‘Slow Horses:’ Rosalind Eleazar On Exploring Dark Places, Grief In Apple TV’s Spy Thriller Series

Rosalind Eleazar navigated many dark places in her role of Louisa in Apple TV’s Slow Horses.

Now in its third season, the British spy thriller series steadily built a loyal following and is now poised to emerge as a strong factor in the upcoming 2024 Emmy season. Based on the novel Slough House by Mick Herron, the series stars Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, an intelligence officer serving in the MI5 reject-filled Slough House. Despite the misery of their employment, Lamb’s team manages to expose schemes negatively impacting Britain.

Eleazar plays Louisa Guy, an operative on the Slough House team. Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, she details her character’s trajectory from closed off to now almost numb with pain. She shares how she channels that grief with the audience. She also reveals how that grief opens up ways to give great one liners and the chance to bond in unlikely ways.

Awards Daily: In this season Louisa is in a very dark place. How was it getting into that mindset?

Rosalind Eleazar: What I particularly like about this series is how when you are tackling grief that people handle that in very different ways. She chooses to shut herself off from the world and takes a lot of her pain out on the rest of the world and on a lot of people. So you just gotta do what you got to do for the series (laughing).

Awards Daily: Speaking of taking it out on people despite her depression, we get some very funny moments with the one-night stand that she runs into a few times. I was curious what those scenes were like?

Rosalind Eleazar: Oh, god, the poor guy. He comes in from a day’s work and I’m spewing crap at him. Those things are funny. Will Smith, our writer, is the king of the one-liners. What’s fun about this character is that women are required to be more likeable than the men need to be. But in this show it’s, like, f*** it. Let’s be the humans that we are! But yes, those scenes were a lot of fun.

Awards Daily: You and Jack Lowden’s character River have a lot of great scenes together this season. There’s the scene when you guys are talking about grief, and of course you are partnered up more so than you’ve been in the other seasons. What was that like?

Rosalind Eleazar: Jack and I work really well together and we are good friends. What’s great about this show is you get to see all these duos change from different seasons. It was interesting putting River and Louisa together, people who are both incredibly stubborn who wouldn’t be the kind of people to open up about their feelings, and then you put them in a car and see what happens. Which basically when two people are unable to dive into themselves, but ironically can really see each other’s problems. They have such a beautiful, weird friendship. While they’re shouting a lot at each other, there’s also an incredible amount of care and love in a way. Which, to be honest, is not that much dissimilar to between me and Jack in real life! Plus, when working with Jack we do different things on each take, and there’s room for us to change things, and we feed off each other.

Awards Daily: What was it like filming the action sequence inside the archive building? You really feel the danger characters are in at that moment?

Rosalind Eleazar: Well, you get cabin fever because you are in the dark for the whole day and you have literally no idea what time it is. You go outside for a breath of fresh air and you’re, like, oh, my god, there is light. So it probably helped the scenes because it did feel like a pressure cooker with all the lights off, apart from these red neon emergency lights. It was insane, but it was also a lot of fun. I’m sure our hearts needed a rest after all those sequences.

Awards Daily: One of the big plot points from the season that has not been resolved is the diamond that Louisa took. You of course know more because you filmed the fourth season already, but had you given any thought to why she took it, or what she even planned to do with it?

Rosalind Eleazar: I feel like she took it in a weird way as a memory of Min. I do not think it was anything nefarious but it was the only little thing she could get to go, F*** you. F*** you for taking the person that she was starting to love away from her. What she plans on doing with it? Well, she could get a lot of money, so we could find out in season 5.

Awards Daily: Where we leave Louisa at the end of season 3 she is not really in any better place. She survived the events of the season obviously, but she’s still in her dark place. Did you have thoughts about where she was at?

Rosalind Eleazar: I find Louisa on a journey in season 1; she’s a pretty locked person with a lot of barriers and not available to people. And then Min in season 2 brings a lightness to her, and obviously that’s taken away from her quite quickly. Then in 3 she doesn’t know what to do with this pain, which she expands with these one night stands. Then in season 4 she just doesn’t give a s*** anymore, she doesn’t care, she doesn’t have anything to lose, so it is quite interesting that she starts to form a friendship with River. Just when she’s about to be free of anything, she starts to really care for River and his whereabouts when he goes and does some really really crazy things, and she is brought back to her pain with Min. To me it’s all about, for her, the trajectory of the moment of Min coming into her life and then coming out of her life, and I think you see a real shift in who she is from season 1 to season 4.

Awards Daily: You have a new project where you were just cast in the lead in “Missing You” on Netflix. Can you tell us anything about that?

Rosalind Eleazar: I’m actually filming that right now. It’s about a woman whose father was murdered 11 years prior to where the story starts, then her fiancé also left her unexpectedly. The series is about her discovering more about her father’s death and why her fiancé left her. She’s been living in this frozen state of not having answers but still getting on with her life. When the series starts her fiancé resurfaces on a dating app that she is on. We have a fantastic cast, and I hope it’s going to be really good.