Still forcing yourself to 'not give up'? The Slow Horses star flips it: quitting can be the brave choice — if you pass one test
We have collectively decided that quitting is for cowards. "Never give up" is on the mugs, the gym posters, the motivational reel your uncle keeps resharing. Perseverance is the whole personality now. Which is exactly why it's a little jarring — in a good way — to hear someone successful argue the opposite.
That someone is Jack Lowden, the Scottish actor currently best known as perpetually put-upon MI5 reject River Cartwright on Apple TV's Slow Horses, the show that functions as a scruffy, brilliant antidote to James Bond's globe-trotting gloss. Lowden has spent a decade collecting sharp roles, so when he starts praising the people who left, it's worth leaning in.
The line worth taping to your monitor
Speaking on the podcast An Actor Despairs, Lowden turned the whole "keep going at all costs" gospel on its head:
"There is courage in persevering, but there is courage in calling it a day as well... I have more admiration for people that pivot and use [their skills] in a different way."
He was talking about friends in film and TV who stopped chasing acting itself and redirected everything they'd learned into other roles in the industry. Not failures, in his telling — pivots. People who took the skills and pointed them somewhere more useful.
The part that keeps it from being an excuse
Now, "quitting is brave, actually" is the kind of sentiment that can curdle into permission to bail on anything mildly hard by Tuesday. So here's the test embedded in Lowden's point, the thing that separates a real pivot from just giving up: the skills have to go somewhere.
The skills have to go somewhere. A pivot redirects what you've built. Giving up just puts it down.
The friends Lowden admires didn't walk away empty-handed. They carried the craft — the discipline, the reading of a room, the years of training — into new positions and, by his account, ended up "wonderfully successful and having the time of their lives." That's the qualifier that makes the whole thing land instead of collapsing into a permission slip. Quitting a specific dream isn't the waste. Wasting what the dream taught you is.
A short field guide to telling the two apart:
- A pivot has a destination. You're moving toward a different use of the same strengths, not just fleeing the current discomfort.
- The time wasn't wasted. If the years taught you something transferable, they count — even if the original goal never happened.
- Honesty about "not working" is the entry fee. You have to actually admit the thing isn't working before you can do anything smart about it.
For the record, Lowden himself hasn't quit anything — Slow Horses is already renewed through a seventh season, with the sixth arriving September 16. Which is sort of the point. The man perseverating on-screen every week is quietly making the case that knowing when to stop is its own kind of nerve. Put that on a mug.
