Phoebe Dynevor and David Morrissey arrive in a London hotel room, both suited. Extremely suited, in fact: he’s in a three-piece, he looks like a lithograph; she’s experimental, very fashion forward. This would have been commonplace before the pandemic: just two big-name actors, in nice clothes, promoting a new project: The Colour Room. Now, it feels almost surreally exciting to be in the same room as a stranger at all; Dynevor, after playing Daphne Bridgerton in Netflix’s second-most watched series ever, is probably one of the most recognised new faces in the world; Morrissey – and he’s famous for this – is disconcertingly nice and self-effacing, and always looks a bit puzzled to be asked about himself. The Colour Room is quite an old-fashioned idea, a biopic of the groundbreaking art deco ceramicist Clarice Cliff, executed in quite an old-fashioned way. Dynevor plays Cliff, all fire, passion and genius, bringing colour to a drab world and revolutionising design. Morrissey is Fred Ridgeway – an amalgamation of two real figures in the industrial Midlands of the 1920s – whom he plays as a kind, thoughtful, quietly awestruck superior, not unlike Giles, the librarian in Buffy. “I was very concerned,” he says, “that Fred didn’t come across as any kind of mentor. He’s more of an observer of her talent, he just sees her as this force of nature.” In fact, the whole vibe reminds me a bit of Buffy, it’s just that instead of vampires, Dynevor slays pottery convention, workplace sexism, social prejudice and market expectations. The funny thing about Cliff – particularly if you’re over 40 – is that it’s very easy to conjure her look and colour palette, while having completely the wrong idea about her background. “I always thought she was part of the gentry,” Morrissey says, “a William Morris type, with the world at her fingertips.” In fact, she was a working-class factory worker. “She has no one to look up to, no one’s done what she’s done,” Dynevor says. “Working-class people just learned their trade and got on with it.” Her performance navigates Cliff’s life brilliantly; the problem with mould-breakers is that they need a hell of a lot of charm if they’re not going to come across as narcissists. Dynevor has been working for years – she got her first role in 2009, when she was 14, in Waterloo Road, which was Grange Hill for Zoomers – but this is her first film. “You have one script, a beginning, a middle and an end. There’s an arc. It’s six weeks.” Without using the term “cakewalk”, she makes it sound like a cakewalk, after Bridgerton. Morrissey expands: “There’s a lot of television, you don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s much like life, you’re just dealing with what’s happening on the day. Whereas in film, you know where you’re heading. You know how much time you have to tell a story. You can argue for the consistency of your character.” It’s impossible to tell whether he prefers the messiness of things that are like life, or the neatness of a tightly told story. His career is rather longer: now 57, he had his first TV role in One Summer in 1983. In fact, one of his first stage jobs was with Phoebe’s father, the actor turned screenwriter Tim Dynevor. “It was quite funny doing this, realising: ‘Oh my god, that’s Tim’s daughter.’ It made me feel so old.” Dynevor is from a showbiz dynasty: her father became a scriptwriter on Emmerdale having started as an actor; her mother is Sally Dynevor, who has played Sally Webster in Corrie since 1986. (You may remember the proto-romcom moment of her debut appearance: Kevin splashes her in his van, she yells: “Me boots! Me white boots!”, and then they fall in love. She’s absolutely terrific.) “Obviously there’s my mum and dad,” Dynevor says – clearly, she has made the decision to acknowledge the pedigree rather than etch it away – “but my grandma was a runner and an assistant director and my grandpa [Gerard Dynevor] was a famous theatre director, my other grandma paints sets. So the family conversations wouldn’t just have an actor or a writer’s perspective, it would be every perspective of the industry.” David Morrissey’s mentor was his birthplace. “I didn’t have anybody, but in Liverpool everybody is a joke teller. What I’ve always been grateful for is coming from a city that takes the arts seriously. I never felt nervous about saying to somebody, ‘I want to be an actor.’ My only nervousness was I wasn’t saying, ‘I want to be in a band.’” He always comes off as quite leftwing, without saying anything overtly political; it’s more of a leftie demeanour. He’s extremely conscious, though, of class and privilege and access. “My thing has always been, looking at this from a working-class point of view: we can get working-class people into drama schools, but that first four or five years in our business is difficult. And ipso facto acting becomes a middle-class profession because it needs the bank of mum and dad to support it.” If The Colour Room has class at its heart, Bridgerton had race: not so much colourblind casting as colour-conscious: black actors played aristocrats, not in the contemporary theatrical mode of race being invisible, but with race and racism explicitly written into their character experiences. Dynevor has appeared in so many roles over such a relatively short career – including Snatch, Dickensian and Younger – that perhaps it’s not surprising to find her at the vanguard of a new movement towards diversity on the small screen. But it’s also very important to her, smashing conventions of who belongs on screen and who doesn’t. “I grew up with TV where everyone looked like me. I grew up wanting to be an actress, and when your idea of ‘actress’ is Keira Knightley [and] Audrey Hepburn … women that sort of look like me, it was very easy to imagine myself in that position. It wasn’t until I did Bridgerton that I thought, ‘Oh, so many people aren’t seeing themselves.’” (She clarifies, hastily, that Knightley and Hepburn only resemble her in the sense that they’re white; although they do also both look a bit like her). Morrissey calls Bridgerton “an absolute gamechanger” from a casting point of view, but adds: “I feel that [if] we’re seeing diversity in front of the camera, [then] we’re seeing it less behind the camera. So now we need more diversity with directors, producers, writers. That change is still quite slow for me.” Last time I met him, it was in Baton Rouge in 2005; it was just after Hurricane Katrina, less than 100 miles away in New Orleans, the whole place was jittery and sad, and he was embarked on a film that might or might not have been his big-budget Hollywood breakthrough – in the end, it wasn’t. The Reaping, a horror movie starring Hilary Swank, had poor reviews and was much less career shaping than the British TV series’ that bookended it: State of Play; The Deal (with his remarkably acute rendition of Gordon Brown); Blackpool; Viva Blackpool; and Red Riding, the adaptation of David Peace’s Yorkshire noir quartet. He’s done a little directing, but says: “The way I like to work as an actor is to disappear into it and concentrate on that. So I could never direct myself; you need an overview as a director.” His career bears that out; he doesn’t seem to choose a part for where it could take him, or see projects as waypoints en route to fame or glory. He’s very like his character in The Colour Room, in fact: modest, craftsmanlike, expert, self-effacing. But maybe that’s a trick of the light. Maybe that’s just him disappearing into his role. Dynevor, meanwhile, has become so strongly associated with the role of Daphne, just by dint of Bridgerton’s success, that to play Clarice Cliff, such a different character, is quite a smart, tactical move: “Daphne is this woman who comes from complete privilege and only has one option. She’s very self-aware, and has to be so. Clarice is the total opposite: she’s not self-aware at all, it’s all about what she can visualise and create, what she can see.” “She reminded me of someone who was coming into a tired world, with these colours, this boldness,” says Morrissey of Cliff. “It’s quite frightening, like any revolution.” They have, between them, found the jeopardy in art deco pottery. It’s an understated film, but curiously evocative and lingering. The Colour Room is in cinemas, on Sky Cinema and streaming service NOW from 12 November.