DIGITAL ARTWORK: RABBIT RETOUCHINGMR VOGU EHas Russell Tovey perfected
the art of modern manhood?
Without doubt, says Olivia Marks.
Photograph by Paul Wetherell.
Styling by Julia BrenardIn the frameRussell Tovey, the 38-year-old actor from Billericay- who got his break almost 14 years ago in Alan
Bennett’s The History Boys and dazzled last year
in the BBC’s Years and Years – is on typically
effervescent form when we sit down together at Vogue
House. No wonder. He’s about to decamp to New York for
eight months to star on Broadway opposite Rupert Everett
and Laurie Metcalf in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
“When you’re connecting on stage with other actors
who are all playing the same game and feeding off that
energy with each other, it’s magic,” he says in his cheery
Essex accent. “That’s all I’m in it for – that feeling.”
Yet, as fans of Talk Art, the podcast he co-hosts with
gallerist Robert Diament, will know, it’s art that really gets
him talking. He’s “obsessed”. All those acting pay cheques,
which he’s been receiving steadily since his teens, have
funded the highly enviable personal collection on display
in his Shoreditch flat, which includes works by Phyllida
Barlow, Carmen Herrera and close friend Tracey Emin.
Tovey’s all about championing older women artists –
recently, the Royal Academy commissioned him to write
an essay for a book they are publishing about Rose Wylie.
“This little loveable dickhead from Essex, who got kicked
out of college... it’s quite nice that.”
His podcast guests are high-profile and far-reaching,
ranging from art-world aficionado Hans-Ulrich Obrist
to photographer Jamie Hawkesworth via comedian London
Hughes. “Art’s for everyone,” he says. “We want to make
it really accessible in a gossipy way, in a way that’s fun.”
The actor just starred alongside Imelda Staunton in
Flesh and Blood, a domestic thriller on ITV, and will next
be seen in the channel’s Because the Night. “Relationships
between families” is what Tovey is drawn to in scripts,
and he’s built an army of fans in shows such as Looking
and Gavin & Stacey. (He even has an Insta-famous dog,
Rocky the French bulldog.)
Tovey is keen to have kids by 40 – “I’m 39 this year, that’s
got to ramp up” – and settle down with his boyfriend, former
rugby coach Steve Brockman. Then the dream, he says, is
for Talk Art, his current “baby”, to become an institution, a
place where voices and experiences are archived. “We see it
like field recordings,” he says. Book deals and TV programmes
are being discussed. Could he be our next John Berger?
“I could be that nun, Sister Wendy Beckett,” he laughs. n
Cotton T-shirt,
£300, The Row, at
Mrporter.com. Wool/
cashmere trousers,
£2,475, as part of suit,
Lanvin. Grooming:
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