Jack Lowden can still quote exactly how one of his earliest reviews described him. “A perky-nippled Tintin lookalike,” he says, grinning, hands thrust deep into the pockets of the ankle-skimming Armani trousers he’s wearing on the set of his Vogue shoot. He shakes his head ruefully, mock wounded, before adding a quietly emphatic, “Bastards.”
It’s hard to square that particular comparison with the tall and unmistakably buff Scotsman keeping the small crew entertained in a studio on a discreet corner of north-west London, even if his sandy hair does rearrange itself into something resembling a quiff whenever he rakes his fingers through it. Although unfailingly professional, as he obediently switches between poses and clothes, Lowden, I’m told, does not relish having his picture taken.
He may have to get used to it. Already lauded for his work on stage (an Olivier Award for his turn as Oswald in a 2013 production of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts), early reviews of Lowden’s starring role as Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction, Terence Davies’s upcoming biopic of the English war poet, are rapturous. Backed by a heavyweight ensemble cast, the actor, who devoured Sassoon’s memoirs while preparing for the role, delivers a performance that is at once subtle and deeply affecting.
On the small screen he’s also just played young intelligence officer River Cartwright in Slow Horses, Apple TV+’s big-budget adaptation of Mick Herron’s much-loved spy novels, opposite Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas. “I was basically like a big sponge on that set,” he says later, sipping a Diet Coke in a pub overlooking Regent’s Park. “Getting to see these guys, that I’ve admired for ages, up close and to watch how they work things out – Gary in particular – it was just fascinating.”
Lowden’s star moment has been coming for some time. Graduating from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2011, a steady stream of TV and theatre roles followed and soon Hollywood noticed. Now a director’s favourite, Lowden, 31, has worked with everyone from Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk) to Steve McQueen (Small Axe) and Josie Rourke, who cast him as Lord Darnley in 2018’s Mary Queen of Scots, the film that introduced him to Saoirse Ronan, his girlfriend of four years.
Raised in a rural village in the Scottish Borders, in a “not at all theatre-y family”, it was joining his little brother’s ballet lessons that gave Lowden his first taste of performing. “I wasn’t very good,” he says, laughing, now wearing his own nondescript track top, jeans and trainers, a neat backpack at his feet. While Calum is now a principal dancer at the Royal Swedish Ballet, Jack jokes that he was quickly encouraged to “try words instead. But that’s how I discovered the stage. I just adore it. It feels like home.”
If this feels perilously close to luvvie territory, rest assured the Borders banter remains intact. In fact, it’s me who stands accused of being pretentious. “So London,” he drawls, after we’ve ordered: a burger and chips for him; cauliflower and chickpea salad for me. He looks appalled. I explain that Lent, not London, is behind the abstemious choice. “No bread?” he repeats, blue eyes wide, Scottish accent suddenly more pronounced. “Get tae f**k!”
He was living in Leith until last year, though professes to love the capital and the home he now shares with Ronan there. Yet it’s when talking about Scotland that he becomes truly animated. “I was in Orkney a couple of days ago and I did not want to come back,” he says. “The space!” He was on a recce for an adaptation of local writer Amy Liptrot’s bestselling nature memoir, The Outrun, which he and Ronan (who will also star) are producing through their new production company, Arcade Pictures.
The project has also ignited a new passion: wild swimming, which he has been doing off the coasts of Scotland and Ireland ever since reading about it in Liptrot’s book. “Beforehand you’re hoping that you trip over and can’t go through with it,” he explains. “Then you come out and you just wanna hug and kiss people.” He is determined to avoid becoming “one of those annoying people” who bang on about it, but will admit to owning a Dryrobe. “It’s leopard print, though,” he points out, which apparently distinguishes him from the earnest types.
Saoirse has the bug too. The couple recently kayaked Scotland’s Great Glen Way with a gang of friends, paddling in vast lochs by day and wild camping at night. “Amazing,” Lowden enthuses. “We reached a pub at one point and walked in there like we’d been missing for three months. We’d only been camping for two nights; you’d think we’d come back from Shackleton’s expedition.”
There was no training required to play River Cartwright. Sidelined by bosses after botching a practice response to a terrorist incident, the first episode of Slow Horses sees him moping around the deeply unglamorous Slough House, as opposed to, say, engaged in a high-speed boat chase next to a supermodel. “It’s deliberately pedestrian,” says Lowden, smiling. Has he thought about the slicker side of espionage, I ask? The fact that the new James Bond is yet to be cast will surely not have escaped the notice of a British actor of Lowden’s age and calibre.
He laughs in a way that suggests he’s aware the show could make him a contender in the eyes of fans, and Bond producer Barbara Broccoli has cast him previously (in her 2012 stage adaptation of Chariots of Fire). “Slough House is MI5, though, not MI6 – strictly domestic,” he deadpans. Having grown up watching Daniel Craig as 007, Lowden insists, “It’s going to take a long time to get him out of my head. Or anybody else’s.” Someone new will eventually slip into the Brioni tux, though… and wasn’t the best Bond Scottish? “Arguably he was,” Lowden says, with what could definitely be interpreted as a mischievous grin.
Of course, fronting a billion-dollar film franchise for the next decade or so would leave him with less time to fling himself into freezing water with his girlfriend – not to mention a level of global fame I’m not sure he’s in the market for. I believe him when he says he’s never seriously considered a move to Hollywood, thousands of miles from morning dooks in frigid lochs and the theatre work he hopes to continue forever. “I’ve been over a few times, but here seems to be where it’s happening,” he says. “The quality of stuff being made in the UK is just fantastic.” Besides, he adds, as he stands to leave, “I’m shite in the sun.”
