David Morrissey: ‘All of us have a duty to call out abuse’

David Morrissey has always been interested in untold stories; clear from the roles he has chosen over his four decades on stage and screen, memorably including Gordon Brown in Peter Morgan’s Channel 4 drama The Deal about the Blair-Brown relationship behind the scenes.

So too does this extend to his work with Refuge, one of the charities being supported by the Telegraph Christmas Appeal. Morrissey says he’d be “surprised” if domestic violence was much discussed among men. For while abuse “is not a ‘women’s issue’” – and men can suffer too – there remains “this clichéd idea of domestic abuse [being] specific women with specific men,” he explains.

After a year when most of us have retreated to our homes for safety, it’s never been more pressing to recognise how many find themselves in danger behind their own front doors. In his announcement of a third national lockdown at the start of January, Boris Johnson highlighted that those still at home with their abusers were an exception to the rule; during one three-week period in April 2020, domestic killings of women and children more than doubled, while over 40,000 calls were made to Refuge’s National Domestic Abuse helpline between March and June.

Court delays are now so excessive that some charities are advising the few who do manage to take legal action against their abusers to pursue civil orders instead. Some have taken their own lives while waiting for justice that may never come. Even before this, the statistics were grim, with an average of two women killed by their partner in England and Wales each week. “As a man,” Morrissey urges, “it’s a conversation we have to be part of.” For the actor’s part, that meant getting involved with Refuge, whose work made him “really want to do something. I felt that it was something that, because it involved violence and there’s a lot happening behind closed doors, it was very difficult for people to come forward at times and to be believed.”

When women are in a vulnerable position, he adds, “it’s hard for them to speak out because they’re frightened, and they’re being dictated to by that fear. Not speaking out… having an inability to express yourself, that’s what domestic abuse is all about. It’s that idea of controlling someone; controlling what they do, what they say, where they go, how they operate.” All too often, he acknowledges, “we hear about it when it’s far too late.” How this control manifests has also changed: technology means perpetrators of abuse can now manipulate their partners in new ways, either by the dissemination of compromising information or cutting off their access to help entirely.

The role of social media is something Morrissey, who recently starred in ITV’s lavish series The Singapore Grip, has been mulling lately. With three children born in the digital age – he shares Albie, 25, 21 year-old Anna and Gene, 14, with Esther Freud (from whom he is separated) – he watched The Social Dilemma, a Netflix documentary about the damage such networks have inflicted, and “it frightened the pants off me,” he admits. “I do think there’s something about social media that is both liberating and wonderful, and something that is worrying and threatening.”

His own digital forays are of the gentler, dad-posting kind: the actor, who was raised in Liverpool (and remains a diehard fan of Liverpool FC) has in recent months been filling his Instagram feed with snaps of homegrown cucumbers and hand-kneaded sourdough, Government-sanctioned trundles across Hampstead Heath with his collie-cross, Billy, and his reading list (Elif Shafak’s How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division being a pertinent choice).

He has also fulfilled another pandemic cliché by starting a podcast, Who Am I This Time?, in which he asks thespian pals – from Derek Jacobi to David Harewood and Anne-Marie Duff – to detail their most significant roles. As an interviewer he is understated yet interested, interjecting only occasionally.

Acting remains a source of fascination to this son of a cobbler and a Littlewoods employee – as well as a welcome diversion from the torpor of lockdown. In November last year, the Office for National Statistics reported that loneliness has reached its highest level in Britain since before the pandemic. Which is no surprise, Morrissey points out, as when things shut down the first time around, “it did seem a little bit of a different atmosphere – nobody knew how long we were going to be in it for and the weather was quite nice.”

In the intermediary periods, though, he has “felt that loneliness myself a lot”; the absence of his eldest when he returned to his other ‘bubble’ with Freud (the novelist and daughter of Lucian) and the creep of winter led to a sense of “just feeling so restricted, not able to make plans… You can go into a bit of depression,” he admits, without “contact, human contact – just being with friends… [not] being able to get a hug from mates and stuff like that, you know, it’s hard.”

The closure of film sets did teach him that “my job is my biggest social interaction. I get to see people, we all sit down and shoot the breeze; that’s where all our water cooler moments happen,” he says. Forming those fast bonds is “one of the reasons I love work so much, certainly in the theatre. You get an instant family.”

It came as a relief, then, to return to the day job, and start filming the third series of Jez Butterworth’s Roman epic, Britannia in September. Like most workplaces, it’s had something of a Covid facelift: cast and crew are organised into bubbles, the make-up and hair department workers are in PPE, and “we have a Covid advisor who’s there all the time. It’s very different,” explains Morrissey, “but it’s not work that can be done at home.”

His other work comes in the form of campaigning for Refuge – he hopes that, if people become aware of signs of abuse in those around them, and that there are support services out there for those who need them, the scourge may finally flatten.

There is no denying that we are in the midst of “an extraordinary year, and one of the sad things is that the conditions we’re living under have accentuated this problem that has always been at the heart of our society,” adds Morrissey. But perhaps with more people recognising the feeling of being trapped, we might stop asking: “‘Why doesn’t she leave?’ There’s so much emphasis on the idea of the victim,” he remonstrates, “rather than ‘why does he do it?’.” It is “all of our responsibility” to change this, he says. “Whether [abuse] happened in our house, or not. It’s happening in our world, it’s happening in our streets and our neighbourhoods – and that is what we need to face up to, recognise and shine a light on.”