“Blinded by love”: Slow Horses star Christopher Chung opens up about his character in Season 5

In Season 5 of the acclaimed spy thriller Slow Horses on Apple TV+, Christopher Chung's Roddy Ho gets to be in the limelight, portrayed in a surprisingly positive light.

The tech wizard of Slough House is caught in the most dangerous situation right away. The danger comes not from spies and agent competition or anything like that, but from his own romantic relationship, where he is most vulnerable.

Roddy being in love with Tara (played by Hiba Bennani) places him, without him knowing, in a very risky plot of deception, where Chung is defining his character as "blinded by love", a weakness that threatens not only his life but the whole nation’s security too.

In the earlier seasons, apart from his technical genius, Roddy had been associated with a harsh attitude, which brought to the team comic relief and sometimes friction. But Slow Horses Season 5 is different; the focus is mainly on Roddy’s personal and professional destruction as his new love leads to an MI5 crisis across the whole spectrum.

The season is adapted from Mick Herron’s book London Rules. Chung's performance endowed with self-awareness is a factor in lifting the intrigue of Roddy's storyline, as it combines naiveté, the element of comedy, and the unfolding of emotional stakes.

The team is shown to be scrambling to clarify the repercussions of Roddy’s choices, and with each episode, it becomes clear how much personal devotion and romantic blindness can easily bring about the downfall of professional judgment, even in the world of espionage, where stakes are high.

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Christopher Chung opens up about his character in Slow Horses Season 5

Slow Horses Season 5 immediately warns the audience that Roddy’s outrageousness is just a cover for his serious weaknesses. Incidentally, a white van belonging to a mass shooter nearly runs Roddy over, but instead of fear, he gets overwhelmed with love for Tara, a woman who is apparently not his type at all.

Roddy is consistently warned by his colleague, but he still goes for it and lets this relationship obscure his comprehension. Chung has defined his role as "blinded by love," while Tara's attractiveness turns her into the perfect tool to penetrate his defences.

Speaking to ScreenRant, Chung said:

“He's blinded by love. He's a puppy dog.”

The authenticity of Roddy's crush is treated both as a source of comedy and a cause of heartbreak. He describes himself as "a puppy dog," who is very easily overwhelmed by the attention he gets and cannot think of betrayal at all. This lack of sophistication in his thinking makes him an inviting target.

With each episode, it becomes clear that Tara is not what she pretends to be; instead, she is a spy working for an extremist cell, and Roddy's trust in her becomes the cause of his tragic errors in judgment that eventually lead to the leakage of highly confidential MI5 information.

Chung has remarked that the major task for the crew during this Slow Horses season was to find genuine empathy for Roddy. In an interview with Decider, he mentioned:

“I was most excited about showing the journey that Roddy goes through with Tara, and his justification that she’s not actually a honey trap, that she was coerced into doing this and she does actually love him.”

The incredible performance of Chung is also seen in the scenes with Dame Kristin Scott Thomas' character Diana Taverner, who, with her skepticism and sharp humor, manages to reveal Roddy's illusions. Their exchanges have become one of the main attractions of Slow Horses Season 5. As Taverner says to him:

“We both know you don’t have any exes. You’re not a lothario. You’re not James Bond. Your relationship history consists of a series of deeply awkward, prematurely terminated encounters followed by periods of intense neediness and borderline harassment until you are blocked.”

Roddy's drama is not only a personal failure but also a professional disaster that affects MI5. Unintentionally, Roddy's action of giving Tara permission to access MI5 systems, under the impression of either impressing or helping her, leads to the compromising of the very agency whose secrets he has been assigned to protect.

With the suspicion growing and the Slough House team digging deeper, Roddy's mistake puts them all in danger, which leads to the whole department's frantic efforts to control the situation and to decide if their tech genius is reliable.

Showrunner Will Smith and Chung both emphasize that Roddy's character this season is about facing the consequences of his mistaken beliefs. Chung reveals to Town & Country:

“Ho, this season, he manages to set off a chain of events that makes the Slow Horses enlist in a game of… I wouldn’t say cat or mouse, but in a game using London as the play board, all because of one silly mistake that he makes.”

Roddy always proves to be a capable agent, but his inability to distinguish between his personal obsession and professional obligation is a stark reminder of how human error can ruin even the most well-constructed intelligence organizations.

Still, Roddy's character in Slow Horses Season 5, despite his flaws, is not entirely without growth. The minor, gradual change, the "two steps forward, one step back" dynamic that characterizes Slow Horses, shows Roddy having to deal with his emotional immaturity and the great dangers of trusting the wrong people at the same time. Chung tells Town & Country:

“The thing that’s really brilliant about the show is that the character growth and development within each of the characters is very minimal. It’s small, and that’s why they’re all kind of stuck within this purgatory where they’re doing this trudgery work that they don’t want to be doing, and they never better themselves. They can never actually get back to Regents Park. For Roddy, he always thinks that he’s learned something. Maybe going into six, he might feel like he’s a bit more enlightened.”

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Also Read: “We do very short days”: Slow Horses director explains how Apple TV+ manages the show’s rapid filming schedule