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Jack Lowden: ‘I would defend the right of any actor to play any role’
As he transforms into First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon for Benediction, the Slow Horses star takes a pop at the casting police

Jack Lowden: ‘I would defend the right of any actor to play any role’

Just before the closing credits of Benediction, a new film about the poet Siegfried Sassoon, the camera lingers on the actor Jack Lowden sitting alone on a bench in full military uniform. Very slowly, as the strains of Vaughan Williams flood the soundtrack, his face creases up in silent anguish. Then the film ends. It’s an achingly personal moment in an exquisitely desolate film that demands a huge amount from its 31-year-old star.

I ask Lowden if playing Sassoon, haunted by his First World War experiences, felt like a particular challenge. “No, it was honouring [director Terence Davies’s] script that was the challenge,” he says with a laugh. “With other directors you’re allowed to play about a bit with the words on the page. But with Terence it became evident fairly quickly that that’s not what that he likes. So I had to shut that part of myself down.”

Whatever it took, it worked. In Benediction – which also stars Peter Capaldi as Sassoon in old age and Simon Russell Beale as Sassoon’s mentor, the art critic Robbie Ross – Lowden is mesmerising. Sassoon, who received the military cross for bravery, famously declared his opposition to the conflict in 1917 and wound up at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where, among the shellshocked and the broken, he met and fell in love with the doomed Wilfred Owen (a tremulous Matthew Tennyson). After the war, in which he also lost his brother, Sassoon drifted through several irresolute relationships with disaffected aesthetes, among them Ivor Novello and the socialite Stephen Tennant, before falling into a loveless marriage with the artist Hester Gatty and slipping into critical oblivion.

“Sassoon’s great tragedy was that he came to think of himself as average, both in his love life and as a poet,” says Lowden. “He admits in his wartime diaries that there were greater poets. When he first read Wilfred’s stuff its clear he thought, ‘F—, he’s better than me.’ Then the guy died in the war and was even more beatified by it. There is definitely a world in which Sassoon wishes he had died as well. And yet his life and work were anything but average.”

Benediction takes a pitiless view of the scars left by war even on those who survived it; perhaps more interestingly, it is also pretty critical of the decadent Bright Young Things – all dinner suits and cruelty and brittle aphoristic irony – with whom Sassoon associates. Did Lowden – who is in a long-term relationship with the Irish-American actress Saoirse Ronan – have any concerns about playing a man who was gay?

His answer is considered and to the point. “To ask me that question, you have to be confident of my sexuality,” he says. “And to do that you have to first ask me about it. And I don’t think I should ever be required to declare that. It wouldn’t be asked in other professions and it wouldn’t affect whether you got the job.”

His sexuality, he says, “played no part in Terence, who is openly gay, casting me. I understand the pain and the frustration behind getting the real McCoy to play every part, but I would also defend the right of any actor to play any role. Always.”

Lowden, whose screen credits include Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and the BBC’s War and Peace, has been on the radar as an actor of comet-bright promise for a while now. He is on particularly fine form in Apple TV’s blackly comic drama Slow Horses – based on the much loved Mick Herron books about an inept MI5 department – in which he stars alongside Gary Oldman as an agent consigned to a lowly satellite pision after screwing up a security drill at an airport.

Having been raised on a diet of classic BBC sitcoms such as Porridge and Only Fools and Horses, he found the opportunity to play a downbeat comic role irresistible.

Call my agent: with Gary Oldman in the darkly comic espionage drama Slow HorsesCredit: Jack English

“I’ve only realised recently how much of what I do in a scene is motivated not by feeling but by timing, which comes from being obsessed as a kid with Ronnie Barker and David Jason and how they would use timing to control a scene. Before I got into film I did loads of years on stage” – he won an Olivier award in 2014 for his role in Richard Eyre’s production of Ibsen’s Ghosts – “where everything is to do with rhythm. To be honest I would find myself routinely pretty lost on film sets in the beginning because everything is much more broken up.”

Lowden grew up in the Scottish Borders where, he says, you either plump for the rugby pitch or the stage. “Honestly, the Borders have the best amateur operatics scene of anywhere in these islands,” he says. “Everyone gets involved, from the fireman to the local postman.”

Lowden’s own interest in the stage was piqued after watching his younger brother Calum dance – he is now a principal with the Royal Swedish Ballet – and with the encouragement of his high-school drama teacher, he immersed himself in musical theatre. “Guys and Dolls, Annie, Buddy, Oklahoma! – I did them all. I still think of myself as a music hall actor. Everything else has been a bonus.”

He admits to having a decent singing voice – “Actually I can sing better than I can act!” – so has does he never still yearn to star in a musical? “I’d love to do at some point. I miss the buzz of performing with music every single day, although I’ve let the skill slip over the years.”

After leaving school he studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and on graduating played the lead role in the National Theatre of Scotland’s spellbinding Black Watch, based on the experiences of the Scottish regiment during the Iraq War. The production was a hit and he counts himself fortunate to have worked pretty steadily ever since.

“Not everyone gets the luck of having a teacher obsessed with musical theatre, or the opportunities at a grass-roots level to develop a passion,” he says. “We’re making such great changes at the top of the profession, but what about the bottom? There’s government inquiries commissioned whenever England gets knocked out of a world cup or when Scottish rugby doesn’t do particularly well, but what about drama? Instead there’s this narrative that you have to be rich and go to an expensive drama school to do it. But, on the jobs I do, the most amazing actors didn’t go to drama school – Saoirse included.”

'She's got some promise…’: with his off-screen partner Saoirse Ronan in Mary Queen of ScotsCredit: Liam Daniel / Focus Features

He and Ronan met on the set of Josie Rourke’s 2018 film Mary Queen of Scots. The two now have a house together and she has joined the production company, Arcade Pictures, that Lowden founded in 2019. Their first co-production will be an adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s memoir The Outrun, set in Orkney, in which Ronan will play the lead.

“I set up the company partly because as an actor I hate being bored on set,” says Lowden, “and because I love watching really exceptional actors at work.”

Does that include Ronan, who at 28 already has four Oscar nominations under her belt? “Aye, she’s all right, she’s got some promise,” Lowden says with a grin. “She’ll get there.”


Benediction is in cinemas now