Russell Tovey on growing up in fear of intimacy amid AIDS crisis

Thirty-some years ago, Russell Tovey was just a kid from Essex with a dream of being in the movies, and now he’s one of the most booked & busy actors working today, and a proudly out one at that.

But don’t call him a role model…

In an illuminating new feature interview with The Guardian, Tovey says he prefers “possibility model,” a term once coined by Laverne Cox—it’s being the type of person others want to be, but rather someone who shows you it’s possible to find your own path in life.

“These beacons, that are shining a light going, ‘This way!’,” he says of Cox and other LGBTQ+ luminaries in the public eye. “Things are f*cking rocky [so let’s] build more lighthouses and be that f*cking light that shines out, so people can find you through this dark, cold water that we’re being plunged into.”

For the now 44-year-old actor, these kinds of “possibility models” were few and far between when he was coming of age. He recalls growing up in 1980s England, a time when the Margaret Thatcher-led government implemented Section 28 which banned discussion of homosexuality in school, and when fear around the growing AIDS crisis made same-sex relations feel like a death sentence.

Tovey recalls looking among “all the wank mags” at magazine stands just so he could sneak peeks at gay publications like Attitude before he finally worked up the courage to come out himself at 18, even if he was afraid of what that might mean for him.

Thankfully, things have changed considerably since then. He points to programs like Heartstopper and its positive, authentic of young love as an example of media that gives queer youth something they so desperately need these days: hope.

“They don’t consider death whenever they meet someone and go to bed with them,” Tovey shares. “It just doesn’t enter their mind and that, to me, just seems so healthy. I’ve been so mixed up with it for so long, for so many years.”

In order to move beyond those “mixed up” feelings, Tovey went to therapy (which he suggests everyone should do once they leave school) and really found himself in drama club and an obsession with film.

Cut to a few decades later, and he’s one of the industry’s most prominent out actors, with a varied career that bucks the notion that queer roles are limited or boxed in by certain stereotypes. In 2025 alone, he’s starred in the acclaimed period piece drama Plainclothes, led the British true-crime miniseries Suspect, played opposite Mawaan Rizwan in his rom-com series Juice, and next month headlines the epic Doctor Who spin-off The War Between The Land And The Sea.