I meet the actor Rosalind Eleazar as she is preparing to go on what she calls ‘the best school trip ever!’ The 36-year-old is about to fly from London to Los Angeles to attend the 76th Emmy Awards, travelling with the rest of the cast of the Apple TV+ hit Slow Horses, in which she plays MI5 ‘reject’ Louisa Guy.
Later, at the event, Slow Horses scoops one of the nine Emmys it is up for: best writing for showrunner Will Smith (who wrote for and acted in Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It, playing Phil the hapless adviser). No matter: Eleazar had a ball making her red-carpet debut in a sleek pink Rick Owens dress before partying the night away with Reese Witherspoon, Kristen Wiig and Jennifer Aniston at the Apple TV+ post-Emmys reception, and the cast of Slow Horses sat up into the small hours drinking champagne in their hotel lobby. (‘All the bars were closed,’ she tells me after the event.) However, on the YOU shoot three days before, it’s the plane journey there she’s most excited by.
Blouse, trousers and boots, Louis Vuitton
‘They call it the “Emmys flight” and I’m hoping all the Brit nominees from Slow Horses, The Crown, Baby Reindeer, Black Mirror and Ripley, maybe even Idris Elba [nominated for Hijack] will be on it,’ says Eleazar, changing out of a gold designer trouser suit into workout kit. Well-spoken with an easy laugh, she visibly relaxes: ‘A planeload of incredible actors and writers… I will definitely get starstruck.’
Hmm, I wonder who she’d most like to sit next to? Slow Horses co-star Gary Oldman would be great company – though, on the downside, his character Jackson Lamb is a flatulent, raincoated MI5 burnout. ‘You do realise Gary doesn’t actually smell, don’t you?’ says Eleazar protectively. ‘I mean, Lamb is a genius creation, farting and all, but Gary scrubs up well off-set. You’d be surprised the number of people who ask me, “Does he dip himself in the Thames every morning?”’
Gary Oldman doesn’t actually smell. He scrubs up well off-set
OK, how about handsome co-star Jack Lowden (he plays fellow spy River Cartwright) with whom Eleazar’s enjoys a cosy on-screen relationship? ‘Jack is one of my best friends, so yes, that would work,’ she laughs. ‘On-screen most of the “horses” are socially challenged, but in real life they are a great bunch.’
Lowden is the subject of fevered speculation that he will be the new James Bond. While he’s in LA, might there be time for a few important studio meetings? ‘Oh, Jack is the number-one choice for Bond as far as I’m concerned,’ says Eleazar. ‘Seriously, he is witty and silly, not to mention a great actor as well as brilliant at all the action stuff. And we are due another Scottish Bond, aren’t we? For me, he’s an obvious choice.’
Lowden secretly married fellow actor Saoirse Ronan in Scotland earlier this summer. Did Eleazar attend? ‘That’s “need to know” intel only,’ she says, drawing a zip across her mouth.
We meet in Ham, Southwest London, which, she points out, is an unfortunate place name for a rendezvous with an actor. Eleazar has flown back from a family holiday in Greece specially for today’s photo shoot. She is warm and friendly, unlike her strong yet quietly vulnerable character. ‘But I do relate to her,’ she says. ‘No matter how strongly we present ourselves, we all have hidden pain.’
Shirt, Vero Moda. Dress, Sandro. Earrings (just seen), Pond. Boots, Christian Louboutin
Slow Horses has taken its time achieving smash-hit status – the adaptation of Mick Herron’s spy novels launched in 2022. It used to be the sleeper hit I’d tell friends they should watch. Yet suddenly everyone thinks they’re a Jackson Lamb aficionado. Bill Gates blogged about binge-watching it in May, as America finally woke up to its British charm. ‘All I want to know is: what took so bloody long?’ wrote Los Angeles Times culture columnist Mary McNamara earlier this month. I guess it’s nice to be part of the herd.
For the uninitiated, the ‘slow horses’ are out-of-favour spies dumped at Slough House at the edge of the City of London (where the show is mostly filmed). It’s an outpost for MI5 screwups led by Oldman’s slovenly Jackson, memorably described by another operative as ‘a man who looks like he gropes people on buses’. Nevertheless, between them they still manage to thwart right-wing thugs, Russian spies and terrorist plots.
‘From the moment I opened the script during lockdown I was hooked,’ says Eleazar. ‘I thought, “This is great writing with complex characters.” The women aren’t classic flawless types either – they are quirky and damaged. It’s sort of like The Office crossed with John le Carré. It sounds mad, but it works.’
Rosalind with Jack Lowden in series three of Slow Horses
Her character Louisa ended up at Slough House following a suspect pursuit that went disastrously wrong (it’s yet to be revealed exactly what happened) and in season one she found love with fellow bumbling operative Min Harper (played by Dustin Demri-Burns of comedy duo Cardinal Burns), who was sent to Slough House after accidentally leaving a top-secret file on a train. Then, spoiler alert, in season two, just as Min and Louisa have settled down, spending long, happy Saturday mornings together in a shared flat, he’s whacked by a Russian assassin. ‘When bad things happened to Min,’ says Eleazar, ‘I said, “I know it’s in the book, but can’t we adapt it and save him?”
I loved that relationship but that’s part of the bravery of the show – main characters are not spared. Mick Herron has assured me that I survive all the way through, but he might just be saying that. It might be a bluff.’
It has been said that the first thing the cast do when they get a new script is check who’s been bumped off. ‘That sounds like Jack,’ she says. ‘He’s keen to know if he’s dead or not. The other thing we want to know is: how many foot chases are there? I love sprinting so I’m counting up those pursuits!’ (These days she stays fit by playing squash every morning.
Eleazar is British-Ghanaian. In the late 1980s, her English mum Deborah was working for a Greek shipping company when she met Major Courage Quashigah, a senior politician in the Ghanaian government, at a New Year’s Eve party, and they had a relationship. Deborah, who was in Ghana setting up an office for the shipping company, became pregnant. After giving birth, she moved back to the UK.
Eleazar only saw her father intermittently. ‘I grew up with my mum, I need to stress that because she sometimes says, “You always talk about your dad but never mention me in interviews,”’ she says. Eleazar was raised by her mother in London but then, aged 13, won a scholarship to the prestigious Scottish public school Gordonstoun (alma mater of King Charles). ‘I get hounded about going to Gordonstoun, especially after the way it was depicted in The Crown,’ says Eleazar.
‘For me it wasn’t a cruel, brutal place – my drama teacher Mr Williams is one of the reasons I’m here today.’
With her husband Gabriele
After Gordonstoun she read Mandarin and Spanish at Nottingham University and was also in more regular contact with her father. In 2007 she visited him in Ghana, where he was by then minister for health.
A three-hour road trip from his birthplace, the coastal village of Keta, back to the capital Accra changed Eleazar’s life. ‘I finally understood him,’ she says. ‘It was just me, him and his bodyguard. We stopped at roadside stalls to buy fruit, and I saw how he was revered by the people and how much he loved Ghana. I’d say he placed the love of his country above even his children.’
Tragically, soon after the trip he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and died in 2010. ‘Being minister for health, I think he thought it didn’t look good to go abroad for treatment,’ says Eleazar. ‘But after that trip we spoke every day and he was a big part of my life.’
Similarities between Eleazar and the father she barely knew are striking. He grew up in poverty and got a scholarship to the British Army’s officer training academy at Sandhurst, where he won the Best Overseas Cadet Award. ‘He told me what a racist place Sandhurst was at that time – other cadets tried to sabotage his equipment so he’d fail the course.’ It also turned out that he was once a decent actor. ‘He won an acting award at university at the same age I won a best actress award at Nottingham,’ she says.
Most strikingly of all, before he became a government minister, he worked for the Ghanaian intelligence services. ‘I know I’m only a TV spy, but that’s weird, isn’t it? I doubt he would have been a slow horse, though.’
It took a while for Eleazar to find her way into acting after that trip. Following her father’s death, she went back to Ghana to meet his side of the family. She even landed a job in TV production, helping to launch a Ghanaian version of The X Factor. ‘But whenever I was auditioning people, I had this intense feeling: “That’s what I want to do.” I’d acted through school and university, but then stopped. It took an old friend from uni back in the UK to ask me, “Why have you given up on what you love?” to change things.’
In 2012, aged 24, Eleazar returned to the UK, applied to Lamda (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art) hours before the deadline and won a place. It’s now nine years since she graduated, and she has been acclaimed for work on both stage and screen. She won an award for her performance in Uncle Vanya at London’s Harold Pinter Theatre directed by Ian Rickson in 2020 (‘In Eleazar, Rickson’s found gold’ noted The Mail on Sunday) and shone as Agnes in Armando Iannucci’s 2019 film The Personal History of David Copperfield. ‘That was my first big film role, and I was among acting royalty,’ she recalls. ‘When Tilda Swinton calmed my nerves just by touching my hand, that was a genuine “Is this real?” moment.’
Early next year Eleazar will lead in a star-studded Netflix adaptation of Harlan Coben’s Missing You. It’s classic Coben: detective Kat Donovan’s fiancé has been missing for years when his face pops up on a dating app and white-knuckle drama ensues. The streaming platform’s most recent Coben adaptation Fool Me Once (starring Michelle Keegan) was one of its most popular dramas ever, with over 98 million viewers. Is Eleazar ready for that sort of fame? ‘From the outside, certain levels of fame can look daunting,’ she says. ‘But I know how lucky I am to have the chance to fulfil certain dreams.’
The main dream is quite straightforward: to buy a house on the Greek island of Sifnos where she can live with her husband, film producer Gabriele Lo Giudice (he also acts and appeared briefly in Netflix’s Ripley). Eleazar would like to open a restaurant there.
The couple met at university, though their courtship sounds a little… slow. ‘At uni I knew him as this beautiful Italian man I didn’t talk to,’ she says. ‘I have a photo of us standing back-to-back at a party. After uni we were friendly, then one day at a get-together in London we were chatting; there was another handsome Italian man present so I asked Gabriele, “Who is that beautiful Italian man?” and he said, “Wait, can’t I be your beautiful Italian man?”’ They skirted the issue for a decade – but she finally married Lo Giudice.
‘If life has taught me anything,’ says Eleazar, ‘it is this: relish the moment, seize the day.’
Slow Horses (seasons one to four) is on Apple TV+
Picture director: Ester Malloy.
Make-up: James O’Riley at One represents.
Hair: Kevin Fortune.
