 34, is a restless presence. He arrives in a coat that he does not take off for the entire interview. Sometimes he turns up the collar and sinks down into it. The coat is a green shacket thing, with “Mr L” in embroidered italics on the pocket, a Christmas present from his mum, he tells me. But for all his discomfort about the attention that comes with the job, Lowden is fun company. He’s entertaining, good with an anecdote and possessing a dry wit that’s reminiscent of his Slow Horses character, River Cartwright, albeit with his native Scottish delivery. “I saw really quickly when I read it that I could pull River quite close to me,” he says. “He’s quite miserable, he leans towards cynicism, like I do, and he’s incredibly sarcastic.”
River Cartwright is a tarnished golden boy, the grandson of a former senior MI5 official, relegated after a training cock-up to the shonky tutelage of Gary Oldman’s fabulously portrayed Jackson Lamb, a politically incorrect curmudgeon who is also a peerless operative. Meanwhile, Cartwright’s idealism combined with his hot-headed arrogance means he somehow always gets it wrong — and is furious with himself about it. In the trailer for series five, which will be on Apple TV+ this summer, there’s a clip of Cartwright punching the roof of a car again and again in a self-flagellating rage. Lowden laughs when I tell him how much fun it is to watch Cartwright messing things up and hating himself for it. “I’ve never leant very naturally towards the complete package,” he says. “When I was growing up my hero was Norman Stanley Fletcher in the sitcom Porridge. Ronnie Barker.”
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This is perhaps why he chafes at the suggestion that he might play the ultimate hero spy, 007. Lowden’s name is often prominent among the list of actors suggested to replace Daniel Craig, although the casting decision is now out of the hands of Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother, Michael G Wilson, as they have just sold creative control of the Bond franchise to Amazon MGM Studios for a reported $1 billion. I ask if he would like to play Bond. “I’m not going to answer these questions. It’s so boring,” he says. It might feel like a retrograde step, I suggest, when River Cartwright is a more nuanced, fresher version of a British spy than James Bond, but Lowden won’t be drawn. “I love Bond. I absolutely love Bond,” he says. “And I am very much in love with playing River at the moment.”
More imminently, in May, Lowden will be back in cinemas, appearing in the Scottish samurai western Tornado. And he co-stars at Sohoplace in a two-hander with Martin Freeman called The Fifth Step, written specifically for him by the playwright David Ireland. It’s about two men attending Alcoholics Anonymous, one newly arrived, the other long-term sober. Addiction might appear to be a theme in Lowden’s recent projects, but he says that is coincidence and alcoholism is not something that has been an issue in his life. The Outrun was a book he picked up because he liked the cover and, after reading it, gave it to Ronan with the suggestion that she should play the lead. “The addiction issue went completely over my head,” he says. “It was the music of Amy’s prose, but also her description of the Orkney Islands, that’s why I became obsessed with the book. And The Fifth Step is not really about AA. That’s just a setting. It’s more about somebody who has a very open-eyed, naive view of life versus somebody who has all the cuts and bruises that experience gives you.”
Lowden is delighted to be back on stage after a seven-year hiatus. His early successes were in theatre — he won an Olivier award in 2014 for his performance in Ghosts, was Eric Liddell in a stage production of Chariots of Fire and played Orestes to Kristin Scott Thomas’s Electra. Scott Thomas is also in Slow Horses, and Lowden enjoys the company feel of the cast. “These guys all come from theatre, from a collaborative background. You take yourself to work, you fetch your own lunch. Gary Oldman, he’s fantastic. My favourite thing about working with him is that even though he’s Gary Oldman, and we’re filming season six now, he still really cares.”
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Lowden was raised in the Scottish Borders, although he was born in Chelmsford, Essex, thanks to his father’s job with the Royal Bank of Scotland. He and his younger brother, Calum (a principal dancer with the Royal Swedish Ballet), were conceived via IVF. “When I was younger I didn’t really know what it meant, other than my parents telling me that I’d spent the first few days on this planet in a tube in the fridge. Me and my brother used to tell people that. I hate hot weather, I love the cold, and I’ve always put it down to the fact I started life in a fridge.”
After the fridge, Lowden’s route to acting began with ballet classes. “My brother wanted to dance. I went along with him but didn’t like doing it, so I was encouraged to narrate the ballet shows, and I realised that I could make people laugh.”
Lowden explains that he was a shy child — he says he’s still easily embarrassed — not rebellious or cool, not particularly academic, and discovering this ability to make people laugh gave him the social confidence that he had been lacking. “I think every kid should experience affirmation. And that is why, when it comes to the arts in particular, they should be encouraged as much as possible, because a lot of kids who aren’t academic or sporty, maybe they play the clarinet beautifully, maybe they can sing, maybe they can act, maybe they can dance. It did so much for me as a very shy person to suddenly feel any kind of — and I don’t mind saying this — any kind of adoration. I was like, f***, people think I’m good at something. People clapped, thank God, and I felt good about myself. It was just the best.”
There is a thriving amateur operatics scene in the Borders, retirees and school kids putting on musicals, and Lowden threw himself into this. “I did every musical when I was young, I loved it,” he says. He was obsessed with Gene Kelly, and also with sitcoms: Dad’s Army, Only Fools and Horses, as well as Porridge. “Life looks great in musicals, and it’s the same in sitcoms — everything comes to a wonderful coda.”
His obsessions have evolved; today he reads a lot of historical fiction and he walks a lot — Lowden and Ronan have a dog, a petit basset griffon Vendéen. At Christmas he constructs complex festive miniature villages. “It’s just like being a kid again. I’ve always liked miniatures, miniature stuff. I like maps, I don’t know what that is.” He does not meditate. “Christ, no. I don’t have the ability for anything like that. My meditation is distraction. Like, I love driving because one part of your brain is having to concentrate on something. I’m very restless and I really like my own company.”
He and Ronan have homes in London and in the Borders, where they try to return as much as their schedule allows. In terms of co-ordinating their careers, Lowden explains that they “just have to check in with each other a lot. Obviously it made it a lot easier when we worked on the same project.” They do have a plan to work together again. “But the question is, how do we do it, because Saoirse, she has ambitions as well to direct.”
Lowden is veering towards the other side of the camera, possibly writing or directing, most probably producing. He enjoyed his experience as a producer on The Outrun. “It’s just not as much about you,” he says. “I love people that are brilliant in things. I love being near people that are brilliant in things, and I love being able to help in any way I can.” He was thrilled to meet Jeremy Strong at the Baftas, whose performance in The Apprentice was one of his favourites of the year. “It turns out he’s a Slow Horses fan. I couldn’t quite believe that, I was gobsmacked.” And when I try to raise James Bond again he diverts the conversation with a story about the time he met Daniel Craig. “I was doing a film with his wife [Rachel Weisz] and he was on set one day. I saw his eyes from the other side of the room, like a snow leopard. I was like, oh my God! And then I met him and I think I had cake all over my hand, but he was so wonderful.”
Lowden’s incessant self-deprecation could be an act, but I don’t think it is. To this day, despite all the success, he doesn’t feel entirely at ease as an actor. “I still struggle, sometimes I refer to actors as ‘them’,” he says. “And TV, it can feel like acting on a building site.” It’s different for him on stage. “Because I’ve always been shy, I live in my imagination. And when you’re on stage there’s sort of an agreed contract between you and an audience. It’s called performing. So my body and my brain go, it’s performing, it’s fine, you can do whatever you want.”
The Fifth Step, May 10-July 26, Sohoplace, London W1, sohoplace.org. Tornado is in cinemas from May 23
Styling David Bradshaw. Grooming Petra Sellge at The Wall Group. Set design Olivia Elias. Local production North Six
