When Daddy Issues aired in the UK earlier this year, David Morrissey’s rare comic turn – alongside co-star Aimee Lou Wood of Sex Education fame – was broadcast alongside his stonier-faced performance as DCS Ian St Clair in thrilling crime drama Sherwood. “They were playing in the same week, which I was slightly embarrassed about,” he says with a chuckle in his rumblingly resonant Liverpudlian brogue.
Not that it’s his first (comedy-touched) rodeo, having popped up in Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith’s droll mystery series Inside No. 9 and their horror-tinged sitcom The League of Gentlemena guest role in wickedly angelic Good Omens and on the stage.
But Daddy Issues is Morrissey’s funniest yet, casting him as well-meaning but fairly hapless recent divorcee Malcolm forced by totally broke circumstances to flatshare with Wood’s way more together hairdresser daughter, Emma, in a wryly drawn show that’s packed with laughs while tackling everything from sexism to the cost-of-living inflamed housing crisis.
Aimee Lou Wood and David Morrissey in ‘Daddy Issues’. Credit: Matt Squire
“He’s a man child, obviously inept and all over the place and a fairly innocent person who’s quite easily manipulated, as we see with his toxic friend Derek,” he says. “But there’s something endearing about him, as well, by the time you get to the last episode. He has a job and he works hard, so there’s a lot there that people can relate to.”
As Morrissey notes, intergenerational living used to be common, with the current situation seeing many folks return to that model, whether reluctantly or not. “My grandparents lived with us when I was growing up,” he recalls. “But in this situation, Malcom feels like the word has passed him by. There’s also the idea, in terms of things like gender politics and how we approach that now, that the younger generation are teaching their parents about the world, and that’s quite an interesting dynamic.”
Arian Nik as Xander with Aimee Lou Wood as Gemma. Credit: James Stack
Mind you, Emma has her own dramas, winding up pregnant after a mile-high escapade and later falling for local pharmacist Xander, played by Count Abdulla star Arian Nik. She has to clean up after Malcolm’s constant mess, in more ways than one, while fending off the creepy advances of their skeevy landlord, played by Undateable actor David Fynn, who was also in School of Rock on the West End.
“I read the pilot episode and loved it,” Morrissey recalls. “That father/daughter relationship doesn’t get explored all that much. I knew that Aimee Lou Wood, who I’d seen on stage in Uncle Vanya as well as in Sex Educationwas considering the role, and I basically said, ‘Look, if she does that, I’ll do it.’ And she did, and that was great.”
His gut feeling they’d work well together paid off. “We’re from roughly the same part of the world (Wood hails from Stockport, in Greater Manchester, where the show was shot), got on immediately and had great banter,” now London-based Morrissey says.
“There’s a real rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester, based on sports, music and entertainment, so there was banter between us, but I’ve always had an affection for Manchester and used to go a lot, when I was a young, to see great bands. There’s so much going on in the northwest region, with TV shows like Peaky Blinders.”
Aimee Lou Wood and David Morrissey had plenty of laughs filming ‘Daddy Issues’. Credit: Matt Squire
Morrissey and Wood’s double act caused minor problems for showrunner Danielle Ward, the stand-up comedian-turned-screenwriter behind Daddy Issuesand her crew. “The only problem with the job was that we would make each other laugh so much that we’d crease up, which was really difficult for our directors,” he laughs.
Given how well their camaraderie transfers to the show, we suspect directors Damon Beesley (The Inbetweeners) and Catherine Morshead (the Four Weddings and a Funeral TV show reboot) got over it, even if a ribald moment that sees Emma reluctantly agreeing to take sexy pics of her dad for use on hook-up app went predictably haywire.
“That was really difficult to film, that scene, because Aimee and I were killing ourselves laughing,” Morrissey says. “I think they quite deliberately scheduled it for the last half hour of the day, placing extra pressure on us to get it right. If we knew we had longer to do it, we’d probably have eaten up the whole day.”
A big fan of Australian series Colin from Accounts and No Activityhe can see himself doing more stuff like this that fuses real-life concerns with a heightened sense of the absurd. “I found it challenging in all the right ways,” Morrissey says. “You don’t have a lot of prep time and there’s not a lot of money in it, but it’s all hands on deck and there’s a real sense that everybody’s in it together. There’s no hierarchy. Everyone mucks in.”
It’s a grounded approach instilled in London-based Morrissey during his teenage years in youth theatre at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre. “I’ve always had an affection for that place,” he says. “It was full of great actors that went on to be household names, like Pete Postlethwaite, Julie Walters and Jonathan Pryce. I was able to talk to them, as a snotty-nosed kid, and none of them told me to get lost. They took me seriously, and that was so wonderful for me, as a young man, wanting to go out into this world.”
Daddy Issues is now streaming at SBS On Demand.
Source link
#David #Morrissey #working #x27Daddy #Issuesx27
