David Morrissey on swapping drama for comedy and working with Aimee Lou Wood on Daddy Issues

For his latest series, BBC Three’s comedy Daddy Issues, the Liverpudlian actor is showing us that he is in fact also very, very funny – so much so that executive producer Phil Gilbert likens his physicality to that of Eric Morecambe.

His character, Malcolm, is described as being “unable to load a washing machine, boil an egg or microwave rice without it exploding”. Can Morrissey relate? “I can load a dishwasher and a washing machine, but I'm not really a technical person. My kids tend to help me with my iPhone and my Sky subscriptions. I’ve stopped feeling guilty about that, because I taught them how to walk, so they can teach me how to use Sky Sports.”

He adds, with a wry smile, “My personal love is ironing. I find it really cathartic. It's my happy place.”

He shares three children – two sons, Albie and Gene, and a daughter, Anna – with former spouse Esther Freud, but in Daddy Issues, he plays the useless father of Aimee Lou Wood’s Gemma.

When the 24-year-old discovers she’s pregnant after a one-off hook-up, Malcolm is the only one she can turn to. He’s living in a home for divorced men with Derek (David Fynn), mourning his recent separation, when Gemma asks whether he wants to move in with her.

Sharon Rooney (Barbie), Sarah Hadland (Miranda) and Susan Lynch (Sex Education), also star.

“I don't think my daughter would put up with Malcolm the way that Gemma does!” Morrissey says, but building the father-daughter relationship with Wood, despite never meeting before filming the series, was easy. “She's so open. Our approach to work is similar, where we just run at it. We're both Northern as well, which is handy.”

Wood was born in Stockport, Greater Manchester, where the series is set and filmed. “We like to have fun. We make each other laugh, which was sometimes a problem for everybody else. We trust each other.”

“I love comedy, and I love doing it, but I've done very dark comedy,” Morrissey says. He’s had entertaining appearances in Good Omens and Inside No. 9, and was brilliant as executioner Harry Wade in 2015 play Hangmen, written by Martin McDonagh. Blackpool was a similarly dark comedy, despite being a musical, with Morrissey as arcade owner Ripley Holden.

“The fallacy is that comedy is easy,” Morrissey adds. “It's not, it's hard, if not harder than drama. It's all about rhythm and timing. It’s exhausting and quite full-on – you do feel quite crazed by the end of the day.”

Morrissey is often asked whether he prefers theatre or TV/film work, but he says it’s a good story and a good character that’s the most important thing. “If I haven't done theatre for a while, I really miss it. I feel like I need to do it,” he says. “There’s nothing like the immediacy of theatre.”

We spend some time discussing recent shows – he loved Next to Normal, Cold War, Sondheim’s Old Friends and he’s seen Standing at the Sky’s Edge three times. “It’s a really great political story about working-class people and a working-class area. It came out of Sheffield, it’s set in Sheffield, with the music of Richard Hawley, who I love. It’s unbelievable.”

Watching Ken Loach’s film Kes when Morrissey was little, about a young boy who finds a kestrel and becomes interested in falconry, made him realise he wanted to be an actor. “That really blew me away. It’s a wonderful film, and it had a profound effect on me. I think a few actors of my age have said that, certainly working-class actors. Christopher Eccleston talks about it a lot. That got me interested in emotional storytelling.”

His other favourite TV show as a child was Colditz. “In the episode Tweedledum, a great actor called Michael Bryant is attempting to escape Colditz by pretending to go mad so that the Nazis will have to let him go because of the Geneva Convention, but he does actually goes mad. Again, it had a profound effect on me. That's when I started to think I'd like to be able to provoke that emotion in other people.”

Morrissey is known for conducting in-depth research into his roles, which involves meeting the people who have the real professions he portrays. For instance, in Sherwood, which returns for its second run on BBC One on Sunday 25th August, he plays DCS Ian St. Clair, who was a policeman and now runs a Violence Prevention Unit. “These units are real and they try to bring together all the various bodies in any local community – police, mental health, education, paramedics – to find a way to get ahead of crime,” says Morrissey.

“I met a few people who run these units, and it’s a Sisyphean task. I admire them and I'm impressed by them. When I go to work, I have a loyalty to them. I carry that around. I find it hard to let it go when I'm playing a part. Sometimes I don’t want to shake it off, I sort of want to sit in it, which makes me a difficult person to be around, I should imagine, when I'm working.”

Even when this research isn’t necessary, as was the case with Malcolm in Daddy Issues, Morrissey still wanted to dig deeper, and he actually wrote his own backstory for him. “What I need is some sort of psychological breakdown of why this person is like this. With Malcolm, it was important to think, ‘What's happened to this man to get to this place in his life?’ That’s why I needed to fill in the gaps.”

He explains: “I feel like he was in a band and the band looked after him. Everything has been done for him. To me, he seems to have been bullied. I think he and his sister grew up in a very loud household, in a very manly household, and there was a lot of noise and shouting. The thing about Malcolm is his timidity. For a man like me, who’s six foot three, to be timid in the world, something's happened, so I looked at why he is so timid, why he is frightened.

“He's devastated by his divorce, and he's lost the ability to function in the world, because that's been taken away from him, so I’m like, ‘What was the dynamic in that relationship?’ I know quite a lot of guys who are probably not as bad as Malcolm, but on the way, just ineffectually floundering and not knowing what's going on. I pinned him on a few people I knew, and some I didn't know, but that I’d read about.”

Despite Morrissey wanting a change from his drama roles, comedy is still something he takes very seriously.

“When I watch comedy, if I don't care about the people, then it’s not going to draw me in, they're not going to make me laugh,” he says. “You have to believe in them.”

Daddy Issues begins at 9pm on BBC Three tonight (Thursday 15th August), with the whole series available to stream now on BBC iPlayer.

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