Gary Oldman is to star in spy drama Slow Horses for Apple with Justified’s Graham Yost exec producing.
The nascent digital TV service has ordered an adaptation of Mick Herron’s spy novels from Top of the Lake producer See-Saw Films.
Slow Horses, which was first published in 2010, features Jackson Lamb, a brilliant but irascible leader of a group of spies, who end up in MI5’s Slough House, having been exiled from the mainstream for their mistakes. Darkest Hour and The Dark Knight star Oldman plays Jackson Lamb.
The book, which is the first in a series of eight, follows the abduction of a young man with the kidnappers threatening to behead him live on the internet. However, there are question marks as to whether the victim is who he appears to be and there’s a murky connection between the kidnappers and a disgraced journalist.
The series will be written by Will Smith, a close collaborator of Armando Iannucci who has worked on series including Veep, The Thick Of It and HBO’s upcoming Avenue 5. Smith will exec produce with Graham Yost, the Justified showrunner who has worked on series including Amazon’s Sneaky Pete and FX’s The Americans. Jamie Laurenson, Hakan Kousetta, Iain Canning, Emile Sherman, Gail Mutrux and Douglas Urbanski also serve as executive producers.
The series is commissioned for Apple out of the UK by Creative Director for Europe Worldwide Video, Jay Hunt and Apple’s Heads of Worldwide Video, Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht.
It marks the latest big-budget series for See-Saw Films, which produced Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake and Chris O’Dowd and Rosamund Pike-fronted short-form series State of the Union and are currently in production with a Colin Farrell-fronted adaptation of The North Water for the BBC.