Louise Minchin, best known as the former anchor of BBC Breakfast, has a surprising new role in the latest series of Slow Horses.
She appears in the second episode of season 6, entitled Daddy Issues, as Serena, a tough interviewer at the right-wing TV station run by media mogul Damien Cantor (Harry Lloyd).
Bullied by the always slippery Peter Judd (Samuel West), First Desk Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) reluctantly agrees to be interviewed for the channel's news show Checkpoint, and is grilled by Serena about operations at MI5 and rumours that her predecessor had been on the payroll of a foreign power.
Meanwhile, River (Jack Lowden), Standish (Saskia Reeves) and the rest of the team at Slough House have their own problems, as two assassins, Jane (The Witcher's MyAnna Buring) and Jim (Andor's Kyle Soller), appear to be killing former Slow Horses, causing Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) to order everyone to 'go dark' as they may all be potential targets.
While Louise Minchin only appears in one scene in Slow Horses, it's not her first acting credit. The television presenter and journalist, who most recently joined the presenting team on Rip-Off Britain, made her acting debut as a newsreader in the BBC spy drama Spooks in 2006, and followed it with an appearance in Silent Witness in 2007.
Adam Randall, who directed the current season, explained exclusively to Radio Times why that decision was made.
"With season 6, we decided that we needed to combine two books, which was the first time we'd done that," Randall said. "So I read them both. I read Joe Country and Slough House.
"They're both fantastic. Joe Country would make the most amazing film, but it was felt that there was not a huge amount of story for a number of our characters."
"Taverner’s not in it a great deal, Lamb hasn't got a huge amount to do, so it was sort of the decision to combine them and find a way for them to work together," he said. "But then we had the opportunity to draw on both of them throughout the process, which was really fortunate."
Slow Horses season 6 features the return of the main cast including Gary Oldman, Jack Lowden, Saskia Reeves, Kristin Scott Thomas, Christopher Chung, Aimee Ffion-Edwards, Rosalind Eleazar, Joanna Scanlan, Samuel West, Ruth Bradley, Jonathan Pryce and Hugo Weaving, while Olivia Cooke reprises her season 1 role as Sid Baker.
As well as new additions Kyle Soller and MyAnna Buring, Lenny Rush joins the cast as child witness Reece Nesmith, who wins the respect of Lamb when he shows he can out-fart the veteran spy.
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