As an East Asian actor with an Australian twang, Christopher Chung knew when he came to Britain in 2012 that he had to be adaptable. “It’s definitely difficult to be seen in the way you want to be seen as an actor when you have things like race up against you,” he says. “Sometimes – especially back then – you have to take things you’re not a hundred per cent behind because you need to work.” Fortunately, he loves learning accents.
Chung is now part of the excellent ensemble of spy drama series Slow Horses, based on by Mick Herron’s smart, popular spy thrillers about a branch of MI6 where the top brass send their failures, drunks and miscreants. As sociopathic computer geek Roddy Ho, Chung speaks with a flat-vowelled whine you could probably localise to within a single square mile of south London. Most of the people on the show, he says, didn’t realise at first that he was Australian.
Chung grew up on the Mornington Peninsula, south-east of Melbourne, where his Malaysian-born father ran a medical practice. It was a close-knit community – he still sees friends he made in primary school – but he had the country boy’s yearning to get out into the big world. In his case, it was a theatrical world. He joined the local amateur dramatic group, entered musical competition shows like Australian Idol and The X Factor, and did workshops at St Martin’s Youth Theatre.
It was through St Martin’s that he was invited to join a six-week intensive course in New York, the first of three stints in the United States. He had already tried university, dropped out and was working in retail. If he hadn’t had that chance, he reflects, he might still have been quite happily folding expensive shirts. “Those six weeks really changed the way I looked at acting, in that if you’re going to do it you’ve got to take it seriously and you need to really invest in it. It’s not a short game. It’s absolutely a marathon you have to be ready to run.”
It wasn’t long before the marathon’s course brought him back to London. “The sheer volume of opportunity here compared to Melbourne was just astronomical. And I knew I could fashion a career here much more easily than I could back in Australia.” Without a degree from one of the prestige drama schools, he says, he couldn’t get through the door to see casting directors in Melbourne’s theatres. And while it is difficult to unravel the workings of unconscious bias, his ethnicity didn’t help. “The path for someone like me was less than inspiring. I mean, I think Anthony Warlow was still playing the king in The King and I. That’s a good indication of where it was at.”
Not that London was easy. He didn’t know people. He got a job as a regular character on Waterloo Road, a Scottish drama series about a rough school, but the scripts kept changing to emphasise the white characters’ storylines; he came to feel like an extra. “It may be that they were just fixing the story but when you’re a minority within a cast, that’s sometimes the only way you can see it.”
Looking for positives, he reminded himself that he had still cracked a job on the BBC. That was currency. “So I took the best out of it that I could and the job that came after it was Here Lies Love (a musical about Imelda Marcos, written by David Byrne) at the National Theatre. And that was my dream job, the most joyous thing I’ve ever done.”
Ten years after he came to London, he is about to shoot the fourth series of Slow Horses. This is truly gourmet television, both on screen and behind the scenes, led by two of Britain’s greatest working actors. Slough House is headed by Jackson Lamb, a seemingly washed-up alcoholic who gradually reveals himself to be a sage old dog with a lot of crafty tricks, played by Gary Oldman; Lamb’s counterpart at MI6 proper is played by Kristin Scott-Thomas. Chung, 34, can still barely believe the professional company he’s keeping.
“When I first came on to the job last year I was so nervous. I didn’t sleep for about three days before I started,” says Chung. “It’s the biggest thing I’ve done, working with an Oscar-winning actor. But you get to the set and he completely puts you at ease.” After the first series was shot, Gary Oldman saw it before he did. “And he came over and said ‘Yeah, I saw your stuff. It was really good, really good, mate.’ I was floored, absolutely floored. I’ve had so many highlights on this job but having someone like him say ‘I value your work, you are a good actor’: that actually leaves me speechless.”
Roddy Ho is a genius hacker, usually seen behind a bleeping screen with the contents of a security camera playing out in front of him and his current online betting game flashing in one corner. He thus has no idea why he was relegated to the spy world’s remedial class, but his colleague River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) does: he is just too unpleasant for anyone else to bear.
Indeed, he doesn’t smile once during series one. “It’s a joy, because I think he’s such a far departure from who I am as a person,” says Chung. “Just to be so obnoxiously arrogant and always believe you are the best person in the room. Roddy will always give in to Lamb, but it’s fun to see how far he will push it – because he thinks he and Lamb are sort of on a level.”
The source books include plenty of Roddy’s malevolent private thoughts, so Chung reads and annotates them in advance. “It’s great, it’s almost like having a little bit of a Bible. To go round and say ‘OK, that’s what Mick’s got, that’s what (scriptwriter Will Smith)’s got. What can I bring to it? Because now Will’s starting to write for my voice, so it’s like an amalgamation. We get to create it together.” All the slow horses come from theatre, he says: they are all ready to play. “There’s no ego; you can make mistakes and that’s OK. There is that much freedom within it, which is why I think the work is so rich.”
Chung has a few playful ideas of his own. Recently, he put it to Smith that Roddy should get shot – not fatally, but significantly enough to impress one of his unseen dates – or, failing that, shoot someone else. It sounds more like something Roddy would want for himself; I observe that Christopher Chung, former nice guy, is identifying way too much with Roddy Ho.
“I know!” he giggles. He doesn’t have Roddy’s talents; his only techy boast, he says, is that he is good at pretending to type. So good, in fact, that when the computer screen often seizes up on set and someone will yell at him to fix it. “And it’s like: I’m not actually the character! I can’t! But I see a lot of actors carrying guns and I wonder what it would be like if Roddy had a gun. It would be absolute chaos because he wouldn’t know what to do with himself, but he would feel like such a bad man! It would be hilarious.”
Smith has yet to agree, but both Roddy and Christopher Chung are hopeful.