Olivia Cooke's Big Slow Horses Season 6 Moment With Jack Lowden Was Totally Improvised
One of the most exciting moments in "Slow Horses" Season 6 comes in the penultimate episode, when Sid (Olivia Cooke) and River (Jack Lowden) finally smooch, the culmination of a budding romance that had been interrupted for several seasons while Sid was presumed dead. It was a momentous moment — and it wasn't even originally supposed to happen. According to Cooke, the kiss was improvised.
"It wasn't in the script," Cooke told Town & Country. Speaking about the scene in Episode 5 in which the two Slough House spies find a moment to talk about their feelings, Cooke revealed that there was no lip-locking in the script. "And once we'd rehearsed it, Jack and I were just like, 'I think it needs that. It needs that crescendo. It needs that button. You need to know that.' We need to give the audience that. They've waited this long."
Although the season is "supposed to be Sid's happy ever after," as Cooke told GQ, the next and final episode of the season reveals another twist. River gets poisoned, and his and Sid's ultimate fates will remain unknown until Season 7 of the show hits Apple TV. Worst-case scenario, it'll have been a good thing they got that unscripted kiss in already.
Slow Horses was the better of Olivia Cooke's two notable TV kisses in 2026
Olivia Cooke kissed another TV co-star in 2026, and that kiss was very much written into the script — even if Cooke, and audiences everywhere, might have wished it hadn't been.
In the Season 3 premiere of "House of the Dragon," HBO's "Game of Thrones" spin-off, Cooke's Alicent Hightower attempts to manipulate her son, Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell), into leaving King's Landing. As she praises him for being so brave, Aemond gives in to some classic Targaryen incest and leans in to kiss his mom. Alicent, horrified but needing Aemond to do what she says, tries to play it cool. Considering that the mother-son kiss was not in the George R.R. Martin books on which the show is based, Cooke was surprised to see it when she first read the script for the episode.
"I don't know if any mother is expecting their son to have romantic feelings for them. It's so shocking," Cooke TVLine. "Sometimes I'm reading these scripts, and I'm like, 'What has [showrunner] Ryan [Condal] and [executive producer] Sara [Hess] got for me this season?!'"