‘Slow Horses’ Actor Christopher Chung Talks Royal Fans And Season Five

Christopher Chung attends Apple TV+’s Primetime Emmy Party Red Carpet at Ysabel on Sunday, September 14, 2025 in West Hollywood, California.

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Slow Horses is back for a fifth season, which will delight a lot of fans, including some very important ones.

“Queen Camilla is apparently a fan of the show, so you can get much higher than that. Gary Oldman was at an event, and she asked if there was more coming out. Anna Wintour, the same,” enthuses Christopher Chung as we chat over Zoom as the acclaimed spy series returns to Apple TV+. “Jack Lowden said he had seen Anna at a fashion show, and she loves the show, apparently, so people are watching it that you couldn’t even fathom.”

The Queen of the United Kingdom, who most likely doesn’t watch the show alone, and the outgoing Vogue magazine editor-in-chief aren’t the only ones who will be glued to the latest six-episode run that kicks off on Wednesday, September 24, 2025.

“My biggest ‘Wow’ moment that really resonated with me that the whole industry was watching it was at an event for the Golden Globes in London,” Chung recalls. “I saw Jeremy Strong from Succession there, and he waved at me from across the room, but I realized that he was probably waving at the guy behind me. Then I was with a friend of mine who had taken me to an event, we were chatting, and Jeremy came over and tapped me on the shoulder and was like, ‘Hey, man, I love your work, and I love your show. I think it’s such a great, great writing, and it’s so brilliant.’ Coming from someone whom I respect so much, that meant a lot, and maybe he was actually waving at me at the other party. It’s astounding how many people that I look up to and admire have watched it, and I don’t even know.”

Christopher Chung Was Nervous To Take Center Stage In ‘Slow Horses’

Based on Mick Herron’s fifth Slough House novel, London Rules, the latest season of Slow Horses sees Chung’s Slough House tech specialist, Roddy Ho, take center stage in the narrative when he meets a woman who he thinks loves him but is, in fact, a honeytrap. Once she has the information she needs and hands it to the people behind the sting, a chain of increasingly bizarre events and potential threats happens across London. Once again, it’s up to Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman, and his ragtag team of misfits to clean up the infiltration and help find those behind it.

So how did Chung, also known for his performances in Blitz and Waterloo Road, feel stepping up as the heart of the story for the acclaimed and award-winning show?

“I felt safe in the sense that I knew the character really strongly. If this were season two or three, I probably wouldn’t have played it with as much nuance,” the actor explains. “There’s also this pressure coming into a fifth season when you know every other season has been 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and you are the first domino that tips for this season for the clock to start. There was that pressure to deliver and make sure that this season was as good as the rest.”

“Also, coming into season five, it is only natural that people start to look for the cracks within the show when they are really scrutinizing everything. Is it the same thing? Have they managed to do it better? Is it getting stale? All of these questions start to get posed even before you release the season, so you’re already on the back foot in that sense. For me, it was crucial to deliver the strongest performance possible, which was rooted in all the work we had done over the past four seasons. Hopefully I’ve done that.”

Why Roddy Ho Finding Love On ‘Slow Horses’ Would Not Be A Good Idea

Chung is the first to admit that Ho is a character who can be hard to like. However, he’s the “necessary evil” within the Slough House team. The actor tries to find a balance so he’s not too unbearable.

“It would crumble without him, and they wouldn’t be able to get anything done,” he sighs. “With Roddy, because his sense of arrogance and self-importance is so pronounced and his ego is huge, it’s a real trick to be able to show that empathetic vulnerability without playing him as someone that’s completely intolerable and inaccessible to the audience. Every season, I try to imbue him with a bit of humanity and how he does actually get affected by things, but he is very quick to put his walls back up and build his world back up when the bricks start to come down.”

“You see that in this season, when Taverner, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, is starting to bring him around to the fact that Tara is a honey trap, and he’s very quickly able to spin it around and justify it away. He’s like, ‘She must have been coerced. They must be threatening her,’ and on all of these spin doctor things that he puts on his own reality to justify what’s happening to him. You see, as the audience, that sense he knows that there’s something quite wrong.”

Because of that, it’s still almost impossible not to feel sorry for him, as deluded as he is, when it turns out the love wasn’t real, just part of her mission. Does Ho deserve, or even really want, love?

“You’d get a version of like Roddy 7.0 if he actually found true love,” Chung laments. “He might become more of a monster. He has got a really heightened sense of importance and peacocking this season because he has Tara this season. I would hate to think of what that would mean if he had a real girlfriend longer than the amount of time that they had been together. I can’t see him settling down with someone. I can’t see someone tolerating him for that long, and I don’t think that that is something that he wants, necessarily. He wants to be a f**kboy.”

‘Slow Horses’ Continues To Grow In Popularity By Keeping Things Interesting

As the fifth season of Slow Horses drops, with two more already confirmed, Chung loves the fact that the show’s audience continues to grow. It’s something he’s especially proud of at a time when audiences can tire of shows that return season after season, finding new things to consume and champion instead.

“When I was doing the first season, I remember having a conversation with our writer Will Smith on set, and we were discussing how we thought it might go down,” the UK-based Australian recalls. “We knew that it wasn’t going to be a huge hit in the first instance, having just dropped the first season, but he had the feeling that it would be like a snowball effect, almost like Breaking Bad. That has definitely been the case. What has been really great about the show, as people have started to discover it, is that they have four seasons to go back to before they start the new one.”

“Knowing as well that we’ve been recommissioned for a further two seasons, it has been a lot easier for the audience to invest in the characters and the show, because they know that it’s not going to get canceled and they’re not going to be cut short. When I discovered Breaking Bad, it was three seasons in, and I was like, ‘Oh, and it’s still going? Okay, I’ll invest in this, and I’ll start watching it.’ That’s definitely the way that it is starting to feel, which is great. Hopefully, we’ll be as successful as that.”

For many, the hardest part will be saying goodbye once all of Mick Herron’s Slough House novels have been adapted. Chung is philosophical.

“All good things come to an end, but you want to end on a high,” the Slow Horses actor concludes. “Whenever it goes out, you want to end at the best, because you don’t want it to be like, ‘Meh. It was done.'”