Fifteen was a big age for David Morrissey. It was then that his father died in
the family’s Liverpool home, leaving the sensitive teenager, the youngest of
four, bereft and with a lifelong burden. “It never goes away, the death of a
parent when you’re a kid,” says the 44-year-old actor, nursing a scowl of
sadness.
He is huge in person, a hulking 6ft 3in, with the lumbering gait of a prop
forward and the soft downturned eyes of a poet. “It’s something that you
have to recognise within yourself. And it’s given me an inkling into a
character like Terry, and how life can suddenly change at that age.”
We are here, of course, in the backrooms of the Almeida Theatre in Islington,
North London, to talk about Terry. The tortured protagonist of Neil LaBute’s
typically provocative new play, In a Dark Dark House, is Morrissey’s
latest incarnation, after innumerable chameleonic shifts from a Nazi officer
(Captain Corelli’s Mandolin) to a small-time casino boss (Blackpool)
to Gordon Brown (The Deal) to Sharon Stone’s love puppet (Basic
Instinct 2) to possibly, even, if the internet and the bookmakers are to
be believed, the new Doctor Who.
We are thus here to talk about the RADA-trained Morrissey’s first stage turn
in ten years (“It’s exhausting, stimulating and arse-clenchingly
frightening”). We are here to talk about the nature of LaBute’s writing (“He
doesn’t shy away from the subject matters that would make other people
balk”). And we are here to talk about the complexities of playing a
character who has been abused in childhood but whose adult life is informed
by that abuse in genuinely surprising ways. “I don’t want to spoil what’s
revealed in the third act,” he says, “but Neil is talking about a different
type of burden you could carry with you after an event like that.”
And yet with the sudden and unexpected dovetailing of Terry’s painful history
and Morrissey’s own childhood ache it’s hard not to see the latter in a new
light. His roles, for instance, though wildly eclectic, seem all equally
afflicted with a profound inner grief. Even his Gordon Brown is
fantastically dark, staring at his rival Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) with
secret, seething resentment. I wonder, then, if he’s not drawn to roles that
somehow reflect this lifelong internal misery?
“If the writing’s strong enough, you shouldn’t have to draw on bad
experiences,” he says. “But the thing for me is that I have played a lot of
people who are going down the toilet, or seem to have major problems.” He
allows himself a self-deprecating chuckle here. “I got to a point where I
said to my agent, ‘I’d like to do some comedy!’ And the next thing you know
I get (the TV musical) Blackpool, this f***ing singing and dancing
thing. And even in that, though I loved doing it, my character’s having a
f***ing nervous breakdown! But then I like characters that sort of kick me
up the arse.”
He adds, perking up, that anyway, really, he confronted fully his feelings
about his father’s death when he was a young actor living in London (“I had
become an angry young man with behavioural problems, so I dealt with it”).
He had moved to a flat in Crouch End from Liverpool, where the acting bug
had bitten somewhere between a school production of The Wizard of Oz
and blissful teenage years with his best buddy Ian Hart at the city’s
Everyman Youth Theatre (“We’d walk home together when we weren’t too drunk.
We became best mates.”).
Unlike many actors, however, Morrissey entered his profession at 19 fully
formed, following a smart standout turn as a tearaway Scouser in the Willy
Russell-scripted TV series One Summer. “I can trace everything back
to that point,” he says. “The series did very well, and from that day on I
had a currency. I became David Morrissey, not just that guy.” From then on,
from RADA to Peer Gynt at the National to Gordon Brown on the TV,
it’s been, he says, a lucky ride.
After Brown in The Deal, Morrissey dabbled in Hollywood, with two minor
works – the Jennifer Aniston thriller Derailed and the Hilary
Swank horror film The Reaping– and one major commercial and critical
dud, Basic Instinct 2. Gallantly, he blames his own role as a randy
psychologist beguiled by Sharon Stone’s “risk-addicted” harridan for the
latter movie’s failure. “If I’m honest, I’m disappointed by my performance
in it,” he says. “The sex scenes told a story in the first one, whereas in
ours it was less so. And I’m quite prepared to believe that that was my
fault.”
He currently lives around the corner, in Islington, and is married to the
novelist Esther Freud (Hideous Kinky), great granddaughter of
Sigmund. Thus I wonder, with sex and death high on the agenda, if he ever
gets Freudian, in conversation, with his wife. “Not at all. My conversations
with my wife tend to revolve around who’s picking up the kids [they have
three: Albie, 12, Anna, 9, and Gene, 2]. Although for years I was aware of
some sort of lineage thing. But now whenever I hear ‘Freud’ its always about
my wife, and not some guy with a grey beard and glasses.”
So, you don’t use the word “Freudian” in conversation, then?
“Obviously not as much as you do.”
Speaking of doctors, is it true that you’re going to be the new Doctor Who?
“I’m not allowed to talk about that,” he says, grinning. “The thing about Doctor
Who is that I’m in it on Christmas Day, and any questioning could be a
spoiler for that episode, so I can’t talk about it.” In the meantime, with
or without Doctor Who, Morrissey says that his schedule is truly
overflowing.
He’s up next playing a copper in two adaptations of David Peace novels (Nineteen
Eighty, and Nineteen Eighty-Three). Plus, he’s putting the
finishing touches to his own directorial feature, the low-budget love story The
Pool, and working on financing for his next project, a movie about a
sado-masochistic performance artist. “I love it, but it’s proving difficult
to finance. Because people, for some reason, don’t like seeing fellas
nailing their scrotums to bread boards.”
And yet, still, you wonder, what about the perennial Morrissey misery? “Look!”
he says, with some finality. “If it was making me miserable, I’d get out,
but it doesn’t! It fuels me! That’s why I’m taking on more things, because I
feel that it’s actually f***ing great!”
In a Dark Dark House, Almeida Theatre, London N1 (www.almeida.co.uk
020-7359 4404), from Thur to Jan 17; David Morrissey stars in the Doctor Who
Christmas Special: The Next Doctor, BBC One, Christmas Day
You forgot to mention 'Holding On' for the BBC in which Morrissey was superb.
Jon, North West, UK