BEING PART OF SLOW HORSES IS LIKE HAVING A GOLD CARD

EXCLUSIVE: Multi award-winning actress Kristin Scott Thomas on television's hottest show, working with Prince, and why it's OK to be grumpy now and then. By SIMON BUTTON

- By SIMON BUTTON

SHE SPECIALISES in playing formidable, fiercely intelligent characters, so I’m expecting Kristin Scott Thomas to be a somewhat daunting interviewee.

It’s a misconception that baffles her as she arches her eyebrows and ponders: “Sometimes people have accused me of being frightening in my life and I say, ‘What are you talking about? I’m not frightening at all’.”

Or rather it used to baffle her, until she started playing MI5 bigwig Diana Taverner in Slow Horses. Starting out as Deputy Director General when the show first aired in 2022 before being promoted in last year’s fifth season, Diana is ruthless in her ambition and has the iciest of stares.

When Kristin first watched herself on screen in the show she recalls: “I thought ‘Oh my God, I just saw the way this woman looks at people’. She was terrifying and I was like ‘I get it now’.” With the sunniest of smiles, she laughs and adds: “Since then I’ve been really, really careful in my life to smile a lot and to be friendly on purpose.”

When we meet, Scott Thomas is at the 2026 Festival de Télévision de Monte-Carlo, where she’s being honoured with a Crystal Nymph Award for her outstanding contribution to television and screen storytelling. And for the record, in person and as herself, she’s not scary at all.

Elegant, yes, in a grey jacket slung casually over a brown print dress. Poised, too, and well-spoken.

But there’s none of Diana’s disdain, nor the cynicism of her character Fiona from Four Weddings And A Funeral, nor indeed the haughtiness of her Sylvia McCordle in Gosford Park.

Instead, the 66-year-old actress is as warm as the climate in the French Riviera, beaming about the award she received the night before from Prince Albert of Monaco: “It made me feel quite proud.”

Asked where she keeps her many accolades, the woman who was made a Dame in 2015 for services to drama reckons: “I don’t think I’ve got any other awards.