‘Being an actor defies hierarchy’
Russell Tovey, returning to the West End, talks to Ben Lawrence about why straight actors should play gay roles and vice versa
Russell Tovey is sitting opposite me in an east London coffee shop, stroking his French bulldog Rocky, which is lying supine. “He’s a Scorpio like me,” says Tovey. “Fiercely devoted.” In fact, Tovey – whose career has successfully navigated Broadway (notably The History Boys), and a string of film and TV hits both here and in America – has been at his best in roles that have shown an intense sort of loyalty. There was George the werewolf in BBC hit Being Human, whose heartbreaking devotion to his girlfriend is compromised every time there is a full moon; John Chivery, the jailer’s son in Little Dorrit, whose long-standing love for the title character goes cruelly unappreciated; and Steve in the acclaimed sitcom Him and Her, desperate to propose to his girlfriend Becky but perpetually unsure of how to do so.
His two new roles in Pinter at the Pinter, however, are rather more slippery and harder to define. This West End season, which comprises 19 of the late dramatist’s short works performed over five different shows on various evenings, stars Tovey and others including Antony Sher, Danny Dyer, Celia Imrie and Tamsin Greig.
He appears in both The Lover and The Collection, two provocative works from the early Sixties, which foreshadow the permissiveness that was just around the corner. In The Lover, Tovey plays a husband whose sexual roleplay with his wife (Hayley Squires) gets out of hand, while in The Collection (first performed several years before the legalisation of homosexuality) he plays a sexually ambiguous man who takes out his insecurities on his older lover (played by David Suchet).
Tovey, now 36, became obsessed with the playwright when he was in his teens and working at the Chichester Festival Theatre. “He was everything to me as a young actor: his structure, his rhythms, his dialogue.
“But the thing with Pinter is that people think you have to revere him, but you don’t. You can take his plays and do what you want with them.” Tovey’s sentiments seem to echo what Pinter himself once said when asked what his plays were about (“How the f--- should I know?”).
Tovey was recently given the opportunity to worship at the altar of the playwright. He visited Pinter’s widow, Lady Antonia Fraser, and said he could feel his presence in the house.
“She is very active when it comes to keeping his legacy alive and you really sense this beautiful love story between them. They were friends before they were lovers.”
Tovey hints at a sort of softness through rather soulful blue eyes. He talks about how lucky he is – a lad from Romford in Essex who has been acting professionally since he was 11, he avoided the stage school route (although he attended Sylvia Young’s on Saturdays) and through “discipline and determination” has worked continuously. I wonder how he feels about the perceived proliferation of posh actors in the industry now.
“The consensus is that it’s harder for working-class actors to break through,” he says. “You have got to pay for drama school, pay for travel, pay for rent. If you live outside London that is already thousands of pounds just to better yourself. And now you have to choose between art and drama at school, which is so sad. Entertainment is such a necessity and I find the lack of respect for it so frustrating.”
We talk about diversity. Tovey says he hopes that we will soon reach a stage where the gender and the ethnic background of an actor is no longer a talking point.
“It will be women playing men and men playing women and you won’t come away saying something like: ‘That’s an interesting choice’.”
More problematic is the issue of sexuality-blind casting, I suggest, which has recently caused much opprobrium when the straight actor and comic Jack Whitehall was cast in Disney’s first “major gay role” in Jungle Cruise. “If you’re an actor, you’re an actor,” says Tovey, who is gay and until earlier this year was engaged to rugby coach Steve Brockman. “The whole thing with Jack playing a gay character … I’m like, just let him act. It’s like me saying I could never play a straight character because I am not going to know a straight person’s thoughts.
“I’ve always been out, and happy with the range of characters I’ve been offered. I’ve had the most amazing opportunities.”
I say that not everyone is as comfortable in their own skin, nor indeed can afford to be – particularly in Hollywood, where actors still feel the need to stay hidden in the closet.
“It’s their choice,” he says. “I don’t know … I can’t comment on anyone else’s decisions. But for me I know that this is who I have always wanted to be.”
Indeed Tovey plays both gay and straight to equally convincing effect,
‘If you’re an actor, you’re an actor. The whole thing with Jack playing a gay character … Just let him act’
and in recent years has achieved success in America both on TV (in the much-praised gay relationships drama Looking) and on Broadway in Ivo van Hove’s spare but intoxicating production of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge. He says he loves being on Broadway, ever since he first experienced it as one of Alan Bennett’s
History Boys in the mid-noughties (along with James Corden and Dominic Cooper). “There’s a whole community there and I think that is because of Aids. They all pulled together and supported and protected each other. There were so many benefit concerts and charity events. We had the same experience in London but not to quite the same effect.”
However, Tovey chose not to go to Broadway with the transfer of one of his London successes – Angels in
America – the National’s 2017 revival of Tony Kushner’s metaphorical masterpiece set at the height of the Aids epidemic in which he starred as a closeted Mormon.
“I couldn’t do it any more,” he says. “I adored it but it took so much out of me and I needed to step away. Everyone else got their ending – even my mum [in the play, a devout Mormon horrified at her son’s sexuality who eventually sees the light] who was there with the gays at the Pool of Bethesda. But you think: ‘Where is her son?’ I was just in my dressing room waiting to go on for my curtain call. I would walk home along the Thames with Rocky and feel like s---. It was amazing to live that character but I knew I couldn’t continue.”
There is a sensitivity to Tovey and, when he reels off the long list of actress friends he has scooped up over his career (Sarah Solemani, Lenora Crichlow, Sinead Keenan and many more), I can’t help but feel that there is a slight mothering effect. He laughs: “It’s true – I have a lot of girls who look after me. I love an actress.”
Tovey skips from job to job. He will next be seen in international thriller
The Good Liar, alongside Ian Mckellen and Helen Mirren (or Dame “Heaven” Mirren as Tovey calls her), and after he has finished with Pinter he will appear in a major new BBC drama, which he can’t yet talk about. Tovey may love an actress but he also loves the acting life.
“I am always professional but I think it’s easy to be professional when you love what you do,” he says. And why does he love it? “I think it’s the collaboration with people from all backgrounds, all walks of life. Being an actor defies hierarchy.”