In our 10 Minutes With … series, the Australian Chinese actor shares how he went from almost quitting to landing a role in the popular show on Apple TV+
Slow Horses, an Apple TV+ series based on British author Mick Herron’s thriller novel series Slough House (eight novels so far, first one published in 2010), doesn’t follow the expected tropes of the spy genre. The show, which has been running since 2022, doesn’t have a suave James Bond type of secret agent; instead, we have Gary Oldman playing the flatulent Jackson Lamb, who leads a dysfunctional team of MI5 agents that have wound up at the “worst” branch, Slough House, due to various individual failures.
One of the actors in the ensemble cast is Australian Chinese actor Christopher Chung, who portrays abrasive hacker Roddy Ho. While Asian people can sometimes be typecast as mild-mannered computer geeks in western shows, Chung says the show’s creators invited an “open dialogue” with him to make sure they steer clear of such stereotypes. This sees Chung’s character as having an obnoxious, grating personality—a far cry from the typically quiet, agreeable Asian figure.
With the show’s third season wrapped up and a fourth to be released later this year, Tatler spoke to Chung about the importance of creative agency, his Asian inspirations and more.
Read more: How Asian talent, voices and lived experiences are reshaping entertainment in Hollywood and beyond
Your character on Slow Horses, Roddy Ho, is so complex. What drew you to him?
Our showrunner and writer Will Smith approached Roddy in a way that was different from the one-dimensional Asian hacker stereotype. I knew there was more to delve into, and our first season director James Hawes gave me a lot of creative freedom and artistic licence to do that.
We had a lot of source material from Mick [Herron], and the way that he wrote Roddy was through internal monologue, so you see his polarised point of view develop in these thoughts. What’s great about Roddy is that you don’t know what’s coming next, because he doesn’t either.
How do you prepare to get into Roddy’s headspace on set?
I played a lot of hacking-style games to learn how to type as quickly as I could and to understand what things might look like on a screen.
My background is in theatre originally, so [the prepping style for TV] is very different to that of a musical, which requires a lot of physical and vocal preparation to do, say, eight shows a week.