Boss man

Has he considered it before? “No, I just thought of it now.” Wow, he’d be good on Have I Got News for You! He loves the show (along with Gogglebox and many others), has never been on it and… yes, come on BBC, of course he would go on if he were asked.

Well, this is David Morrissey as rarely seen: a man of smiles and laughter animatedly talking about baking, love, growing into yourself as you age and no longer feeling the need to impress at dinner parties. He’s like a big, playful pussycat – not coiled but alert – with a slow, sideways grin. There’s something beguiling about him, too – an impression of self-awareness about how he might be seen to take himself as seriously as he does his acting and the world beyond, alongside a willingness to toy with that image.

He’s currently on screen displaying this lighter side in critically acclaimed BBC sitcom Daddy Issues alongside Aimee Lou Wood, but we’re meeting to talk about the return of Sherwood, the intense crime drama series, written by James Graham and inspired by two actual murders in Nottinghamshire in 2004. It’s set in an ex-mining village, much like the one Graham grew up in. The locals live under long shadows cast by the bitter divisions from the 1984 miners’ strike, with characters still spitting “Scab!” over their pints to former co-workers who breached picket lines. It’s also an investigation into the so-called “spy cops” thought to have infiltrated the mining communities, in the same way they did the women’s protest camps at Greenham Common.

I can dance. I can do Northern soul. Not well, but I can throw some shapes

The finale of the first season was one of the most watched British dramas of 2022 and exposed the police informer who married, had a family and continues to live in the village where their covert action led to a tragic loss of life.

Morrissey’s DCS Ian St Clair – one of only two people who knew the spy’s identity – is, by the start of series two, divorced, has left the police force and is running the Violence Prevention Unit, trying to persuade social services to communicate effectively with one another.

Attentive viewers of season one may have noticed that the upright St Clair visibly softened when in the company of Julie Jackson (Lesley Manville in a subtle, multi-layered performance). This tendresse develops at the start of season two in a promising way.

Morrissey talks about how in the first series his character is uncomfortable and under pressure, but when he walks into Julie’s house, something changes. “I don’t know if you’ve ever had this,” he says, a propos of the first stirrings of feelings for another person, “but he walks into her house and something about her and her environment means he can relax for the first time. He doesn’t want to drink but he has one because he feels OK in her presence, he feels safe. And later, when they’re on the sofa before watching Pointless, you just see him go, ‘Ahhhh.’” He sighs, decompressing his shoulders. “And there’s something about that sort of pheromone thing or whatever it is…”

It’s stronger than love, he says. St Clair’s face crumples at the start of the second season, at the thought of losing Julie. “What he feels in that moment is that he’s losing a connection to his past,” Morrissey’s native Liverpool accent clangs heavily on the “g”. “It might be dangerous, actually, because he’s sort of in love with the time and with an ideal.”

But isn’t love always like that, David? When you fall in love, doesn’t that person also, always, represent something more to you? “It is, but it’s also many other things as well. And I think analysis can be paralysis – there’s a sense where you go: ‘I want to dig into this and find the whys and wherefores of it.’ But there’s another bit of you that says: ‘It feels nice; just leave it alone.’

“So my job as an actor,” he says switching from the personal to the professional, “is to question the whys and wherefores.”

St Clair is in trauma having lost his marriage and home, so there’s an almost visceral need for him to grab onto Julie: “How it grows and what it becomes is a different thing but at the moment, it’s about love but also her representing a ballast for him.” Is there a chance that Ian St Clair is actually going to be happy? “Oh,” he says. “That’s a big question. I think he gets to a place of… a little contentment and hope. He definitely gets to that. But he’s quite a cautious person.”

Oh, go on, jump, Ian! Just jump!

Morrissey was married to the writer Esther Freud, sharing their time between homes in Hampstead, London and Walberswick, Suffolk. They have three children: Albie (29, with whom he does a music radio show), Anna (26) and Gene (20). They got together in 1993, married in 2006 and separated in 2020 – spending three decades as a couple before, as a friend explained, “they just couldn’t make it work any longer.”

Esther is the daughter of the late painter, Lucian Freud, and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud; David’s father was a shoe repairman and key cutter who died when the actor, the youngest of four, was 14. His mother worked for Littlewoods. The Morrissey family lived in Knotty Ash, famously the lifelong home of Ken Dodd. David failed his 11-plus and left school at 16 to study at the Everyman Theatre, inspired to act by Ken Loach’s film Kes, thence to Rada. They both have new partners.

Morrissey is known for his deep research before he takes on a role: reading Gitta Sereny’s book on Albert Speer and the history of the Hitler Youth to prepare for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin; shadowing Peter Mandelson to learn more about Westminster for the thriller, State of Play, which was helpful when he was cast as Gordon Brown, with Michael Sheen as Tony Blair, in The Deal.

He has talked about his regret in not attending university. Is this painstaking studying a version of that for him? “It’s an inner-geeky thing,” he says. “I get as much information as I can about the profession my character is working in, and the people I’m representing. I probably only use about ten per cent of the research because you have to forget about it. But you want it inside you at your core.”

At 60, he says it’s unlikely he will go to university now: “What I regretted – and don’t any more – was missing out on that sense of being in a big educational establishment; having time and resources to give yourself over to that. I never had that or any higher education, having left school at 16.

“Also, there’s two things going on – you do something in the pursuit of knowledge; and you do something because it connects with you and informs you about yourself and how you are in the world. And for me it was the former and it’s now the latter. The former was saying, ‘I need to know more about this so I can talk to people at dinner parties,’ and I don’t have that now. Now it’s more, ‘Oh, that makes sense of where I am and makes sense about us and the human condition and challenges my thinking.’ ”

Growing up, he says, “I loved to learn things but I hated being taught. If someone said to me, ‘OK, sit down. This is how you’re going to do this…’ I’d get really antsy. I’d hear them patronising me; I’d hear snobbery; I’d hear a lot of negativity that might not have been there but was to do with chips on my shoulder. But, you know, it might have been there, too.”

I loved to learn things but I hated being taught. I’d hear them patronising me

Morrissey has spoken in the past about the influence his then wife had on both his work ethic and reading tastes, introducing him to writers such as Rachel Cusk and Julie Myerson. He always has a fiction and non-fiction book on the go: he’s just finished Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan’s recent auto-fiction Question 7 and is reading Janet Malcolm’s 1990 book on the ethics of her profession, The Journalist and the Murderer with its notorious opening: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” He also rates Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives, which he must have read with surely some familial interest.

He uses London for theatre, which he goes to a lot (he loved the Richard Hawley musical, set in Sheffield, Standing on the Sky’s Edge, seeing it twice in one week), art galleries and gigs, and enthuses about a recent one with the Irish singer CMAT. Do you sing? “No, I speak in tune,” he laughs. “Like Richard Harris.”

He returns to Liverpool all the time. “It’s where all my family are; it’s where I grew up; it gave me everything.” The way he pauses between each phrase, the cadence of his speech, makes this love letter to Liverpool sound like a poem. “It’s the city that formed me. For good or bad, it is me.”

In a Bafta interview, in 2013, he talked about the dichotomy that is needed as an actor who has to be sensitive and alive to their character while also growing a thick skin to cope with the criticisms they’ll receive. He went on to mention the terrible things people say, not just the critics but the general public, and that male actors as much as female actors are now self-conscious about their bodies. “The insecurities mustn’t stop you walking forward bravely... but it doesn’t get easier, the insecurity… I suffer from it today.”

Not to be superficial, but what I really notice are his threads. He’s wearing a sharp suit in what looks like a Prince of Wales check. At 6ft 3in, with endless legs, he is a good clothes’ horse. Yes, he says, “I like clothes. This is Paul Smith, actually, from an old collection.” Does he happily spend money on clothes? “Yes, I do.” He tends to buy more vintage than new nowadays. He points to his navy shirt and we both bend in to peer at his chest to try to make out the designer label but without success.

What’s the most frivolous thing about him? He looks stumped. And then with all the world-weary pondering of a Hamlet soliloquy, interrogates himself. “What is my frivolity? I do like working a lot, it’s true – but it’s because I’m interested in the human condition. And in what makes people laugh as much as cry. I mean, I’m not totally serious all the time. I like being with friends and family and having a laugh. I like watching everyone on Gogglebox, I’m a big fan of Lee Mack and I love Have I Got News for You.”

Does he enjoy dancing? “I can dance. I can do Northern soul. Not well, but I can throw some shapes.” And, of course, he likes to bake. He’s clearly as chuffed now as he was the day that he won Star Baker on Celebrity Bake Off. He talks about how he made “a very beautiful quiche”, some Bourbon biscuits and a classic red and white marble sponge, which “looked like a dog’s dinner but tasted fantastic…and I got a handshake from Paul!” Not a hug? “Not on camera,” he says, with a final smile and joke, “but I can’t go there.”