Russell Tovey: ‘Queer people in my generation have section 28 in our blood’
Russell Tovey is trying to lick his elbow. It’s a ritual every performer has to go through in the opening scene of Nick Payne’s play Constellations – the response to a flirtily issued challenge from a stranger – but it seems particularly suited to someone whose physical presence combines goofiness and sex appeal in equal measure. The resulting ripple of laughter in a packed house feels mildly alarming after months of social distancing, but for Tovey it’s a reassuring sign of a return to normal. “It hasn’t felt as alien as I thought it was gonna be,” he says, adding that gaps between seats could feel “like you’re playing to a show that hasn’t sold that well”. Judging by the queues outside, there’s little danger of that.
We meet the next day at the bottom of a lightwell in the middle of a rehearsal studio in Covent Garden. It’s technically outside, which is better for Covid, the PR assures us – a reminder that normal is, in fact, some way away. Tovey is dressed in grey chinos and a darker sweater that chime with his now more-salt-than-pepper hair. The erstwhile History Boy is turning 40 in November (he played sixth-former Rudge in the Alan Bennett hit at the age of 23), though he still somehow manages to look younger than his years. The run-up to this milestone obviously hasn’t panned out as expected. In 2020 he was supposed to be on Broadway, performing in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? alongside Rupert Everett, and, as he told one interviewer, “putting the feelers out” on how to have a baby.
In the event, they managed only a handful of preview performances before theatres closed in March, and it was never officially reviewed (one blogger who saw it wrote that Tovey “did a lovely job” as Nick). “It was gutting,” he recalls, but there was no getting away from the reality. “It was a terrifying time. And the last two previews were when news was amping up and the world [was] getting scary. And then you’re playing director’s notes. So you’re thinking, OK, on this line, I’ll put the glass down. I’ll say that line louder, and then I’ll turn around. And the other part of your head’s going: we might all be dead in a month.”
Is there any chance of picking up where they left off? “Broadway literally just opened up the other day, so who knows? I’d love to, yeah. But you know, a lot’s happened.”
He means life, the world, the pandemic, of course. But despite the en
forced hiatus, things haven’t been exactly quiet on the career front, either. Tovey is obsessed with contemporary art, and by the end of 2020 his podcast with gallerist Robert Diament, Talk Art, reached 2m downloads. In May this year it spawned a bestselling book, and these days Tovey’s Instagram is more arty than luvvie, with snaps of gallery visits, podcast guests and the occasional cameo by his beloved French bulldog, Rocky.
What about plans for a baby? “It’s absolutely there in my life, in the future.” Tovey has been with his boyfriend, Steve Brockman, since 2016, although they split up for a year in 2018. In terms of how they’d do it, “surrogacy, adoption – all those things are up for grabs … and you know, conversations with friends”. He says: “Everybody’s advice is don’t have a baby with a friend,” and when I point out I know parents for whom that’s worked out very well, he adds wistfully: “That’s the dream.” In any case, he’ll probably miss his self-imposed deadline: “I think I had this thing in my head, ‘I’ve got to be a dad by the time I’m 40.’ But … probably because I’m about to be 40 I’m letting myself off the hook with that one,” he laughs.
Children aren’t a factor for the couple at the heart of Constellations, a dizzying play that uses many-worlds theory to explore paths taken and not taken over the course of a relationship. Tovey performs opposite Omari Douglas, breakout star of the Aids-era TV drama It’s a Sin, and an exuberant presence in a play that demands huge emotional range from actors who have to flip not just between scenes, but universes.
This is the first time the script, a two-hander, has been adapted for gay characters, but it will run alongside a version featuring Anna Maxwell Martin and Chris O’Dowd. Earlier in the summer actors Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah alternated with Peter
Capaldi and Zoë Wanamaker. This unusual setup is an example, Tovey says, of necessity being the mother of invention. The professional terror of getting pinged or coming down with Covid is eased by the knowledge that there are people who could easily take over if it came to it. “This production would not have happened if it hadn’t been for the state of the world. The idea to turn it into this comes out of [an effort] to keep telling stories. Culture doesn’t slow down, culture adapts.”
Sure, but it’s hard to argue that the pandemic hasn’t been a disaster for the arts. “When it comes to financing, when it comes to support for the arts, yeah.” But at the same time, “all everybody’s done in this time is turned to culture. They’ve streamed stuff, they’ve read books, they’ve gone to see public artworks.” This is where Tovey, whose brand is nothing if not affable, starts to get a bit punchy. “So when the government starts doing cuts, when there isn’t this support for the theatre industry, the entertainment industry, it’s offensive. Because it’s taking away from what it is to be alive.” What would he say to culture secretary Oliver Dowden if he was sitting here now? “I’d say like: what the fuck? It just doesn’t make sense to me.” Funding, he says, “is gonna be a constant battle because we’re always seen as just fluff. And it’s anything but fluff. It’s vitality.”
As I’ve discovered, Tovey’s affability – it’s hard to find any negative press about him – is a bit of a red herring. Given all the warm words, I ask if he’s a people-pleaser, but he rejects the label. “I’m very confident to say to someone, ‘That doesn’t really work for me, sorry.’ I think I’m polite. I think I work hard. I care about my job, and I think all of those qualities mean that people want to hang out with you, people want to work with you again.” In a company, supporting your fellow actors isn’t just about being popular, it’s about making the work as good as possible. “Other people being brilliant means that you’re going to be brilliant. If you’re just thinking about yourself and your performance, and the other people literally just facilitate your performance, then I’ve no interest in that at all. And I’ve been in situations like that, and it just sucks the joy out of a room. It’s shit.”
Equally, he wants us not to likehis characters necessarily, but to understand them. In the 2017 production of Angels in America at the National Theatre, he played Joe Pitt, a conservative lawyer who leaves his wife, Harper, for another man. “I would take it personally, the way that Joe Pitt was treated,” he says. He’d heard that in other productions the crowd had applauded when Harper slaps Joe. “And I remember I went: ‘If anybody claps when she slaps me, I’ve failed. They’re not gonna fucking clap. And they never did. That, for me, was a victory. In that part, I want them to feel desperately sad for me, I want them to think my morals are very challenging, very problematic, but also to see how damaged he is and have empathy for him and care for him.”
Tovey has been out since he was 18, but that doesn’t mean he escaped the kind of shame that kept Pitt in the closet. He is, he says, part of a “whole generation of queer people who have section 28 in our blood”. The message of the Thatcher-era law against the “promotion of homosexuality” was: “You’re a pervert, there’s no place for you. Your only opportunities are to stay in the closet if you want success and happiness, but you won’t be happy anyway. And if you come out, you’re going to get Aids and no one’s going to love you.”
He says he was lucky to have found a more sympathetic environment in the arts, “but for a lot of people section 28 is still part of your psyche. And then they’re experiencing a world now where kids are coming up going like, well, ‘I’m pansexual, I’m fluid, I haven’t really decided yet.’ My feeling is that’s fucking wonderful. Isn’t this a great time to be alive? But I can understand when someone is chewed up by that, because that isn’t their experience. They’ve got self-hate that has been embedded in them by the government.”
Dealing with his own internalised homophobia has taken a lot of work over the years. And, of course, he’s changed and grown like anyone else, and looks back on some of his earlier material with a different eye. “In the beginning of lockdown, Steve said to me, ‘Let’s watch The History Boys,’” – the film of the play that Tovey hadn’t seen since attending the premiere in 2006. “And we put it on. I cried throughout, remembering being with those boys and that experience. But also [thinking] I fucking get that now, I understand what that line is, I know what heartbreak is. I know what longing is.”
Is he still in touch with the others? “I speak to James [Corden] most; I was speaking to Sam Barnett the other day. Dom [Cooper] and me just send random messages to each other all the time. Me and Andy Knott are good, I saw Sacha Dhawan very briefly at a friend’s 50th.” And Alan Bennett? “I called Alan the other day, we had a big chat. He’s doing great.” Did he get through lockdown all right? “Well, I mean, he’s a writer, he’s solitary, you know, it’s him and his partner, and they go to Leeds and then they’re in London. And he sits in his little office and writes.”
And what about Tovey? Is he happy with how things are? He’s spoken in the past about frequently feeling too young for the task at hand. As 40 approaches, can he shake off a bit of the boy in him? “I’m always someone that, if something makes me feel uncomfortable, I push through it and then I sort of catch up … But when it comes to me now, I feel the most settled and the most calm I’ve been for a long, long time. Definitely.”
Constellations is at the Vaudeville theatre, London, until 12 September.
Culture is always seen as fluff, and it's anything but. It's vitality
and shots of the Indian flag fluttering unsullied in the wind. • Shershaah is released on 12 August on Amazon Prime Video.