British actor David Morrissey told Variety at the Monte Carlo Television Festival that he tries not to think about his audience when he makes a TV show, “but when you push a boat out of the harbor, you just pray and hope that people like it.”
Morrissey, star of ITV’s hit thriller Gone, which is in the festival, doesn’t have a magic formula for TV crime shows. “But you have to care about people,” he says. “They have to connect with you personally, and when that happens, something magical happens. It’s like making a soufflé 14 times and it doesn’t rise once, but the ingredients were all the same.”
When Morrissey received the script for “Gone,” written by “Lupin” creator George Kaye, Morrissey said, “It was a gut reaction, because sometimes analysis can be paralyzing. I don’t always know why I keep reading something, but if I did, I wanted to be involved in it.”
In the show, Morrissey plays principal Michael Polly, who becomes the prime suspect when his wife goes missing, a character who remains a mystery for most of the show’s six episodes. He, himself a talkative interviewee, says the following about this character: “I thought, ‘I want to tell the story of this man, I want to tell the story of this man who can’t really open up and communicate.'”
The actor says he is happy with the audience’s response to the show, “But when we make a show, we don’t think about the audience. We’re not thinking about how it’s going to land, we’re thinking about ourselves and what kind of story we want to tell in it.”
Without giving his name, he added, “Sure, sometimes I’ve made a piece of work that I really love and it’s not received well by the public, but that doesn’t mean I love it any less.”
Morrissey also stars in Russell T. Davies’ Channel 4 series Tip Toe as Clive Gross, a closed-minded man who, like Michael in Gone, is an angry man. Does he see connective tissue between such opponents? “Throughout my career, this drama is about conflict. No matter what character you play, they have to be conflicted. Otherwise, you shouldn’t be in the drama.”
That’s especially true for Clive. He is furious at the lifestyle of his gay neighbor, Leo Struthers, and the threat he perceives Leo to pose to his sons. “Right now, with the manosphere and toxic masculinity, that conflict is manifesting itself in the zeitgeist,” says Morrissey, who feels Tip Toe is a show of its time. “But if you look at the characters I’ve played in my life, they’re in crisis. That’s what drama is about. If someone woke up in the morning and had a great day and went back to bed, they wouldn’t be able to tune in.”
