Ruth Bradley: "I went from wearing Britney Spears crop tops to wanting to be the bride of Dracula"

“Would you consider a shower?”

“Yeah, it’s a tempting offer but I don’t think that’s appropriate right now. Apart from anything else one of my team just died!”

That’s the perma-grubby and obnoxious Jackson Lamb spurning latest MI5 irritant Emma Flyte in season four of Slow Horses, the best TV drama since The Sopranos – no, really! – which focuses on the disgraced spies supposedly put out to pasture at Slough House where Lamb rules the roost.

Appearing opposite Gary Oldman in this and many of the new series’ other key scenes is Clontarf thesp Ruth Bradley who confesses to being seriously starstruck whenever she was in close proximity to the much-garlanded English actor.

“One of my favourite films and soundtracks growing up was Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” she recalls. “A friend’s older sister had the poster on her wall and I remember being so intrigued. I eventually got to see it sleeping over at another friend’s house and instantly fell in love with Gary. I went from wearing Britney Spears crop tops to wanting to be the bride of Dracula! Anything dark – like that, Interview With The Vampire, Tim Burton’s Batman and Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet – I loved as a kid.”

Despite being a self-confessed Gary Oldman fangirl, Ruth’s frenetic work schedule – seven major films and TV series in three years – meant that she hadn’t seen Slow Horses before joining the cast.

“When my agent sent me the sides (small sections of the script) they were all coded,” she reveals. “I didn’t know what the show was but straight away thought, ‘This is some of the best dialogue I’ve ever read!’

“So, I called my agent and was mad with excitement when he said, ‘It’s that espionage thriller with Gary Oldman in it!’ The auditioning process went on for three months by which time I’d seen the first three series and absolutely adored it.”

Ruth Bradley and Gary Oldman in Slow Horses

Asked to describe her character, the 37-year old shoots back, “Emma is Deputy Director General Diana Taverner’s new right-hand person, a role that in previous seasons was played by a male. She’s like, ‘I’m top of my game. I’ve finally arrived. My whole life has been working up to this point.’ She’s unaware of these ‘slow horses’, as they’re known in the intelligence world, but then meets Jackson Lamb who quickly pulls the rug from under her. She’s horrified by his looks and his smell, tries to rein him in but eventually gets dragged down to his level and, well, we’ll see!”

Moreso than with any other show she’s been in, Ruth was under strict Apple TV+ orders not to reveal spoilers ahead of Slow Horses’ September 4 return. Had she worked with any of the cast or crew before?

“Apart from Kadiff Kirwan who plays one of the slow horses, Marcus, I didn’t know a soul,” she reveals. “It wasn’t a problem. Everybody was instantly so warm. There’s a really family vibe, which comes from most of the crew being there since the very beginning. My first scene was with Gary, so I had to be on top of my game from day one.”

Another memorable exchange between Flyte and Lam goes thusly…

Her: I hear you’re in charge of the rejects.
Him: They don’t like being called that.
Her: What do you call them?
Him: The rejects.

If the dialogue doesn’t win Slow Horses a BAFTA, I don’t know what will!

Sion Daniel Young, who featured in the last series as keeper of the MI5 archives Douglas, told me he couldn’t believe how open showrunner Will Smith (not the Fresh Prince one!) is to collaboration.

“As well as being a genius, Will is one of the nicest people you’ve ever met,” Ruth enthuses. “There’s no ‘This is my show’-style ego. He’s totally open to other people’s suggestions, which is a mark of that genius. Sometimes you learn your words and that’s it, no deviating from the script, but if you’ve got an idea for your character he’ll listen to it. It felt like we were all in it together, making this amazing piece of television.”

Smith – who describes Slow Horses as “the anti-Bond: espionage stripped of glamour” – only agreed to adapting Mick Herron’s series of Slough House novels after Oldman was confirmed as the lead.

“Gary’s so positive and open and everybody follows suit,” Ruth says. “He’s a very generous actor, as is Kristin Scott Thomas who plays Diana Taverner. They’re two legends who you learn from just by being in scenes with them. I had to remind myself that I was there to work, not just stare at Gary and Kristen as they did theirs!”

As you can see from the trailer, this series of Slow Horses is even more visually stunning than the previous three.

“The shoot lasted five months and felt like a very high-budget independent film as opposed to a ‘bang, bang, let’s get this done’ TV series,” Bradley notes.

If you thought Hozier leaving Trinity after a semester was indecent haste, Ruth managed just three weeks there before deciding to follow her acting dreams in London. Short as it was, did her Trinners experience feel anything like Normal People?

“Oh yeah, Sally really nailed it,” she says of Ms. Rooney’s bonktastic book and subsequent TV series. “I’d been on tour for a year with Druid Theatre Company doing Sive while finishing off school – I was doing my oral examinations in different parts of the country. Everyone was saying, ‘You should go to university’, so on a whim I filled out my CEO form, put down Trinity and got in. Instead of my original plan, which was to finish the Leaving Cert and get the hell out of Ireland, I was doing this four-year Germanic languages course.

“I lasted less than a month before quitting and going to London where I’ve been living ever since. I didn’t know anybody here, but got a job in telesales and, courtesy of a Gumtree ad, a house-share in Golders Green with eight strangers.

“It’s different now but back then there were no Zoom auditions. You were posted scripts and then had to go and meet people in Soho, which I couldn’t have done living back in Dublin. I was totally at sea for about a year, but said, ‘I’m staying until the plan works’… which eventually it did!”

Back home, Ruth had been part of a Dublin acting gang that included Niamh Algar, Sarah Greene, Charlie Murphy and Toni O’Rourke, all of whom remain close friends.

“We used to hang out and be in each other’s pockets all the time, which was great,” she reminisces. “I’ve never sat down and done a Venn diagram but at this stage everybody’s probably worked with everybody else.”

Ruth’s early roles included playing Moya Cassidy in The Clinic and – strange but true – being the Irish language voice of the pink Power Ranger. She then won an IFTA Best Supporting Actor gong playing Antoinette Keegan in RTÉ’s 2006 Stardust mini-series.

“My dad’s from Coolock and my mom’s from Artane itself, so growing up I was keenly aware of how devastating it was for those communities,” she says. “It was a big talking point in our house and I’d have read about Antoinette who survived and became a tireless campaigner, and her sisters Mary and Martina who tragically died in the fire. When something’s that close to home, there’s a weight of responsibility to do it truthfully. It’s not just entertainment or art for art’s sake. There are real people out there who are still living this.”

While nothing will ever remotely make up for the loss of their loved ones, the hope is that this year’s unlawful killing verdict and subsequent redress programme will bring some degree of closure for the Stardust families.

“Absolutely,” Ruth nods.

Two years after Stardust, she went through an extraordinary physical transformation to portray another real life character in the Australian movie, In Her Skin.

“That film was completely why I wanted to be an actor,” Ruth confides. “It’s about this girl who in 1999 killed another child that she’d babysat. I had to put on around three-stone for the role, which I did by going on a beer, protein shake and crisps diet. It was fun for about five days and then a real chore. Consciously working to put weight on fast is a lot different to pigging out over Christmas but the film was an amazing experience. It really allowed me to get into the psychology of human nature.”

And to star alongside both Guy Pearce and Sam Neill.

“I was a bit too young to remember Guy in Home and Away but loved him in Memento and L.A. Confidential which were both great films,” Ruth resumes. “Sam, meanwhile, is just this amazingly charismatic and striking man. Without self-consciously trying, he sucks all the attention out of a room. Everybody just stops and listens to him.”

Mr. Neill has competition in the charisma department, though.

“This is crazy but I was walking down the street last week in Stoke Newington and bumped into Jeremy Corbyn who had this amazing presence,” she laughs. “ I said ‘Hello’ and he came over and had a chat. I was like, ‘My god, the whole world has disappeared. Are we in love?!’ He comes across as a very sincere and caring man.”

In Her Skin wrapped, Ruth jetted back home to join the likes of Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Killian Scott, Ruth Negga, Robert Sheehan, Charlie Murphy – Brat Pack vibes or what? – in season one of Love/Hate. Did she realise what a landmark it would turn out to be?

Ruth Bradley and Robert Sheehan in Love/Hate

“Yeah, we had a keen sense of it being very special,” she nods. “It felt really new, original and exciting. We were all so young and thought the scripts were brilliant. We were constantly hanging out together after work and generally being involved in each other’s lives. We were still shocked by the response, though. It opened doors and reached people that I wouldn’t have expected it to.”

It could be argued – not least by me – that Love/Hate had the finest ensemble Irish cast ever.

“That’s down to the genius of Maureen Hughes, the casting director who’d cast me previously in Stardust,” Ruth ventures. “She has a real knack for picking people who haven’t done anything before and has been one of my champions. It’s just started here on ITVX, so I’ve new people telling me how much they love it. TV usually dates very quickly but Love/Hate still feels as fresh as when the first season went out in Ireland in 2010.”

What Ruth didn’t envisage was that after Love/Hate she’d become a science fiction icon.

“Yeah, that wasn’t on my bingo card,” she laughs. “It was a pleasant surprise because I came to realise there’s so many great female characters in sci-fi. My first experience of that was in Primeval which still has this massive fan following. It was very CGI-heavy which meant you were literally delivering your lines to a tennis ball on a stick – everything got added after. You had to imagine this fantastical world in your head.”

After that came another recurring role in Humans, a delve into the Doctor Who universe and an episode of the Philip K. Dick-inspired Electric Dreams series, which featured Bryan Cranston as her co-star.

“I was only really familiar with Blade Runner, but after doing that anthology I realised just how many amazing stories Philip K. Dick wrote,” she proffers. “As for Bryan Cranston, what an absolute gem! He’s such a gorgeous and generous actor. No ego, it’s just about the work.”

Ruth is equally generous in her praise for the people she appeared alongside in 2022’s The Wonder, the Netflix adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel about an 18th Century ‘fasting girl’.

“Ciarán Hinds is one of the loveliest men you’ve ever met in your life, as is Toby Jones,” she beams. “He’ll kill me for telling this story but when I was twenty-seven, I was bending everybody’s ear about this offer I’d got for a thing in Hollywood. As I was blah blah blah-ing away, Toby was like, ‘Yeah, okay, okay. You need to find something else in your life apart from this.’ That was the start of me learning to take an acting job really seriously – and then forgetting it.

“I got another career-changing piece of advice from a director when I was nineteen. I was finding this really emotional scene hard to do and he took me aside and said, ‘Don’t lie, because if you lie, the camera sees you’re lying and then the audience sees you’re lying.’ I’ve carried that in my head ever since.”

Currently awaiting a release date is Embers, a beautifully observed and highly evocative movie in which Ruth plays a sexual surrogate employed to help a high-security psychiatric patient overcome his intimacy issues.

“Stuart, that’s the craziest film I’ve ever done!” she reveals. “Like so many independent movies, I was attached to it for about three years but the money kept falling through. Anyway, I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant when the director, Christian Cooke, called me and said, ‘We’ve got the funding and are good to go in January.’ I was like, ‘Are you joking?’ He wasn’t, so about an hour before giving birth, I was in the labour ward learning my lines and four weeks later on set with my mother-in-law who looked after my daughter between takes.

“The selfless love I had for my newborn helped me play my character, Amy, whose supporting of the people she works with requires enormous amounts of love and compassion.”

Ruth is also excited about Concordia, a French/Japanese/German co-production which features a United Nations of acting talent.

“We shot it in Rome and every actor was from a different country,” she concludes. “I was really struck by how we all had our own cultural sensibilities and different ways of performing.

“There’s a big AI element to the series, which is set in a town where everybody is filmed 24/7, the idea being that suspected crimes are prevented before they take place. People are generally okay with this until there’s a major glitch in the system. It’s a really fantastic premise.”

• Season Four of Slow Horses is out on Apple TV now