** Major Slow Horses season six spoilers follow **
You might be reeling from Emma Flyte’s grim end on Slow Horses, but Ruth Bradley has had six years to get used to the idea.
The 39-year-old was told of Flyte’s demise before she was cast as the head dog at MI5 for season four. But she only learned exactly how her character would go out right before they shot it.
There had been rumours among the crew, Bradley tells Metro ahead of the bloody season six finale. The whispers were that Hugo Weaving’s hitman Frank Harkness would do the deed, in a change from Mick Herron’s source material.
Bradley admits that the build-up was ‘strange’. Speaking over a video call, the Irish actor has a slightly manic tone to her voice as she recalls the crew all season saying things like, ‘Oh my God! And you die. When are you going to die? When do you die?’
She says: ‘It’s weird because your brain doesn’t go, “Oh, they’re talking about Emma Flyte”. This family I’d been with for years. It all felt very surreal.’
The big beach stand-off, where Harkness executes Flyte as she lies wounded in the sand, came in the final week of filming.
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They mapped out the moves – she’ll be shot here, then fall here – with director Adam Randall, but not so much ‘the inner life’ of that moment. Yet Bradley’s performance of it hits you like a wallop to the stomach.
‘I had the chance to play the moment between her fighting and realising, “Oh God, now I’m gonna die”,’ she says, recalling how a line in the stage direction referred to the realisation it’s her final moment.
‘You never know in the edit if they’re going to use all that. But Adam really let those moments breathe, which I think is what’s really good about the show. Yeah, it’s fun, it’s a thriller and it’s high octane. But also, it can be very human.
‘The idea of basically being executed on a beach when you can’t get away. We can all relate to how horrendous that would be. And there would be a moment of… Jesus. That’s it now. That’s my last moment.’
As Bradley puts it, Flyte died on a Monday and the season wrapped on Friday. ‘I spent the rest of the week as a corpse on the beach,’ she says, recalling the cast running all around her prone position.
It sounds pretty horrendous, but Bradley says it allowed her to grieve Flyte while still playing her.
‘I always have a bit of a slump after a job, but this was such a long time with a character. I got to really be in the grief for the week,’ she says.
Randall would deliver notes to her castmates – or, as Bradley puts it, ‘the actors who are still alive’ – and would check if she was alright, lying there.
‘I’d just be silently weeping in the sand going, “I can’t believe it’s over, and I’m in this kind of suspended place between Emma’s life and death”. He’s like, “Alright, anyway, moving on”.’
The idea of being executed on a beach when you can’t get away. We can all relate to how horrendous that would be.
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When the season finally wrapped and Bradley could peel herself off the sand, she made a beeline for the make-up bus and chopped all her hair off (after producers okayed it).
‘I had to keep that long blonde hair for a long time. So it was helpful to have mourned her and then chopped the hair on Friday night. Wake up Saturday fresh,’ she says.
Given this season was filmed last year, the months since included some white lies, as people on other projects queried why she wasn’t filming Slow Horses, which is currently shooting season eight. ‘That’s been harder. Now I can breathe a sigh of relief,’ she says.
Filming the Apple TV hit sounds just as fun as you might imagine. After long shoots on the beach, Bradley says they would retreat to Weaving’s place, where he would cook them all dinner.
‘It’s like going back to the best school ever. At this stage, we’re all pretty close, and we still are,’ she says. When we speak, the cast have just attended the Emmys as one big crew (‘My feet are still sore,’ Bradley says to start).
‘We were looking around at all the other shows, like, “I wonder if all these casts and producers get on so well.” We know each other really well after so many years, and it’s only brought us closer together, really,’ she says.
Slow Horses was up for five gongs, but only walked away with one, for outstanding directing. It’s become something of a running joke with the fanbase, how the espionage caper rarely translates the many noms into wins.
As for what the cast make of it? Incredibly unbothered, by the sounds of it. ‘I think we weirdly love that it’s in keeping with the show, just like the underdogs,’ says Bradley.
I suspect Jackson Lamb would have another word for them.
Slow Horses season six is available to stream on Apple TV.