The search for the next James Bond has been long. It\u2019s already been five years since Daniel Craig hung up the tux and the Walther PPK in No Time To Die<\/em> (or \u2013 spoiler alert \u2013 was blown to smithereens with them), sparking a half-decade of speculation over who\u2019ll be appointed next to 007. It seems that race is finally nearing its end; according to a loose-lipped Gary Oldman, of all people, the new Bond overlords at Amazon\/MGM have narrowed down their top choice. And since Oldman\u2019s Slow Horses<\/em> co-star Jack Lowden is chief among those rumoured top names, Oldman\u2019s knowledge nods towards Lowden being the Chosen One.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Let\u2019s get it out the way: Jack Lowden would be a great Bond, if it is indeed him. He\u2019s young, charismatic, has a physical presence. He\u2019s warm, but there\u2019s an edge to him too. He\u2019s Scottish, which helps in a 007 context. He\u2019s in his mid-30s, so could have significant mileage for a run of Bond movies. And we\u2019ve already seen him as a spy, as Slow Horses<\/em>\u2019 River Cartwright; a man who has, along with the the rest of the Slough House team, saved the skins of the country, boss Jackson Lamb (Oldman) and his colleagues several times over. The qualifications are all there.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n River Cartwright isn\u2019t James Bond. He\u2019s James Bond if he was a bit shite.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n Except, the delicious irony of it all is, River Cartwright isn\u2019t James Bond. He\u2019s James Bond if he was a bit shite, all the skills but little of the suaveness, prone to fuck-ups, drowning in the undertow caused by the more senior people around him. This is a guy who wishes<\/em> he was James Bond, who went into MI5 hoping to be<\/em> James Bond, and who found himself shipped off to Slough House for his grave errors. (Or was he? There are many underlying references in Slow Horses<\/em> to indicate Cartwright was set up to fail by his conniving superiors.) James Bond wouldn’t know what a Colin The Caterpillar cake is; River Cartwright definitely does.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Across its soon-to-be-six seasons, Slow Horses<\/em> has become a massive Apple TV hit, a word-of-mouth smash. And it\u2019s easy to see why: gripping, propulsive, extremely funny, incredibly well-defined characters. The milieu it\u2019s playing in is definitively post-Bond; it\u2019s about subverting the expectation audiences have of the Intelligence world as something slick and smart and cool<\/em>. While we see glimpses of MI5, it\u2019s full of power-hungry managers and ruthless agents who don\u2019t care about crossing their own people; the Slough House team might be all the rejects, each with real issues and flaws to face up to, though they\u2019re more morally wholesome. The thing they\u2019re definitively not<\/em> is cool, or slick. Their office is disgusting, their resources lacking. Jackson Lamb \u2013 the smartest guy in any room \u2013 spends much of his time farting, or insulting his own crew.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Of all Lamb\u2019s people, Lowden\u2019s River has always been the most capable. You can feel the fact that maybe he\u2019s not really<\/em> supposed to be in Slough House. (That said, he didn\u2019t manage to stop the mayoral candidate he protecting from being killed by a falling paint pot in Season 5; a genius bit of Looney Tunes<\/em> slapstick.) For all that Cartwright is the anti-Bond, it\u2019s easy to see why the new 007 producers \u2013 Harry Potter<\/em> and Paddington<\/em> mogul David Heyman, and Spider-Man<\/em> overseer Amy Pascal \u2013 would see Bond in Lowden; there\u2019s a steely determination to him, a physical scrappiness. A little bit of melancholy too, and yet a lightness that makes him a delight to spend time with.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Who knows whether Gary Oldman has correct intel. You never know when it comes to Jackson Lamb. But it would be a relief for Bond to finally be cast, to finally get the cameras rolling on the next era of 007, and if it is<\/em> Jack Lowden in the role, Slow Horses<\/em> is \u2013 in its own weird way \u00ad\u2013 the perfect proof-of-concept. Let\u2019s just hope it wouldn\u2019t stop River Cartwright mid-flow.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The search for the next James Bond has been long. It\u2019s already been five years since Daniel Craig hung up the tux and the Walther PPK in No Time To Die (or \u2013 spoiler alert \u2013 was blown to smithereens with them), sparking a half-decade of speculation over who\u2019ll be appointed next to 007. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13982,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"Default","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-47"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13981"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13983,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13981\/revisions\/13983"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Slow](\"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/jack-lowdens-best-james-bond-audition-has-been-playing-the-anti-bond-in-slow-horses.jpg\")
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