Then he turns the questions on me, with the chatty discomfort of someone who’d much rather be asking than answering.
“How old are you?” A gust of comradely weariness, delivered in a soft Scottish Borders burr.
“I’m 30.”
“I’m 36, man. You definitely start feeling older.”
He first noticed it – not maturity, but fatigue – “at 30,” he says. “When you get into your 30s, something just starts to tick… I measure myself against footballers. You know, when they get to 30 and it’s like, ‘Oh, he’s still got the legs’ – because he’s only 30.”
But actors endure their fair share of scrutiny about ageing. “I remember being ‘promising’ for ages,” says Lowden. He won an Olivier at 23, and an EE Rising Star award, then spent a decade doing serious work in big films – a Spitfire pilot in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017), Lord Darnley, opposite Saoirse Ronan, in Mary Queen of Scots (2018) – without quite becoming the name above the marquee.
Now, he’s reaching the age when a promising actor becomes a leading man, or doesn’t. “I count myself lucky, in that I’ve had a relatively gradual build,” he says. “So I’ve been allowed to develop as a man, as a person, outside the spotlight.” Only lately has he noticed it swinging his way. “It’s funny – you go from being ‘a bright young thing’ to just ‘a thing’.”
Slow Horses has a lot to do with that. His hapless nepo-spy, River Cartwright, has carried the show’s momentum for six series. Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb, a flatulent, foul-mouthed spymaster, may get the laughs, but it’s Lowden – all puppy-dog eyes and self-inflicted injuries – who lingers. “Jack is great at the action, he’s great at the comedy, but he’s also really, really great at the messy emotional stuff,” says show creator Will Smith. “He truly is the full package.”
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