Russell Tovey Is Terrified of the Future

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Popular culture has been obsessed of late with the impending apocalypse. Alternately destroyed by zombie invasion, nuclear war, rising oceans, extensive drought, inequality, xenophobia, and mostly our own hubris, human society does not appear to have a promising future. In the new HBO series Years and Years, mankind is brought down not by colossal disasters but bit by bit, largely by our own doing. Set in Manchester over the course of 2019 to 2034, the show tracks the lives of the four Lyons siblings through economic upheaval, immigration crises, the triumph of populism, and environmental degradation. More family drama than sci-fi thriller, Years and Years is all the more unnerving due to its familiarity, as if creator Russell T Davies has committed an act less of projection than mere reflection. The world in ten years’ time is entirely our own, only more so. This vision of the future is unapologetically bleak but intimately recognizable, compellingly provocative for that exact reason. “He doesn’t like to describe it as dystopian, but it is,” says Russell Tovey, the English actor who plays the younger son Daniel Lyons, whose job as a housing official places him in the center of the immigration debate as he oversees a refugee camp, about Davies. “It is futuristic, but it’s also the now and the way the world is going and that’s what so accessible about it. Everybody’s starting to get scared and everybody’s starting to get woke. I feel like people are more anxious about what it is to be alive than in any other time in history.”

Daniel is what many would derisively refer to as a “bleeding-heart” liberal, unswayed by the gimmicky rhetoric of Emma Thompson’s Vivienne Rook, a businesswoman who rises to political power through her reactionary, vulgar screeds against immigrants and the establishment, even as the rest of the nation succumbs to her inane, brittle populism. He falls in love with Maxim Baldry’s Viktor, a refugee fleeing homophobic persecution in his native Ukraine, and their attempts to reunite across an increasingly fractured Europe shed new light on one of the continent’s most persistent and controversial issues. As the show’s conscience, Daniel offers the majority of what little hope there is to be found in the show, the glimmer of possibility that, despite personal and societal devastation, people will still find a way to do what’s right. “He’s a good person and he believes in the right stuff and he’s doing the right thing,” he says. “He makes a few mistakes, but his heart is in absolutely the right place and what is important to him is what it is to be a member of society today. He is a societal player, a hundred percent.”

There is some of Daniel’s empathy in Tovey himself. The 37-year-old actor says he was drawn to Years and Years because of the way the show spotlights the refugee experience at a time when conservative politicians and commentators—he singles out the writer Katie Hopkins, who has referred to migrants as “cockroaches”—are making every effort to stir up hatred and anger. “It felt really important for this character to be someone who is on the front line witnessing what it’s actually like and humanizing these people,” he explains. “You see how the storyline projects and goes through Daniel’s relationship with an asylum seeker and where that pushes him and what happens to him and how anybody can be put in this position of fear that so many people are in every day of their lives.”

Having already aired to high praise earlier this year on BBC One, Years and Years is now finding an American audience on HBO, where some of the intricacies of Britain’s electoral politics might get lost, but Trump’s reelection early in the first episode hits hard. Tovey earnestly asks, “Do you think America’s going to like it?” but seems to know full well that the series will give many of its viewers nightmares. He admits he’s had a few of his own as well. “I’m terrified, I’m fucking shitting myself,” he laughs. “You try and do as much as you can in your own way, but we’re hurtling towards things that are out of our grasp. It’s terrifying to be confronted with a world where fake news and false facts are a daily occurrence and the following day worse appears. Never in history have we ever been in a situation like that, where we’re just being fed atrocity after atrocity but it’s been belittled and made fun of and forgotten. That for me personally is terrifying. My character is fearful for the future of his nephew who’s being born in the first few scenes and I’ve got nephews and I want to be a dad. It’s a world that’s unpredictable where you don’t know what’s happening.”

Tovey has been acting since he was a child growing up in Essex and credits his strong background in theater with helping him make the transition to grownup roles. At just twenty-two, he made his début at London’s National Theatre in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys alongside Frances de la Tour and the late Richard Griffiths. Dominic Cooper and James Corden were also part of the cast of a group of boisterous history students preparing for their Oxbridge examination exams. Character-driven, voluble, and full of high-minded references, the show was a surprise smash hit and was extended multiple times before going on tour to Asia and Australia and ending up on Broadway two years later, where it won the 2006 Tony for Best Play. The film version, starring the original cast, came out that fall, Tovey’s first feature role. He still looks back on that run with a bit of awe. “The older actors said to us, ‘Hold on to this because this doesn’t happen all the time,’” he recalls. “We were very spoiled and we were like, ‘Yeah yeah yeah.’ We just thought that was what happened when you got a show that’s good. It was a very unique experience and a phenomenon. Being part of that phenomenon felt like we were in a boy band.”

He worked regularly, mostly on British television, for several years and lately has been earning significant praise as an openly gay actor playing a number of notable gay roles—from Kevin, who was entangled in a love triangle with Jonathan Groff’s Patrick, on Looking to closeted Mormon Joe Pitt in the National Theatre’s recent production of Angels in America—but Daniel feels different, a character whose homosexuality is not the driving force behind his storyline and is thus a welcome step forward in queer representation. Tovey insists that there was no “overarching plan” to focus on gay roles, but given the state of the industry, it’s hard not to note the bravery and perhaps a hint of defiance in his choices. “My life is as important as my career and that took me a long time to work out,” he explains. “Because I did it as a kid, my career was fundamentally the most important thing in my life and I didn’t allow myself the opportunity to live in the real world growing up. When I realized that the only way to do your best work is to be enriched by what it is to be alive and be a real person and experience real emotions out there in the world, that was when I was like, ‘Ok well this is who I am.’ It wasn’t a tactical decision. It never felt like I was doing something beyond what felt completely natural to me.”

Then came Looking, Andrew Haigh’s underappreciated 2014 HBO series about a group of young gay men living in San Francisco. Tovey reveals that he had originally auditioned for the lead role of Patrick, only to find out on Twitter while “having a pee in the middle of the night” that the part went to Groff. “I was totally gutted, but they turned around and said, ‘Look if we get picked up from the pilot, we’re going to write you a part,’” he recalls. “You hear that a lot so I took it with a pinch of salt and they stood by their word and they wrote me the part of Kevin, who became a huge part of the show.” The series was criticized for its ordinariness—which, for a show almost exclusively about gay men, should be considered an accomplishment of sorts—and had trouble finding its audience, resulting in just two short seasons and a feature-length finale, but Tovey argues that it was sadly ahead of its time. “I feel like if it came out now, it would be a whole new world,” he says. “People weren’t ready for Looking, they weren’t looking for Looking then. Now I feel like it would have a different impact. It’s an incredibly important show and it’s timely and it just shows what it is to be alive right now, what it is to be a gay man living in San Francisco.”

When he can find time around his acting projects, Tovey also runs the Talk Art podcast with his friend, gallerist Robert Diament, a self-professed fellow “art geek,” with whom he interviews other art enthusiasts, from contemporary artists like Tracey Emin, Martin Creed, and David Shrigley to actors like Pedro Pascal and Zawe Ashton along with critics, curators, and collectors. “They say to never consider politics and religion when you’re drunk and I think contemporary art should be added to that list,” Tovey jokes. “People get so angry and opinionated about what art is now. That’s why we want to do it, because it’s exciting to celebrate art with artists, collectors, gallerists, actors, singers, whoever. Everybody’s had an art experience, everybody has been touched by an artwork that they’ve seen or been affected by something that with the visual arts they’ve witnessed in their lives.”

Tovey’s enthusiasm for art—or anything, for that matter—may be surprising for someone who minutes before openly admitted to being terrified about the future of the world, but it seems like the important lesson he’s taken away from his time on Years and Years is a contemporary update of the famous British World War II slogan to “Keep Calm and Carry On.” “The thing is that terrible, shitty, awful things happen in the world, but you still get up and you go to work,” he says. “You still go to the bar, go down to the pub, laugh, make love, cry, go shopping, watch TV. You still get on with your life. Life carries on even though horrific things are happening.”

Years and Years continues on Mondays on HBO.