Russell T. Davies Reveals Dream Lead For An American Version Of His Upcoming Queer Drama ‘Tip Toe’

Russell T Davies has revealed that he’d want Matt Bomer to play the lead in an American version of his upcoming UK drama Tip Toe.

via: Deadline

Russell T. Davies’ “angriest and darkest series yet” launches on Sunday but the Doctor Who showrunner is already thinking about the shape of an American version, and he has talent in mind.

Davies’ new show Tip Toe is about a gay bar owner in Manchester and his long-standing neighbor, who become embroiled in a feud. It is so named because of Davies’ feeling that the shifting of vitriolic online discourse into the mainstream means the queer community now has to tip toe to avoid being noticed. Davies said this terrifying “radicalization we’re having is every bit as much an American story” as the UK and he’d jump at the chance to make a Hollywood version.

His choice of lead would be Matt Bomer, star of White Collar and Chuck, who starred in 2023’s Fellow Travelers opposite Jonathan Bailey, a Showtime series about the decades-long romance between two men who first meet during the height of McCarthyism.

“There are actors like Matt Bomer who has always said he has wanted to work with me,” said Davies. “Frankly if he wants to make the American Tip Toe I’d sell it to him for 10 pence. This [radicalization] is happening worldwide and it’s happening with every minority group to a vast extent, and it’s speeding up.”

Several days after Deadline interviewed Davies, the UK government brought in a law requiring single sex spaces such as changing rooms and toilets be used on the basis of biological sex, which the head of trans rights campaign group TransActual said will “fail to protect the rights and dignity of transgender people, but appears to have weakened protections for the LGBT community as a whole.”

“A lot of trans friends are right at the sharp end of the argument,” added Davies. “I had a trans couple come up to me at a signing and tell me they were living in a state of terror, simply scared of British society. When that starts happening, when people tell you they’re scared of Britain, then what writer can’t react to that. How can you not go and write this up?”

Davies has previously called Tip Toe his “angriest and darkest series yet” and said it will be “called woke on a colossal scale” by critics.

Starring Alan Cumming as Leo and David Morrissey as Clive, the series launches Sunday, 27 years after Davies broke out with Manchester-set Queer as Folk, one of the most important queer TV dramas of our time.

Davies said Tip Toe has achieved a number of firsts for him and producing partner Nicola Shindler.

While Davies revealed an American sale of the finished tape is close, he said it is his first show in recent memory that has been fully funded in the UK, partly because “we knew it would be hard to raise Ameican money for this with its clear condemnation of Trump.” The show is instead funded by Channel 4 alongside deficit financing from distributor ITV Studios, which owns Tip Toe producer Quay Street and has now begun striking international sales deals.

“ITV Studios really backed this and I think that’s a quiet little revolution,” said Davies. “Normally you have to sit there and wait for the co-production money to come in but there was too much urgency and demand for this.”

Another first for Davies and Shindler is that they pitched the show to Channel 4 with its lead, Traitors US host Cumming, attached before Davies had even written a script. It was Cumming who then suggested Morrissey to play Clive.

“We thought it would be hard to get a commission as it’s so bleakly told and doesn’t have a happy ending so we said we’d get a star attached first,” added Davies. “Frankly, the moment we described scene one to Alan we turned to each other and said, ‘We’ve got him’. Then I sent him a script and he may have the busiest schedule in the world but he said, ‘Let me move all these dates so we can shoot’.”

As it happened, Davies and Shindler needn’t have worried about their greenlight, which Davies said came within just seven days, with Channel 4 top brass even interrupting their 2024 Christmas dinner to take a meeting with him and Shindler about Tip Toe.

“I don’t think seven days will ever happen again in my career,” said Davies. “It was a ‘Yes’ on the spot and that was one of the greatest and proudest moments of my life. And I’m not being glib about that. Those moments make me work very hard.”

“I’ve been carrying my fury at this bulls**t for 10 years”

Long before he had his greenlight, Davies said he “ran home as fast as I could” to write the first draft of Tip Toe owing to the “state of the world” but also events that had happened in his personal life.

He didn’t elaborate much on what these events were but said it was “something at work and something to do with my home life, where I felt compromised and unsafe, and I say that from a very comfortable and safe position in my life.”

Tip Toe is about so much more than just the queer community and the writing process saw Davies hark back to the abuse that his late husband Andrew would receive in the street for being disabled.

“Ten years ago the motor strip on my husband’s left side was torn and he was disabled and so he walked with a stick,” explained Davies. “He was numbed on his left side. And lads would walk past us and see him walking with a stick and say to his face, ‘You were limping on the other foot 10 minutes ago’. I’ve been carrying my fury at this bulls**t for 10 years. I was so angry at the time and I still am.”

Regardless of his anger, Davies fears his TV show “will not cause a change in society” – he points to how Jack Thorne has been “pilloried, desecrated and attacked” online since Netflix’s Adolescence – but says “all I can really hope for is to maybe reach one person, because individual people can make great actions.”