British actor David Morrissey tries not to think of the audience when making TV shows “but once you push the boat out of the harbor you’re just praying and hoping that people like it,” he tells Variety at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival.
As the star of ITV’s hit thriller “Gone,” which is in competition at the festival, Morrissey doesn’t have a magic formula for TV crime shows, “but you have to care about the people,” he says. “They have to connect with you personally and once that happens there’s a magic thing. It’s like you’ll make a souffle 14 times and then one time it doesn’t rise, but all the ingredients were the same.”
When he got the scripts for “Gone,” written by “Lupin” creator George Kay, Morrissey reacted “with my gut because analysis can be paralysis sometimes and I don’t always know why I keep reading something but if I do then I want to be involved in it.”
In the show, Morrissey plays headmaster Michael Polly, who becomes the chief suspect when his wife goes missing and who remains inscrutable for most of the six episodes. A garrulous interviewee himself, he says of the character: “I thought ‘I want to tell this man’s story, this man who has an inability to really open up and to communicate.'”
The actor says he’s pleased by audience reactions to the show, “but you’re not thinking about the audience when you make shows. We’re not thinking about how it lands, we’re thinking about ourselves in it and what story we want to tell.”
Without naming names, he adds: “Sometimes I’ve certainly made work that I absolutely love, which hasn’t landed well with the public. But that doesn’t mean to say I love it less.”
Morrissey also stars in Russell T. Davies’ Channel 4 series “Tip Toe” as Clive Gross, a man who is as vocal in his anger as Michael in “Gone” is closed off. Does he see any connective tissue between such opposites? “All through my career, the drama is about conflict. Whatever character you’re playing, they have to be in conflict, otherwise they shouldn’t be in a drama.”
That’s especially true of Clive, who is raging against the lifestyle of his gay neighbor Leo Struthers and the threat he perceives Leo poses to his sons. “Now with the Manosphere and toxic masculinity that conflict is out there as a zeitgeist,” Morrissey says of how “Tip Toe” feels very much a show of its time. “But if you look at the characters I’ve played all through my life, they’re in crisis because that’s what drama is. You wouldn’t tune in if somebody got up in the morning, had a lovely day and went back to bed.”