Slow Horses season five: Nick Mohammed credits Ted Lasso for giving him a dramatic leg-up

Slow Horses is not the first time Nick Mohammed has played in the world of espionage and spy thrillers. It’s not even his second.

When the British comedian, actor and Ted Lasso star boarded the fifth season of the Gary Oldman-headlined Slow Horses, he hadn’t made the connection that the genre was becoming something of a trend for him.

“Maybe that’s my typecast now,” he told The Nightly, with an added laugh.

Mohammed started filming on Slow Horses the day after he finished a movie, Deep Cover, with Bryce Dallas Howard and Orlando Bloom, in which the three play stand-up comedians recruited to become undercover assets for the Met Police.

There was also Intelligence, a two-season goofy comedy he created, wrote and co-starred in with David Schwimmer, set inside the UK government’s cyber crimes unit. Despite all that time adjacent to the world of spies, Mohammed is adamant he knows no more than the average viewer.

“When we were writing Intelligence, the GCHQ actually got in contact because they were, it’s fair to say, a little concerned about how we might portray their image,” he recalled.

“When they realised how silly the show was and that the kinds of things I wanted to know were, ‘What does the snack machine hold, what do people wear?’, and that it wasn’t anything too spicy or saucy, they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, we can tell you that’.”

Mohammed’s character in Slow Horses is quite different to those in Intelligence and Deep Cover. Here, he’s playing Zafar Jaffrey, the mayor of London in the fictional show, right in the middle of an intense re-election campaign against a far-right candidate whose central plank is being anti-immigration.

This season kicks off with a mass shooting involving a booth worker for Jaffrey, by a gunman with nationalist views.

Slow Horses always seemed to be on the pulse when it came to connecting with real-world events, even if the episodes were filmed months earlier, and based on books written many years ago.

Season five was shot last year, but its premiere this week, not two weeks after 110,000 far-right supporters poured onto the streets of London to protest against immigration, has a chilling resonance.

“We’re all aware of the state of the world and what’s going on, but it is a work of fiction, albeit there are elements that people will recognise, sadly, things that are going on in this day and age, and we sadly can’t get away from that.”

While Mohammed cautioned against drawing too many parallels between the series and recent events, he said it is still, “undoubtedly relevant and will strike a chord, for better or worse”.

“It is, suddenly, a reflection of where we are and, look, people have been anti-immigration for millennia, sadly. People have always been like, ‘We don’t want people to our shores’.

“Part of the success of Slow Horses is just how potent it can be because there’s a real edge and a real satirical edge to it. Of course, it’s always balanced brilliantly by those moments of levity and you realise that you were laughing, but actually the stakes are huge and there’s a lot of death, and emotional and dramatic storytelling as well.”

While Mohammed broke out on the international stage for his role as Nate “the Wonderkid” Shelley, he has been a mainstay in UK comedy for a lot longer.

A prolific presence on TV in shows such as Drifters and Drunk History, he’s also been on the likes of Taskmaster and 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, in addition to touring as his alter-ego, Mr Swallows.

Which is all to say, that Mohammed is known for his comedic chops. Playing Jaffrey certainly called on that experience for the slippery, cowardly politician, but the role is primarily a serious one, and the actor credited Ted Lasso for giving him the opportunity to branch out.

“This is a little bit of a departure for me and with Ted Lasso, particularly season two, it took us to slightly more emotional and dramatic terms for my character, it was the first time I got to play a bit more straight-laced and dramatic,” he said.

“Since Ted Lasso, I’ve been afforded a bit more leeway in the kinds of roles that I’m seen for now. Whereas before, not to say I was typecast, but I had a particular schtick and I would often be employed to do a certain thing to play a slightly awkward, bumbling comedy character.

“Doing something like the big heel turn in Ted Lasso allowed me to stretch myself a little bit, and I guess that means that you slightly open up the bracket for which you can be seen for roles that are more dramatic skewed than comedy skewed.

“I’m very grateful for Ted Lasso.”

It was muscle he had already used, so Mohammed wasn’t burdened with imposter syndrome when he showed up on set – that and he had gone through a rigorous audition process, and through all those recalls, each time he had a clearer idea of what the filmmakers wanted from him.

He may have read all the scripts – and not just the pages of his scenes – for this season, but Mohammed is still pumped to watch the whole series week-by-week with the rest of the audience.

“I’m saving it, I’m going to watch it like a real viewer,” he said. “I was such a fan of the show before I joined, and of the books, that I want to savour it, even though I know what happens.”

Slow Horses is on Apple TV+ from September 24 with new episodes weekly on Wednesdays