Russell Tovey on Years and Years, podcasting and having children

After a standout role in this year’s smash TV drama Years and Years, there’s no stopping Russell Tovey. The actor talks to Nick Curtis about his bright future — and his plans to have 10 children
AMI BY ALEXANDRE MATTIUSSI leather jacket, £1,125 (amiparis.com). OSCAR JACOBSON jumper, £260, at selfridges.com
Nick Curtis @nickcurtis27 August 2019

Russell Tovey is sprawled on a sofa at The Standard hotel in King’s Cross, his gym-honed form clad in a T-shirt and shorts. His close-cropped, light brown hair is just starting to grey, his eyes are a startling blue and he is relaxed, smiley, almost blokeish — entirely comfortable in himself.

Tovey, one of Britain’s most-loved stage and screen stars, has every right to be this at ease. At 37, he’s exactly where he wants to be professionally, still basking in the success of Years and Years, Russell T Davies’ near-future family drama, in which he played Daniel Lyons, a housing officer besotted with a refugee. This November he will appear alongside Sir Ian McKellen and Dame ‘Heaven’ Mirren in The Good Liar, and in January he will star in a new ITV series Flesh and Blood with Imelda Staunton. There’s also a turn in a Broadway revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opposite Eddie Izzard, Laurie Metcalf and Patsy Ferran.

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Off-screen and off-stage, he has been just as busy, writing a TV comedy drama (he refuses to divulge much about it today) and parleying his self-taught love of art into a hit podcast, Talk Art, on which he recently interviewed Lena Dunham. Tovey is a serious collector: the first piece of art he bought was a Tracey Emin sketch from White Cube, thanks to one of his first theatre pay cheques, and since then has quietly amassed a collection boasting works by Michael Craig Martin, Wolfgang Tillmans and Rose Wylie. (It is so vast that he was once invited by the Royal Academy to display the collection at his east London flat.)

And if that weren’t enough to be getting on with, there’s also the fact that, this summer, he has become something of an unlikely style icon, bagging a Loewe campaign, shot in Margate, where he has just bought a ‘little dump that needs lots of work’ as a bolthole from his Shoreditch apartment. ‘The artistry of fashion is what interests me,’ he smiles, ‘and I’m an actor — I don’t mind being dressed up and made to look pretty.’ Loewe’s boss, Jonathan Anderson, is apparently up for coming on Talk Art after the pair met at the opening of the brand’s New Bond Street store.

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But back to the acting. Having previously worked with Davies on Doctor Who (Davies wanted him to succeed David Tennant as the Time Lord), Tovey jumped at the chance to collaborate on something as epic and game-changing as Years and Years, which roamed from the rise of populism to AI to the gig economy to the international refugee crisis. ‘It’s about where we’re going globally, universally, how we interact with each other,’ he says. ‘But it’s also a totally domestic story of a family in Manchester, which is how everyone can interact with it.’

“I’m an actor — I don’t mind being dressed up and made to look pretty”

Russell Tovey 

He liked the fact that Daniel’s sexuality wasn’t an issue in the script and that his relationship with Viktor was a love story: ‘obsessive love, but love fundamentally.’ Their story arc came to a climax (if you haven’t seen the show, skip the next two paragraphs) as they tried to reach Britain in an overcrowded, unstable dinghy. Davies told him that he had originally imagined that Viktor would drown and Daniel would live, but realised it would work more powerfully the other way round. ‘I pre-warned my parents the end of episode four was going to be sad, because my mum has watched me die so many times and she is sick of it now. And on the night, she rang me up and she was like: “You’ve got to stop dying in everything — me and your father can’t deal with it.”’

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Tovey is one of the more quietly confident people I have interviewed. He retains his Billericay accent (his parents and his older brother run a coach company in Romford), though his old friends think he’s ‘gone really posh’. He began acting at 11. Early work in adverts, kids’ TV shows and short films led to bit parts in The Bill and Silent Witness, then bigger parts in Gavin & Stacey, Being Human, Him and Her, HBO’s Looking and ABC’s Quantico. But his first big break was as Rudge in the original cast of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys at the National Theatre in 2004, alongside Dominic Cooper, Jamie Parker, Sacha Dhawan and James Corden, of which he is still proud.

‘When you start working in the UK, you dream of getting movies or American TV shows,’ he says. ‘I’ve worked over there loads now and it’s great, but for me the milestones have always been theatre.’

At 18 he came out to his parents. ‘I just didn’t want to get to a stage where it would be a big thing; it’s always just been who I am and I made a decision at an early stage when I started getting lots of work that it is what it is.’ Coming out, however, wasn’t the hardest thing he’d face that year: in a shocking, random attack, Tovey was also stabbed in the head by two thugs of about the same age on the train home to Billericay (the incident hasn’t affected his physical health or acting ability). ‘I looked like a little kid, and these two were like blokes, just two horrible people — c***s, basically,’ he says of the attack today. ‘But now I look back and think: what must your childhood have been like that you felt it was okay to do that?’

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It ‘f***ed [him] up for about three, four years,’ he adds. ‘I still have a thing, though not as much now, that if I’m walking along and feel nervous, I lose my step, lose my ability to walk properly. I probably should have gone into therapy.’

These days Tovey is cautious of discussing his sexuality too much because he doesn’t wish to be defined solely by it. Nonetheless, he is accepting of his status as a role model. ‘It wasn’t on my agenda, but you do become an ambassador in some ways if you are successful and you are a “something”,’ he shrugs. And he hasn’t shied away from gay roles on stage, including a footballer in John Donnelly’s The Pass at the Royal Court (for which he trained furiously, part of a conscious bid to give himself a leading man’s body and leave ‘dweeb’ roles behind). In 2017 he played a repressed gay Mormon in the nearly eight-hour epic Angels in America, again at the National, and last year he was David Suchet’s lover in The Collection, part of the starry Pinter at the Pinter season.

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It almost looks as though he was consciously embracing gay roles later in life. ‘I felt like I was playing gay characters all the time: people that were in the LGBTQI spectrum, I felt I was covering all of that,’ he says. ‘You’re kind of programmed as an actor to not come out or not take so many gay roles if you are gay, but I felt the roles I was getting offered were changing the dialogue, so I couldn’t not [take them].’ Certainly, he has not been pigeonholed; all his parts next year are as more or less dysfunctional straight men.

“You’re kind of programmed as an actor to not come out or not take so many gay roles if you are gay”

Russell Tovey

There is, perhaps, another reason Tovey appears so at ease today: he is dating again. Last year, Tovey split up with his fiancé, the rugby player Steve Brockman, reportedly due to their hectic and conflicting professional schedules (Tovey said the break-up was ‘shitty’ and on this occasion, did take himself off to therapy). Today, he tells me he’s seeing someone outside the business who has two basset hounds (Tovey’s bulldog, Rocky, is almost as famous as he is, and has modelled for Pringle).

SANDRO jumper, £209; jeans, £155 (sandro-paris.com). FALKE socks, £16 (falke.com). JOHN LOBB shoes, as before.

‘At some point it will all be out there but it’s all going very, very well and I’m very happy,’ he says. Last year, when he and Brockman broke up, Tovey said he was adamant that he would find love again, and be a father by 40. Is that still the plan? ‘Yeah, I wanna be a dad and whatever the ins and outs are of that, I’m exploring,’ he says. ‘I love my nephews. I love kids. I just feel like I’d be a good dad. I feel like I could provide a fun house and a very cultured upbringing.’

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So what about those Emin and Tillmans artworks? ‘I’ll just frame ’em up behind glass, wipe clean,’ he says. How many kids does he have in mind? ‘Oh 10, I don’t know, loads, whatever works,’ he beams, arms spread as if embracing his brood. ‘I mean it all depends on the size of your house, doesn’t it, whether you can, like, put them all up. I think that probably puts a limit on it.’

After an hour in his company, it’s hard to believe Russell Tovey could put a limit on anything he does.

‘The Good Liar’ is released in cinemas on 8 Nov. ‘Talk Art’ is available to download now

Russell Tovey - In pictures

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