We haven’t seen much of Zafar Jaffrey, the mayor of London, played by Nick Mohammed, in the latest season of Slow Horses, which you can check out with an Apple TV+ subscription. However. it’s clear he’s going to play a pivotal role in the story. Mohammed is the newest cast member of the popular spy thriller that, unlike basically every other television show, has usually wrapped filming of its next season before the current season even ends.
For actor Mohammed, who joined the show for Season 5, which hit the 2025 TV schedule last month, this presented a new challenge. The Ted Lasso star was only up to date with Season 3 when he auditioned for the role of Zafar Jaffrey. Luckily, Mohammed was already a fan of the books, written by Mick Harren, when he joined the show, and it helped him get up to speed when shooting began.
Mohammed Had Read The Book That The Season Is Based On Years Earlier
If you’re a fan of the Slow Horses, you likely know that each season of the show has been based on one book from the Slough House series. Season 5 is based on the fifth book, London Rules, published in 2018. Because of the shooting schedule of the show, production for Season 5 got underway before Season 4 had aired, and that presented an interesting challenge for newcomer Mohammed. I asked him about it, and he explained how he was up to date,
That's a good point, because actually, they had wrapped on Season 4. I think Season 3 had dropped when I auditioned for it, so I was up to date by that point. I'd obviously not seen Season 4. I've read Mick's original books anyway, so I was aware of most of the things that preceded London Rules Season 5. And so, yeah, I was pretty up-to-date.
That doesn’t mean he knew everything, and in fact, it had been a while since he read it. Though Nick Mohammed had read London Rules, which so far is largely focused on the character Roddy Ho, by his own admission, it had been a while. When I asked if he re-read it before the season, he said no, explaining,
I then didn't want to go back and read it, because I wanted to really focus more on [writer and showrunner] Will Smith’s version of the character, you know, because it might have been sort of changed a little bit, and I didn't want to get kind of too restricted by anything I'd read before then.
It’s also worth noting Mohammed added that his character, though similar to current London Mayor Sadiq Khan, is not based on any one person. That means the door is wide open for the rest of the season, and I can’t wait to see where the show goes with the complicated character (and, of course, everything Jackson Lamb does on the show).
