Before he became the go-to guy for complex queer roles with working-class charm and puppy-dog eyes, Russell Tovey was just a lad from Essex with a big heart and even bigger ears (his words, not ours). He broke out in The History Boys, earned critical acclaim in Angels in America, and somewhere along the way became a full-blown gay icon—without ever needing to declare it in neon lights. In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Tovey opens up about his latest role, his defiant embrace of queer storytelling, and why being typecast as gay is exactly where he wants to be.
It’s a rare and deeply satisfying thing when a gay man refuses to be anyone but himself—and still ends up everywhere. Russell Tovey, with that unmistakable Essex lilt, grey-streaked charm, and the emotional range of a tragic opera in jogging bottoms, is precisely that.
Let’s get one thing straight (so to speak): Tovey is not just an actor who plays gay characters. He is, in many ways, the blueprint for what it looks like to inhabit queer roles with complexity, tenderness, and—most deliciously—defiance. When critics warned him early in his career about being typecast, he essentially said: Good.
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“There are billions of queer characters around the world, so how the hell can I be pigeonholed?” It’s the kind of energy that feels practically medicinal in a time when queerness is being repackaged, diluted, and sanitized for algorithms and anxious network execs.
From Looking to Angels in America, Being Human to Plainclothes (that devastating Sundance darling about a cop tasked with entrapping gay men in toilets—romantic comedy, this is not), Tovey has made a career out of leaning into queerness, not running from it. And it’s working. Not only is he working consistently across genres, but he’s one of the few actors who can convincingly go from HBO’s first gay male ensemble drama to the Whoniverse without so much as a costume change.
And that’s exactly the point: Russell Tovey doesn’t “play gay”—he lives queer.
His latest project, Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, might not be explicitly a “gay story,” but his portrayal of Brian Paddick—the real-life, openly gay Deputy Assistant Commissioner who dared to challenge the Met’s cover-up—is a masterclass in queer integrity. When most of the force went full robot, Paddick, portrayed with steady fury by Tovey, said the quiet part out loud.
“It’s like we’re saying: ‘Sorry we killed you, but it is your own fault,’” Paddick tells his colleagues. It’s the kind of line that punches through bureaucracy like a stilettos-through-carpet moment—and Tovey delivers it with the weight of lived experience.
Tovey has known Paddick for 20 years. “I wanted to honour Brian Paddick too; I wanted to serve him and that character and what he went through in order to honour the truth,” he says. “He was a public figure who was out in a high position and ran for Mayor, and I always found him quite commendable and heroic.”
Also: “We’re both gay men and we’ve got grey hair – come on, who else is there?!”
It’s that wink of self-awareness that makes him so beloved in the queer community. He’s not just in on the joke—he’s probably making it while pulling a popper out of his sock.
But Tovey’s queerness doesn’t end with screen roles. Off-screen, he’s an art freak (in the best way), co-host of the Talk Art podcast, and a vocal champion for making the art world less elitist and more queer. He’s currently working on a children’s art book and dreams of playing David Hockney—a gay icon who wore yellow glasses, painted swimming pools, and never gave a damn what the straight art establishment thought.
“I would love to play him,” Tovey says. “The story of him making art that was very coded and very queer at a time when it was still illegal, at the Royal College of Art, is amazing.”
You can’t help but see the parallels.
And let’s be real: the fact that Tovey has managed to remain openly, loudly, joyfully gay while navigating prestige dramas, sci-fi, theatre, and queer activism is quietly revolutionary. In a landscape where too many actors still worry about “limiting their options” by being too gay, Tovey is out here reminding us that queer stories are human stories—and human stories are infinite.
“What’s happening in the States is fucking terrifying,” he says of the current political climate. “But it makes me more determined to tell gay stories and to play gay characters. If people are having to be brave, they should be brave right now because they’re going to be on the right side of history, and I think I’ve always really run towards that.”
He’s not interested in being safe. He’s interested in being seen—and making sure the rest of us are too.
Source: Rolling Stone