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The writers of Slow Horses appear to have hidden a tribute to Heath Ledger in the fifth season of the show.

Gary Oldman plays the lead character Jackson Lamb in the Apple TV spy comedy series, and also starred as Lt. Gordon in Christopher Nolan’s beloved 2008 film The Dark Knight, and in episode five of the new season of Slow Horses, the two streams appeared to cross.

In a scene in which he becomes frustrated with his colleague, Oldman’s character snaps, “When you talk, I wanna stick a pencil in my eye and headbutt the table!”

Fans have speculated that this could be a sly reference to a memorable scene in The Dark Knight in which Ledger’s Joker intimidates a group of organised criminals by asking, “How about a magic trick?” before slamming a pencil into the table. “I’m going to make the pencil disappear,” he adds.

As one of the mob confronts him, the Joker smashed his head eye-first through the pencil. “Ta-da!” he exclaims. “It’s gone.”

Ledger passed away at the age of 28, before The Dark Knight was even released in 2008, and went on to pick up an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his iconic role in the film.

Many of Ledger’s co-stars have continued to express their sorrow at his loss in recent years, including Paul Bettany, who said last month that he continues to be unable to rewatch A Knight’s Tale because he misses his co-star so much.

Earlier this year, Michael Caine, who played the butler Alfred in The Dark Knight, said he was left “terrified” by Ledger’s performance. “The smeared makeup, the weird hair, the strange voice. It was chilling,” he wrote. “Absolutely floored me the first time I saw him in action – I was terrified”.

The Slow Horses season five final was on October 29, but it has already been commissioned for a sixth season.

Paul Bettany has admitted he hasn’t watched his breakthrough film A Knight’s Tale since it was first released because he misses late co-star Heath Ledger “too much”.

The WandaVision and Avengers star played English poet and writer Geoffrey Chaucer in the medieval 2001 action-comedy, which starred Ledger as William Thatcher, a peasant squire, fuelled by his desire for food and glory, who forges a new identity for himself as a knight when his master dies.

Ledger went on to be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his role in Brokeback Mountain in 2005 and he played the iconic Batman villain The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 blockbuster The Dark Knight. The actor died in January the same year, four months before the release of the film, after overdosing on prescription drugs. He was 28 years-old.

The late actor received a posthumous Oscar for his role in the film.

Speaking in a Q&A during an appearance over the weekend at the LA Comic Con, when asked if fans ever ask him to repeat some of his iconic lines from A Knight’s Tale, Bettany said: “It was a really long time ago. It was like another lifetime ago. And people do come up sometimes, people come up to me on the street and quote things at me, and I literally can’t remember. I can’t remember any of it.”

He added: “I saw [the film] when it first came out. I’ve never seen it again since. There are lots of reasons for that, and just one of them is that I miss Heath too much.”

Elsewhere, it was recently confirmed that Bettany is set to return as Marvel Studios’ Vision in the forthcoming Disney+ series Vision Quest, which is set for release in 2026.

Bettany last played Vision in the 2021 Disney+ series WandaVision, where the character was resurrected and revamped into White Vision following his death in 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War.

Ledger

‘Slow Horses’ pays subtle tribute to Gary Oldman’s ‘The Dark Knight’ co-star Heath Ledger

Paul Bettany hasn’t watched ‘A Knight’s Tale’ because he misses Heath Ledger