Kristin Scott Thomas has said she was shocked by how intimidating she appeared when she first watched herself play spy boss Diana Taverner in the hit AppleTV+ spy drama Slow Horses.
The series, adapted from Mick Herron’s Slough House series, follows a group of intelligence agents investigating espionage, with Thomas playing the stern MI5 Deputy Director-General.
“I thought, ‘Bloody hell, I get it. Now I see why people are so terrified of me,’” Scott Thomas, who has long been painted as frosty by the tabloid press throughout her decades-long career, told The Times.
She added: “It was the coldness. I’d had no idea before why I came across like that. It worries me to think it might seep out into real life.”
Scott Thomas rose to fame as the sharp-tongued Fiona in Richard Curtis’ 1994 rom-com Four Weddings and a Funeral, starring Hugh Grant.
The star went on to play the similarly assertive explorer Katharine in Anthony Minghella’s 1996 romance The English Patient and, in 2019, an award-winning businesswoman in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag.
Prior to Slow Horses, Scott Thomas said she would never be part of a main cast for a TV series because they run for so many years compared to film shoots and she gets “terribly bored”.
The actor admitted she was “peer pressured” into accepting the role of Diana Taverner in the programme as her friends were huge fans of Herron’s novels.
“They said, ‘You have to!’ So it was basically peer pressure that drove me – I wanted to be in their group,” Scott Thomas said, adding the fact Slow Horses is filmed in the UK also appealed to her.
“I’m very much a life person rather than a career person. I’ve always fitted work around other things, which is a huge luxury,” she said.
The actor married her partner of five years, John Micklethwait, the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg, last September in a small ceremony with only their immediate family and closest friends in attendance.
Micklethwait has run the 2,700-strong newsroom at Bloomberg since 2015 and was previously the editor-in-chief of The Economist.
When asked about her nuptials, Scott Thomas said: “Just thinking about it makes my heart swell. Every time I look at the pictures I think, ‘Ah…’ It was just so affectionate and lovely. Completely brilliant.”
