Russell Tovey: ‘I was advised many times not to come out, I don’t think there was many people who’d done that — and I feel really proud that I’m one of those that did’

Since he was quite young, Russell Tovey, 44, has been chased by the same question: who the hell is Russell Tovey? This query may be answered by resorting to the usual formalities; a British actor known for series like Years and Years (2019) and American Horror Story: NYC (2021). But this would be, in the words of Rosalía’s song La Perla, a reductionist narrative. Throughout his life, labels have rained down on Tovey, all of them accurate and all of them, insufficient.

To his schoolmates in Essex, he was Big Ears, the weirdo who preferred theater to soccer. But on the sets of the BBC he was The Prodigy, having made his acting debut at 12 years of age. At 20, he became The Gay Actor, an inexhaustible activist for LGBTQ+ rights, an anomaly back in the aughts, who would later make an easy transition to Hollywood. In the world of contemporary art, Tovey was merely The Actor, an outsider who got his start collecting drawings, and who would wind up curating expositions and hosting an open-minded, successful podcast called Talk Art.

Faced with such a barrage of labels, how does he define himself? “I’m a storyteller that is desperate to tell stories, desperate to connect. I am making work — whatever that be, writing, you know, acting, the podcast — that I needed as a kid. I want to be the best version of myself for my younger self, but also so that other people can hopefully see me and feel safe,” he reflects, seated on a sofa in his home in Margate, a coastal town in southeast England. These days, he’s been thinking about that young boy from Essex on the occasion of his 44^th birthday. “I’m unsure of my birthdays, really,” he says. “I sort of love-hate them. I am normally with friends or family. This year I didn’t want to do anything. I haven’t really stopped [working], literally since I was 22. I don’t really take holidays. But this year I really was more respectful, I guess, of my time,” he explains. With that goal in mind, he left the din of London to celebrate on his own in Margate. He was on the brink of achieving this objective when Robert Diament, his neighbor, a gallerist and Tovey’s podcast co-host, called to invite him to dinner. Tovey and Diament are part of a community of artists that is revitalizing the region. It was meant to be a small celebration, but more and more guests arrived. Finding some peace and quiet is never easy, but when you have as much life as Tovey, it’s frankly impossible.

In the precious moments he is able to pause and reflect, Tovey is surprised by how far he’s come. The last time this happened took place at another dinner table: “There was this Esquire dinner the other night and I was at a table with myself and Andrew Scott and Jonathan Bailey and Kadiff Kirwan. We were sat there and I was like, ‘We didn’t have this when we were kids,’” he says. “Four queer men, gay men sat at a dinner table, having photos taken, completely at ease, loving life, being politically available and being out and full of pride.”

This generation of actors has been able to throw the rigid norms of the British gentleman to the winds, substituting them with the versatility of the deconstructed dandy better suited to the 21^st century. During his interview, Tovey jumps from talking about the Picasso painting Night Fishing at Antibes — his top pick, were he ever to rob a museum — to the benefits of having a routine at the gym (which he refers to with no small amount of irony as “gay church”), to social backlash in the United Kingdom. On screen, he alternates between wide-reaching projects like The War Between The Land and The Sea (the fantasy mini-series from the Doctor Who universe that will premiere in 2026 on Disney+) and riskier bets like Plainclothes. That film, the cinematographic debut of writer and director Carmen Emmi, was honored at the most recent Sundance Film Festival and depicts the shadowy tactics employed by the New York police in the 1990s to arrest gay men who had sexual encounters in public places. Against such a backdrop, a young undercover officer (Tom Blyth) falls in love with one of the men he is meant to be arresting (Tovey). Both live double lives.

Unfortunately, as the actor points, its plot seems more relevant than ever. “It’s set in 1997, but literally, it’s happening now. When we opened in New York, there was a story at Penn Station where police were using [Sniffies, a cruising app] to target men and then sending them to ICE facilities. It’s a real universal situation, history is repeating itself. You think we’ve progressed so far, and then suddenly, you just get pulled back, like snakes and ladders,” he says.

The conversation and intergenerational exchange that arises around this kind of story are, for Tovey, more important than ever, as Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+, far-right policies have even reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In April, its justices approved a biology-based legal definition of womanhood. “I think it’s about being as visible as possible and supporting each other,” says Tovey. “These old stories, I think we have a responsibility to tell them. I think people are becoming more and more aware, because of the political climate, and young people are being educated very quickly in what’s happened beforehand. And I think they’re angry. That’s great. They should be angry, and they should be out there shouting and screaming. We need that.”

Tovey grew up as a gay man in the 1990s and shares many of the fears of the characters from Plainclothes. During the same era in the United Kingdom, people were still feeling the impact of Margaret Thatcher’s polemic Article 28, which banned the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools and public institutions. “My generation wasn’t targeted specifically out of nowhere by HIV and AIDS, but we were coming of age and feeling emotions towards someone of the same gender, and that was still something that was terrifying and shocking and full of turmoil. You would spend your life thinking about that or panicked about that or worrying about that consistently. I have real hope for young generations that they just don’t mix sex and death in the same thought. It’s taken me a long time.”

That road to acceptance, breaking with all the labels and prejudices that were placed upon him, is his life’s journey. It didn’t begin with leaving the closet, but rather, his unmistakable protruding ears. “Kids are horrible, and you can imagine the names I got from my ears sticking out,” he says. “You know; Dumbo, FA Cup, someone’s left the car doors open. But I never at any point was I like, I need to do something about this. I was like, no, they can fuck off. So I had real ear pride. Then there was the coming out, Pride stuff.”

It didn’t take long for Tovey, whose parents owned a bus company, to start being proud of his own artistic trajectory. From theater club, he made a quick transition to actual sets. “Where I went to school, if you showed any interest in anything other than football, you were othered,” he remembers. “I loved reading and plays. And suddenly, I was with people where I could absolutely be myself and felt completely safe and celebrated for these things that I really enjoyed. Working on film sets from such a young age, I was around queer people and it was completely normal. In Essex, I might have brushed against them, but I wouldn’t even know.”

But he encountered problems when, upon turning 20, he wanted to simply live as a gay man publicly. He realized that the same industry that had helped him find other queer people was now asking him to hide himself. “I was advised many times not to come out, the industry wasn’t welcoming to people being open, and giving them opportunities to play parts that were really varied. I don’t think there was many people who’d done that — and I feel really proud that I’m one of those that did,” he says.

His alma mater from this time was British public television. “BBC has been an amazing boss for me!,” he says. “If you said you work for the BBC, people were like, ‘Oh, you’re serious.’ The quality is there, and I think they should be protected at all costs, because they do amazing, important stories.” Tovey grew up working on the typical Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie adaptations, and in due time, got an opportunity to work in the United States, thanks to the very factor he was told could destroy his career: being an out actor. His role on the influential series Looking (2014), which followed the lives of a gay friend group in San Francisco, opened doors to both the U.S. market and the rich array of queer characters he has played since: an FBI recruit in Quantico; a troubled man in love with a young immigrant who is sent to a concentration camp in a totalitarian England for the celebrated dystopia Years and Years; the detective who investigates a wave of gay murder in American Horror Story: NYC, and the violent lover of Truman Capote in Feud: Capote vs The Swans — the last two hailing from the universe of the well-known Ryan Murphy. What he has yet to do is move to Hollywood. “There used to be a thing called pilot season: every summer, loads of actors would fly out and live in L.A. and they would do pilot auditions, and then hopefully get picked up. But no, I love London. I love my family and friends,” he says.

In addition to bringing visibility to their community, Tovey’s generation has also set out to normalize gay sex scenes for a mainstream public. “These characters are human beings, they’re flawed and authentic,” says the actor. “Humans have sex and that’s the way that we connect. If the sex scene is in there, it’s there for a reason. In Plainclothes, I wanted the sex to be fumbly and real, we see condoms and we see lube. That’s been really important to me, I never saw sex scenes as a kid. I just had to imagine. So many young men get their idea of what sex is from porn. If we do these scenes in a project, I want it to be what it really is: beautiful and awesome.” When Tovey speaks about sex and eroticism, he’s not just referring to movies. He also brings up the work of photographers like Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe, tragic and respected names in 1980s art. Tovey researched the figures for roles, and wound up being a collector of their art.

The works that the actor has hanging in his home are the contemporary art translation of his own professional trajectory. “When I’d get a good job, I used to go, ‘Oh, I can buy something,’” he laughs. When he was 21, his fathers gifted him a print of a Tracey Emin drawing for his birthday. “When I live with the art, it’s like a diary. I get to look around and go, ‘That’s when I did that play on Broadway. That’s when I did American Horror Story. I bought that, and I was with Ryan and I talked to him about that artwork.’ They’re like these little time capsules,” he says. But soon, his collection no longer fit in his home. “That’s how you know you’re a collector, when you don’t have enough space for it. I bring things out and put them back in storage, and I loan works to exhibitions,” he says. Tovey understands his modest place in the art world as a site of dialogue and education. Six years ago, he took a risk by launching Talk Art, his podcast, and today, even though it has become a glamorous meeting point (with guests like Billy Porter, Wolfgang Tillmans and Pedro Pascal), he says the only listener that matters to him is his mother. “I made the podcast specifically for my mom. She listens to every episode, and gives a review. If my mom enjoys it, I think we’ve done well. This is a lady that never had art given to her, and now, my parents collect art and they go to galleries, museums, and my mom can spot artists. It’s become part of their cultural experiences, like it’s part of the same conversation,” he says. “It’s a feeding system, because I do the acting, and then I’d be doing different research and that brings up a character I didn’t know before, or a different movement of artists. And then I do a podcast about it, and then I get to curate an exhibition. It’s this whole ecosystem of how we receive those stories, and how they mix themselves up in my brain, and then how it comes out in various ways.”

And has he given any thought to what will become of his collection?

“When I die, it’s going to go to a museum, or someone else will live with it. Someone else will get to live with that story,” he says. The dream of any storyteller.