Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Looking back on his acting career, David Morrissey is grateful for the many successes. From his shady tax inspector in Tony Marchant’s awards-laden Holding On and his prime minister-in-waiting in The Deal to his compellingly monstrous Governor in The Walking Dead, he loved doing them all. But to find out what you’re made of as an actor, he says, nothing compares to the jobs that bombed.There was his starring role in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at London’s National Theatre in 1990, where he and the cast played night after night to a half-empty auditorium. “It taught me a big lesson, which is ‘Fuck ’em!’” he says when we meet at his publicist’s office in central London. “You do it for you and for the other actors. You go out there, you deliver it, you have fun. If people want to watch it, that’s up to them.”Then there was Basic Instinct 2, the critically drubbed sequel to the hit erotic thriller, in which Morrissey played a police psychiatrist obsessed with Sharon Stone’s crime novelist. He knew things weren’t right during filming. “There were a lot of people behind the camera who were money people. Conversations were being had and things kept being changed. But I learned how to negotiate that environment and how to keep going when the wheels are coming off. And I was working, and the worst thing for an actor is the phone not ringing. If I’m not at work, I lose my oxygen. I’m lucky because I haven’t been in that position for a long time.”I meet 60-year-old Morrissey — lean, tanned and impeccably turned out — to discuss Sherwood, the TV series written by James Graham which, on its first outing in 2022, emphatically did not bomb. Set in a former mining town in Nottingham where the wounds from the mid-1980s miners’ strike can still be felt, it was conceived as a standalone series but, noting the glowing reception, the BBC approached Graham for a second run.Morrissey had remembered the miners’ strike as “a very binary dispute. As far as I understood it, it was the miners against the government and you picked your side.” In fact, he says, “it was a much more complicated and divisive conflict which, because of splits within the union, ended up splitting families. So this season is asking: how do we heal in a community when we’ve taken sides in a conflict? You can apply that to the miners’ strike or to something like Brexit. James has this empathetic gene and is able to stand in other people’s shoes. He knows there are no easy answers and the mud of it is where he wants to live.”Morrissey once again plays Ian St Clair who, having falsely accused his wife of being a police plant in the last season, is now single and craving companionship. A police detective in series one, he has left the force and is leading a violence intervention team to tackle youth crime. That team is based on a real-life initiative across a number of British cities that takes a public health approach to violent crime and aims at early intervention. “It’s about approaching from a preventative place rather than a reactive one, and joining up different agencies — police, housing, mental health services, prisons, schools — to stop people getting on the wrong side of the law,” he explains.He is playing another lonely divorcee in the sweetly funny Daddy Issues, currently on BBC Three. His heartbroken and hapless character, Malcolm, moves in with his pregnant daughter, Gemma, played by Aimee Lou Wood. Malcolm is, explains Morrissey, “a man who has lost the manual of life and doesn’t know how to operate. He’s a parent but really he’s the baby.” The actor concedes comedy isn’t his usual territory — he has built a reputation playing hard nuts or brooding, stoical types — which is precisely why series creator Danielle Ward hired him.Morrissey grew up in a working-class family in Liverpool: his father was a cobbler and his mother worked for a department store. When he told his parents he wanted to act, “I may as well have said I wanted to be an astronaut.” In his early teens, he joined a youth theatre group at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre. Back then, the Everyman was a hotbed of talent, launching the careers of Jonathan Pryce, Anton Lesser, George Costigan and Pete Postlethwaite, all of whom Morrissey approached for advice. They were, he says, “incredibly generous. They would immediately sit me down and say: ‘OK, what’s your plan?’”Morrissey found acting therapeutic, as it “allowed me to step out of myself and to explore emotions via characters. I was able to indulge the things that troubled me — my unhappiness and my confusion at the world. I grew up in an unstable domestic environment, for want of a better description, and no one was going to talk about that stuff at school.”He made his screen acting debut in the drama series One Summer aged 18, playing a Liverpool teenager who runs away to Wales with his best friend and causes havoc. Before the series aired on Channel 4, Morrissey went travelling in Kenya by himself. He recalls sitting in a hotel lobby having coffee and seeing a man reading a British newspaper. “As he was reading it, he folded the page over to reveal my photo.” The article turned out to be a glowing review of One Summer’s first episode. “So I thought I’d better hurry up and get home. When I got back to Liverpool, I had the first experience of being recognised, which was pretty strange when you’re a kid.”Later that year, Morrissey went to drama school Rada in London “which was a real leveller. It didn’t matter what you’d been in.” He recalls being “very chippy at first. I had come down from Liverpool and it felt like I was going to Oxbridge and they were going to erase everything that was working-class out of me. In fact, they said: ‘No, we love that side of you. But it might be quite handy for you to be able to do this other stuff as well if you want a career.’ After that, I got my head down and worked hard, and it was tough but great. And I’ve been doing that ever since.”Morrissey says he is maddened when he sees drama, and the arts in general, being dismissed or devalued as a “soft option” by politicians and teachers. “The first question I ask, as an artist, is: what’s it like to be someone else? That simple question breeds empathy and humanity, not just in you, the actor, but in audiences too. What could be more important than that?”Series two of ‘Sherwood’ is on BBC1 on Sunday August 25 and Monday August 26, and afterwards on Mondays and Tuesdays. ‘Daddy Issues’ is on BBC Three and iPlayerFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
