INTERVIEW WITH DAVID MORRISSEY, WHO PLAYS CLIVE GOSS

What is Tip Toe and who is Clive Goss in the story?

It’s a five part drama which is essentially about two men who are neighbours, one played by Alan Cumming, who is Leo, a gay man who runs a bar in Canal St and his neighbour Clive, played by me. Clive is an underemployed electrician, struggling to make ends meet, whose marriage is not in a great place. He’s slightly on the edge, he feels quite marginalised from the world. He has two sons growing up that he neither knows nor understands and he doesn’t understand what the world holds for them. He’s becoming detached from the people around him. Leo asks him to do some work in his bar and so Clive peeks into his world much more closely. At a time when my character is becoming radicalized, Leo becomes the focus of Clive’s anger at the world.

Is life conspiring against Clive? 

I wouldn’t say that exactly. I would say that a series of unfortunate events have hit Clive  and how he decides to deal with them is by lashing out, predominantly at Leo. He gets most of his information about the world from the internet, so his radical views are easily affirmed. 

How was the first table read?

Visceral. We had all the episodes before we started. This isn’t a whodunnit. It isn’t a thriller in that way. It’s a how did this happen? How did we get here? In the read-through you got this sense of the rollercoaster world of the show. A rock is pushed down the hill and it gathers momentum. Nobody is able to stop that, with terrible, fatal consequences.

What does Tip Toe tell us about modern masculinity? 

Toxic masculinity and the manosphere are quite interesting terms for now and today, but all through my working life I’ve played people who are dealing with their masculinity in the world. What’s changed is how we receive information today and what Russell does so brilliantly is deal with how social media has changed us all. How we share information, share photographs, how things that are meant to be private become public. What are the consequences of that? Russell and our director Peter have done a brilliant job at bringing to life something that is potentially difficult dramatically. Where is Clive? He’s struggling for many reasons. His marriage is breaking down and his relationship with his children is breaking down and he doesn’t seem to have many friendships. He feels isolated and alone, as do many people in the drama. Tip Toe is about the lack of connection between us all. Why do we not believe things in front of our eyes but believe information that has been spun online, designed to keep us angry, keep us down and to other people, to make them the threat? Why has that replaced empathy, love and connection with our fellow human beings? The internet is not going back in a box now. It’s about how we manage it.

The idea of physical relationships being superseded by digital is very clear in the show, can you tell us about that?

What Russell does brilliantly is intimate that there is a world in which these two men are friends, in which they connect, where they can agree to disagree. That almost happens. Clive becomes curious about what Leo is saying to him. He ends up in a club on Canal St. Russell gives both of the men forks in their road. There are times when Clive is quite vulnerable in front of Leo. Leo cannot not goad him. He gives both men an opportunity to heal, to build bridges, to come together in some way and they just cannot do it. They poke away at each other, regardless. Russell’s script is exploring language as well as identity.

Is it difficult to find the humanity in somebody that you know will do the things that Clive Goss ends up doing? 

Russell doesn’t write cartoons. He doesn’t write in two dimensions. I know what my job is, which is to embody this brilliant writer and his work as fully as I can. He writes ambiguity and inconsistency into his characters. He writes complexity into them. It’s not my job to judge the character. When I’m inside the character I have to find empathy, to know where he is coming from, his way of thinking. We talk about the patriarchy affecting women, but I think it affects all of us. It affects men in the sense that out there in the world, the only real, acceptable emotion that I think men are allowed to express is anger. Vulnerability or insecurity is not acceptable. You have to have an opinion about everything. You have to have a stance. You can’t show frivolity. Anger is acceptable always. What Clive is seeing – what a lot of people are seeing – is that anger, that othering, that ridiculing of people, you see it in people in positions of great power. Whether you’re intellectualizing that or not, you are seeing that it’s being rewarded. It is the way to be successful. There is a type of masculinity that you are encouraged to embody. It is being shown to you all the time. Clive is vulnerable. He’s lost his ability to support his family. He’s begging people for work, including Leo, which he hates. He has very little left. Everything that was sure in his life is now rotting away. Everything he was promised, all through his life, none of those things have been delivered. So, he wants to kick out. Where’s mine? That way of thinking will be constantly reaffirmed to him online.  It causes this emptiness and lack of connection in his life, which you see on the date with Diane [Denise Welch]. It’s heartbreaking. It’s lack of love, connection or understanding. That’s where all this darkness and hatred can build, in that vacuum of his life. 

Is this also why he can’t speak to his sons?

It’s got something to do with that. He does try. There’s something about our muscle memory now that is about taking the piss, or ridicule or block. Even George, the younger son [Jackson Connor] blocks conversation. They’re all in this routine and can’t get out of it. No emotion. The television is on and everyone’s on their telephone. How do we look each other in the eye, begin to have a conversation, let alone ask for help in this environment. It is not unusual, I think. The piece is about how we lost our way. There’s something about this shaming, goading and inability to put the brakes on that explodes in a group. The frenzy of it is really dangerous.

How do you think the piece will be received? 

First of all, how it lands is none of my business. I’m very proud of the work. Where it goes from now is not up to me. There will be debates about it, certainly. To be a part of Russell’s work, in any capacity, is a massive privilege. This is about how broken society is, how dangerous that is. But what belies that is how we made the show. Working for Russell, Phil [Collinson] our producer, for Peter the director, working with Alan, the collegiate nature of how that group of people looked after everyone involved in it, the loving nature and humanity that this piece was made in to show the dangers of what’s going on, they are quite opposed to one another. My experience of it as an actor has been one that’s been quite amazing. I had trust on a daily basis to go to the places I needed to go to. I never try to think of how it lands. 

Who would you most like to see the show?

Some people have said to me that this is a warning about what’s to come. No. It’s happening. It’s right here, right now. People are being persecuted for being other. We see it. It’s a mirror held up to all of us. When do we say no, that’s enough? That’s a job for all of us. So I would like everybody to see it.