This article contains major spoilers for the latest season of Slow Horses.
Slow Horses director Adam Randall has opened up about what went into creating one of the show’s most shocking death sequences.
Earlier this month, many Slow Horses viewers were left shocked when JK Coe, played in the series by Tom Brooke, was killed off after a knife fight with a Russian agent towards the end of season six.
With many viewers left disappointed to discover that Coe was no longer going to be part of the show, Adam has admitted he knows exactly how they feel.
“I love Coe, and the hardest thing was now the show’s not going to have Coe in it, which just seems such [a] shame,” he told Variety.
Adam also revealed that he’s currently “feeling that” on the set of Slow Horses’ eighth season, which is currently in production.
“Like, I wish Coe was here, because he’s just such an interesting, unique character,” he continued. “I had so much fun with Tom.”
When asked about fans who’ve questioned why Coe “would go in solo armed with just a knife to face a Russian agent”, Adam responded: “There was never a question about, ‘why would [Coe] follow him in?’. Because I think it’s a courageous thing to do. He’s going in to try and stop this villain who’s been hunting them down relentlessly.”
He added: “When we had the fight with Coe, I had this thought: ‘Would it be interesting to intercut that with Jack [Lowden] eating a sandwich really slowly?’. It felt like quite a Slow Horses way of doing it. So rather than doing the sort of Mission: Impossible toilet fight, [while] most of the fight takes place you’re actually with River trying to open a sandwich packet and a packet of crisps.
“So the edit was doing all of these things, but still trying to make sure that Coe had the ending that he deserves, and I feel really proud of it. Tom was really, really emotional watching it, and was really happy. A lot of the great little gems from it came from Tom.”
Tom previously admitted to feeling a wide range of emotions about his character’s final scenes.
“I can’t even remember my last day on set, but I did pick up Clown Town [the latest book in the Slough House series, on which Slow Horses is based] at the airport the other day, and I read two pages, and I was so upset that [Coe] wasn’t in it anymore,” he claimed, noting: “I couldn’t read it. [I had to] just put it down.”
He has also opened up about some of the changes he requested be added to Coe’s death sequence, to make it more in keeping with the source material.
Tom said: “It was just the mundaneness of the [death scene] in the book [that had previously appealed to me]. [In the book], he talks about mortgages with the mercenary, how to get a mortgage self-employed, all of this sort of stuff.”
Slow Horses’ seventh season is already “in the can”, ahead of its release next year, with production on the eighth currently underway in London.
