Christopher Chung Steps Into the Spotlight as Roddy Ho Finally Gets His Season

The Apple TV+ spy drama handed its most socially oblivious character the wheel in Season 5, and Christopher Chung says walking that line between arrogance and humanity was the whole job.

Christopher Chung plays Roddy Ho, the abrasive tech genius at the center of Slow Horses Season 5.
Gary Oldman leads the series as dishevelled MI5 handler Jackson Lamb, but Season 5 shifts significant weight to Chung.
Chung told Variety the challenge was calibrating Roddy's ego so audiences stayed with him rather than against him.
Slow Horses has built a devoted following on Apple TV+ across five seasons of Mick Herron's spy-fiction adaptations.
The performance is drawing awards-season attention ahead of Emmy consideration.

Gary Oldman gets the poster and the awards shelf, but ask anyone deep into Slow Horses which character they quote at the dinner table and the answer, more often than not, is Roddy Ho. Season 5 of the Apple TV+ spy drama made that argument official, handing Christopher Chung's socially catastrophic MI5 tech operative a load-bearing arc and daring the audience to keep rooting for him.

In a recent interview with Variety, Chung described the balancing act as the central creative problem of the season. Roddy Ho is a man who believes, without irony, that he is the most capable person in any room — and in certain rooms he is correct. The trick, Chung said, was ensuring that certainty read as deluded confidence rather than cruelty, and that the cracks in it landed as comedy before they landed as pathos.

The character has been a fan fixture since the show's first season, when Mick Herron's source novels were adapted for the streamer with Oldman as the chaotic, deliberately slovenly Jackson Lamb running the intelligence service's dumping ground for disgraced agents. Roddy occupied that world as a man entirely unaware he had been dumped anywhere. Season 5 gave him something to lose.

Chung's profile has risen steadily with the show's reputation, which sits in the upper tier of prestige streaming drama and draws the kind of viewer who will re-watch episodes to catch what they missed. Emmy nomination conversations are circulating ahead of the current eligibility window. The Variety piece went live this week.