British actor David Morrissey tries not to think of the audience when making TV shows “but once you push the boat out of the harbor you’re just praying and hoping that people like it,” he tells Variety at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival.
As the star of ITV’s hit thriller “Gone,” which is in competition at the festival, Morrissey doesn’t have a magic formula for TV crime shows, “but you have to care about the people,” he says. “They have to connect with you personally and once that happens there’s a magic thing. It’s like you’ll make a souffle 14 times and then one time it doesn’t rise, but all the ingredients were the same.”
When he got the scripts for “Gone,” written by “Lupin” creator George Kay, Morrissey reacted “with my gut because analysis can be paralysis sometimes and I don’t always know why I keep reading something but if I do then I want to be involved in it.”
In the show, Morrissey plays headmaster Michael Polly, who becomes the chief suspect when his wife goes missing and who remains inscrutable for most of the six episodes. A garrulous interviewee himself, he says of the character: “I thought ‘I want to tell this man’s story, this man who has an inability to really open up and to communicate.'”
