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Christopher Chung is no longer surprised when members of the public walk up and insult him to his face. “It happened yesterday,” he says. “A guy came up to me and said: ‘Are you from Slow Horses? You’re awful.’” Or sometimes, it’s “You’re a dickhead”.
“But,” the 37-year-old adds, the insults are usually “said with love and affection”. And “I want, as an actor, to have some effect, so it’s really …” he hesitates, as if searching for the right word, “really nice,” he beams. Then he bursts into laughter.
Whatever fans of the hit spy drama Slow Horses may think of his character, for Chung, playing the talented but abrasive hacker Roddy Ho is a dream role. “The best thing is not having to worry about the other characters’ feelings. You can be as arrogant and obnoxious as you like.” He perceives Roddy as “slightly on the spectrum” and “misunderstood”; never “vindictive” or “nasty”, just “egocentric” and lacking a censor. “Sometimes, the things that he vocalises are similar to my internal voice. So it’s a really fun character to play: I get to just say what I think.”
We meet in London’s Soho, not far from Slough House, the rundown east London office for disgraced MI5 spies where Roddy spends most of his time behind a computer. But in the show’s new season, a series of bizarre events unfold in the city and the hacker takes a more central role. He attracts a glamorous girlfriend and – during a thrilling episode in which he wields a sword – is shown topless and declared to be “ripped” by a colleague.
Sitting opposite Chung, I remark on how unusual it is for a geeky character to be presented as physically attractive: in the novels, the hacker’s defining physical characteristic is his thick black glasses. “He’s just me,” Chung drawls in a Roddy-ish way that makes us laugh.
It becomes clear, however, that I’ve touched a nerve. He tells me that, after arriving in the UK at 24 in 2012, he had to navigate a lot of “unconscious bias” as an actor with east Asian heritage: “It’s one step forward, two steps back, consistently.” He was often auditioning for roles he didn’t want to play, “stereotypes like the takeaway worker or the Asian nurse – peripheral characters that don’t have any autonomy” – and other opportunities were thin on the ground.
To have the freedom to be more choosy with his acting roles, he started working as a personal trainer: “If I didn’t have that, then my career might be in a very different place.” He continues the work today: “I had a client this morning. I love it because it gives me an external focus, an hour that’s about the client, not me. That’s really healthy.”
But when the part as Roddy arrived, Chung “was really concerned about my physicality, because I was quite big at the time”. So at his audition, he tried to “cover up” by wearing a hoodie. Then, after he got the part, he discovered his costume was too small and “started to spiral, worrying they were going to want me to be this geeky Asian kid”. He began to wonder how quickly he could lose muscle. His first rehearsal swiftly put paid to that idea. “They were like: ‘No, no, no. We’re going to build all of that into the character.’ As soon as they said that, it was so liberating.” He realised that he could portray Roddy in a way that challenged even his own beliefs about how a nerdy east Asian guy should be seen on screen: “That was the most beautiful thing given to me on this job.”
Acting alongside stars such as Gary Oldman, who plays Roddy’s grubby, mercurial boss Jackson Lamb, has forced Chung to bring his A-game to every scene, he says: “You’re trying to meet them at their level so that they don’t have a dud opposite.”
Behind the scenes, the cast of the show are like a “dysfunctional family” with Oldman acting like a “very supportive” father figure. There’s a lot of banter and camaraderie between them all, he says, and when Oldman learned Chung could sing, the two of them recorded a version of Let It Be together “just for fun”.
The role has been a “gamechanger” for Chung: he has since been cast as a hot-headed soldier in Doctor Who, a villain’s sidekick in the Steve McQueen movie Blitz, and has just finished filming the Australian Netflix period drama My Brilliant Career. In it, he plays the romantic lead, the handsome and wealthy Harry Beecham.
“I always thought my career ambitions would be capped at being the best friend to the lead,” he says. “I never thought I’d get to take that myself.” Previous auditions for leading roles had been unsuccessful, and for a long time he was unable to see himself playing those parts: “Growing up I was never the most desirable kid.”
Born to an Irish mother and a Malaysian Chinese father (they met at a party in London in the 1970s, and he often visits his mother’s home town of Limerick) Chung grew up in Mornington, a suburb of Melbourne, where he was one of three or four Chinese kids in a school of 2,500. “I remember kids yelling out to me in the field: ‘Jackie Chan, do some kung fu,’ all the time.” Heath Ledger had been his acting idol; he was not into martial arts, and so didn’t see an east Asian actor whose career he wanted to emulate.
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Despite this, he loved performing from a young age and soon realised no other career held the same attraction. He took acting courses in New York and Philadelphia and then moved to London. Within six months, he was cast as Archie Wong, a student in BBC drama Waterloo Road, whose main function is to secretly help his (white) languages teacher learn to speak Mandarin. Later stints in the theatre followed, including roles as the jock Kurt in the musical version of Heathers, and Paris in Romeo and Juliet at the Globe. Then Covid-19 hit and theatres closed. Chung spent lockdown wondering whether he should take a break from acting: “If you weren’t an established actor at that point, what hope did you have?”
On the eve of the second lockdown, he landed the part of Roddy. When his agent broke the news, “I broke down on the ground and cried,” Chung says. “Here I was, with an opportunity to have the career I’d always dreamed of.”
These twists and turns of Chung’s career are fascinating: it’s hard to imagine Roddy on stage, dancing in a musical, I say. Initially, he shrugs this off with a joke: “I like to show range.” But after mulling it over, he explains that in his experience, actors from minority ethnic backgrounds “can’t just be good at one thing. You have to be good at everything if you want to work.”
Before Slow Horses, he says, he often found himself pigeonholed by directors: “They were very much like: ‘This is the Asian part’,” he says. When he was working on Waterloo Road, an executive producer suggested that a good storyline for Archie would have him “go to China on a boat”. Internally, Chung thought, “What the fuck? But I said: ‘OK.’ I didn’t have the vernacular at the time to say: ‘What are you talking about?’” He felt “othered” and that his presence on set was ticking a box.
It was thanks to his wife, the Scottish actor Frances Mayli McCann, that he got past it: “She told me to keep going.” Earlier this year he was nominated for best supporting actor at the Bafta TV awards, becoming the third east Asian male actor ever to be nominated. Now, he’s doing everything he can to break out of “race-specific” roles. There needs to be more diversity “across the board, behind the camera, on the stage, the higher-ups”, he says. “That’s where significant change starts to happen.”
Meanwhile, as viewers gear up for Slow Horses’ new series, he eyes the release with some trepidation. “I feel a little anxious about being a bit more central,” he admits. “Fame is not something that I ever chased. I think it’s really overwhelming. You don’t get any time or space for yourself.” On a practical level, he says, being really famous is very expensive, because you can’t easily go out. “You have to get people to go and do stuff for you – and I can’t afford that,” he says.
His personal training clients, however, are “thrilled” by his newfound fame: “I think it’s a hoot for them to be able to say: ‘Oh, my trainer is on Slow Horses.’”
Slow Horses season five is on Apple TV+ from 24 September.
