The Thursday Interview: David Morrissey

Knotty Ash to Hollywood

A cook, a journalist, a film producer and a Nazi. It could be the latest Peter Greenaway film. In fact, it is an insight into the professional life of David Morrissey, not just an actor of great versatility and growing renown (he was extraordinary as Bradley Headstone in Our Mutual Friend), but a producer and director, too, currently wrestling to put together funding for a film of The Wild, the novel written by his partner Esther Freud, which he intends to direct.

Freud's first novel, Hideous Kinky, became a high-profile film starring Kate Winslet. But financing The Wild, through their production company Tubedale Films, is still a struggle. "It's where all my energy is going at the moment," says Morrissey. "I heard Richard Eyre the other day talking about raising the money for Iris, and it brought a smile to my face. It's one step forward, two steps back. Getting a commitment from A so that B might come in." So what, I ask, does a working day entail for someone raising finance for a film, do you wake up in the morning and...? He cuts me short. "No," he says. "You wake up in the middle of the night."

With him as producer/director, and Freud writing the screenplay, might not the near-inevitable creative struggles impinge on their relationship with each other? He smiles. "People have warned us about that. We're under no illusions that it will be a picnic. All I can say is 'listen, we're going for it'."

The character Morrissey plays in tonight's episode of Clocking Off – the acclaimed television drama, created by Paul Abbott, about the personal lives of factory workers – is similarly resolute. Franny's story is that he fights to adopt the child of his dead sister. And Morrissey gives a fine, characteristically powerful performance. Doubtless he is equally fine in Murder, a forthcoming four-part drama for BBC 2, in which Julie Walters plays a woman whose only son is beaten to death, with Morrissey as a tabloid journalist, sniffing for details.

We meet in a pub close to where he and Freud live with their two children. He is a little uneasy about being photographed here, for this is his local, and he is the antithesis of the attention-craving, theatrical prima donna.

Nor does he know any, which comes as rather a disappointment from a man who worked with Nicolas Cage and Penelope Cruz in Captain Corelli's Mandolin. I was hoping for stories of trailer tantrums. "I have never encountered it. There is always the story about the guy you've never worked with, but maybe it's some sort of urban myth thing. Anyway, if you deliver between the words 'action' and 'cut', I'll forgive you a lot."

He loved working with Cage, he says. "Apart from anything else, it's amazing meeting someone who grew up in LA. It's like meeting someone from a mining town when you know nothing about mining. Obviously, I know a bit about film-making, but growing up, his whole life was film. At one point I mentioned to him that the relationship between Corelli and Weber [the sympathetic German officer, played by Morrissey] had a Colonel Blimp element to it, and he instantly reeled off the credits of Colonel Blimp."

Morrissey was upset by the criticism the film received. "I'm very defensive of it," he says. "And it was great for me to work on a film of that scale. It was amazing seeing the looks on the faces of the old people when all those buildings went up in Cephalonia, because there was absolutely nothing there beforehand, and, bloody hell, when they saw me in German uniform..."

In fact, Morrissey's performance as Gunther Weber was one of the few features of Captain Corelli's Mandolin for which critics found unstinting praise. He researched the part thoroughly, he says.

"I did a lot on the Hitler Youth, which seemed to me an integral part of how the psyche worked, the boys' club mentality. And I read Gitta Sereny's book on Albert Speer, which showed how Speer got driven along by this train of energy, how he needed to prove himself. Weber is a man who starts to get troubled by the team he's playing for. But there was no point playing someone like him with the advantage of hindsight. I tried to get a feeling for the time, but only up to the point I was playing him."

Morrissey's diligence perhaps springs from an eagerness, still, to educate himself, for his formal education left much to be desired. He is 38 next week, and grew up on a council estate in Knotty Ash, Liverpool, the youngest of four children. He failed his 11 plus, and there was no drama at his secondary modern, but then he joined the Everyman Youth Theatre.

"And that was the making of me. Before that, I was just getting on with things, aimlessly. It's where I discovered women, and friendship." Not to mention acting. While he was at the Everyman, Morrissey landed a part in One Summer – Channel 4's first drama series, written by Willy Russell – in which he played one of a pair of Scouse kids who ran away to Wales. "It was a turbulent production, and Willy Russell took his name off it. But for me it was life-changing."

He got a place at Rada, but found London hard to embrace. "I had no money and London seemed unfriendly. But that changed when I started going out with a girl from London, who showed me what it could be. Now I really use London, and I absolutely love it. My son's been doing the Great Fire of London at school, and it was great going with him to St Paul's, and Pudding Lane and all that..."

Does he, though, like many exiled Liverpudlians, retain a sentimental attachment to the banks of the Mersey? After all, unlike many exiled Liverpudlians, he has retained his Scouse vowels. "I'm sentimental about people in Liverpool, but not about bricks and mortar," he says. "Actually, Hilary and Jackie [in which he played the ebullient Kiffer Finzi] was filmed in Liverpool. That was weird for me, because I was playing an upper-middle-class guy. I got picked up by a fella with a really strong Scouse accent, who said 'I'm going to be your driver during the film...'"

The driver, Terry Bleasdale, was a cousin of the writer Alan Bleasdale. Morrissey has never met Bleasdale, but yearns to work with him. "I'm such a fan of his. I just think he's a genius. I watched Boys from the Black Stuff again recently, and it's an amazing piece of work, "Yosser's Story" in particular. It should be played in schools as a history lesson."

This huge enthusiasm for people – from Cage to Bleasdale, whether he has met them or not – recurs in Morrissey's conversation. And it's infectious. I find myself liking him hugely, and nigh on three hours later float out of the pub on a tide of bonhomie (and several pints of bitter), wondering not whether I should invite him round for dinner, but when.

I know he goes to dinner parties because he met Freud at one. "We have differing things here," he says, when I quiz him about it. "I have one memory of it, she has another. I think I was set up, that we were the only two single people there and were deliberately sat next to each other. She thinks there were lots of single people there, and it just happened. Maybe it's that male-female thing, that I think it was planned and she thinks it was destiny. I don't know. But we clicked immediately."

Presumably he had heard of her father Lucian? "Her name was the least interesting thing about her," he says, flatly. I plough doggedly on. Do they socialise much with the extended Freud clan? "We see Bella [Esther's sister, a dress designer] a lot. But it's hard for me to talk about. It's not an area I want to go into."

Which is fair enough, of course, although I do rather love the idea of a lad from a council house in Knotty Ash marrying into the privileged Freud family. It is yet another privilege for them, in fact.

'Clocking Off' is on BBC 1 tonight at 9pm