David Morrissey has one request for ITV fans bingeing his ‘intoxicating’ crime thriller

David Morrissey is no stranger to edge-of-your-seat TV thrillers.

Across his roughly thirty-year-long career, the 61-year old has played cops, criminals and cads of all different varieties.

Yet his new psychological thriller Gone for ITV, which he stars in alongside Eve Myles, might be one of his most compelling yet.

Morrissey plays Michael Polly, the inscrutable headmaster of an all-boys school whose wife mysteriously disappears one afternoon.

Emotionally withdrawn and prickly, Michael quickly becomes the prime suspect, but his Family Liaison Officer, DS Annie Cassidy (Myles), believes there’s more to this case than meets the eye, and the pair form an unlikely bond.

What makes this series so fascinating, however, is how it explores what happens to someone so used to control who has that stripped away from them.

‘I never want an audience to feel sympathy for me, but I always want them to feel empathy for me,’ Morrissey told Metro when we asked what it was like playing such an unsympathetic character.

‘I always want them to think, “God, what would it be like to be that person?’ But I don’t want them ever to think, “Oh, poor him.”‘

To Morrissey, Michael is a man who has built a cage around himself, who finds it difficult to be challenged (especially by women), and who has sacrificed so much for his career that he’s been hollowed out.

‘He’s not a man who’s used to asking questions, answering questions, he’s used to asking them,’ Morrisey continued. ‘He has no emotional intelligence, so he’s constantly trying to get back to the control he had before, which is all about school routine and curriculum.’

Annie, then, would be Michael’s opposite. In the first episode, we see she’s empathetic to a fault or as Myles tells me, ‘She’ll break the rules and keep doing what she thinks is right.’

‘Annie’s not going to go anywhere unless she’s physically removed from that house,’ she explained.

‘It doesn’t matter what [Michael] throws at her. She’s not going anywhere. She’s going to do her best to find the truth of what, what’s happened.’

Indeed, a large part of the drama comes from the pair’s unusually uncomfortable dynamic.

Morrisey was clear that the pair’s chemistry came from just ‘playing the scene’ and the work of director Richard Laxton, who ‘encouraged them to bat around ideas and play within the scene.’

‘These characters are incredibly uncomfortable with one another,’ Myles added. ‘We didn’t want to shy away from that, but actually to lean into that and to see what happens.’

She later added: ‘I hope that people would find that sort of intoxicating, addictive watch and something they want to come back to.’

Finally, the big question. Did Michael have anything to do with his wife’s disappearance? Well, we’re not going to spoil anything, but Morrissey certainly plays it with a degree of ambiguity… not that he’d say that.

‘You don’t play ambiguity,’ he told me. ‘What you play is the character.

‘He is someone who is out of his comfort zone. He’s very rigid, and that, in itself, means he’s suddenly casting suspicion on himself, and he doesn’t have the wherewithal to say, “Can you help me out here?”

‘He’s been given a rule book from day one on how to be a Man, and he’s going to stick with that. And it’s always, always worked for him, until it suddenly doesn’t work.’

Gone will premiere on ITV1 on Sunday 8 March and will be available to stream on ITVX.

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