Both Phoebe Dynevor and David Morrissey are dressed to the nines as they arrive in a London hotel room. He's wearing a three-piece suit and looks like a lithograph; she's experimental and highly fashion ahead. Before the epidemic, this would have been commonplace: two big-name actors in good clothing promoting a new production called The Colour Room.

It's almost surreal to be in the same room with a stranger now; Dynevor, after playing Daphne Bridgerton in Netflix's second-most-watched series ever, is probably one of the most recognisable new faces in the world; Morrissey – and he's famous for it – is disconcertingly nice and self-effacing, and always looks a little puzzled when asked about himself.

The Colour Room is an old-fashioned notion, a biography of pioneering art deco ceramicist Clarice Cliff, done in an old-fashioned manner. Cliff is played by Dynevor, who is all fire, passion, and intellect, who brings color to a dreary world and revolutionizes design. Morrissey portrays Fred Ridgeway, a kind, thoughtful, quietly astonished superior who, like Giles, the librarian in Buffy, is a fusion of two genuine men from the industrial Midlands of the 1920s.

"I was concerned that Fred didn't come across as any kind of mentor," he adds. He's more of a bystander to her brilliance, seeing her as a force of nature." In fact, the entire feeling reminds me a little of Buffy, but Dynevor is slaying ceramic conventions, workplace misogyny, societal prejudice, and market demands instead of vampires.

Cliff is hilarious in that it's really simple to conjure up her style and color palette while having totally the incorrect impression about her past, especially if you're over 40. "I always imagined her as a member of the gentry, a William Morris type, with the world at her fingertips," Morrissey adds.

She was, in reality, a manufacturing worker from the working class. "She doesn't have anyone to look up to, and no one has accomplished what she has," Dynevor adds. "Working-class people simply learned their trade and went about their business."

Cliff's life is expertly navigated by her act; the trouble with mold-breakers is that they require a lot of charm to avoid coming off as narcissists. Dynevor has been acting for a long time — her first part was in Waterloo Road, which was Grange Hill for Zoomers, when she was 14 – but this is her first film.

"You only have one script, which has a beginning, middle, and finish. There's an arc here. It'll be six weeks in six weeks." After Bridgerton, she makes it seem like a cakewalk without using the phrase "cakewalk."

"There's a lot of television," Morrissey continues, "and you never know what's going to happen." It's similar to life in that you're only concerned with what's going on at the time. In cinema, on the other hand, you always know where you're going. You are aware of the amount of time you have to present a tale. You may make a case for your character's constancy."

It's tough to determine whether he enjoys the chaos of real-life situations or the neatness of a well-crafted tale. His career spans more than three decades: he first appeared on television in 1983 in the film One Summer, and he is now 57 years old. In fact, one of his first stage roles was with Phoebe's father, Tim Dynevor, an actor who later became a playwright. "It was rather amusing realizing, 'Oh my gosh, that's Tim's daughter,' while I was doing this. It made me feel really elderly."

Dynevor is from a theatrical family: her father began his career as an actor before becoming a playwright on Emmerdale, and her mother is Sally Dynevor, who has portrayed Sally Webster on Corrie since 1986. (You may recall her initial appearance's proto-romcom moment: Kevin splashes her in his vehicle, she cries, "Me boots! Me white boots!" and they fall in love.) She's a fantastic person.)

"Obviously there's my mother and father," Dynevor recalls, "but my grandma was a runner and an assistant director, and my grandpa [Gerard Dynevor] was a famous theatre director, and my other grandma paints sets." So it wouldn't just be an actor or a writer's point of view in the family chats; it would be every point of view in the profession."

David Morrissey's mentor was the town where he was born. "I didn't have anyone, but everyone in Liverpool tells jokes." Coming from a city that values the arts has always been a source of pride for me. I've never been afraid to tell someone that I want to be an actress. "The only thing that made me nervous was that I wasn't saying, 'I want to be in a band.'"

He always comes off as left-wing, even when he doesn't say anything overtly political; it's more of a leftie demeanor. However, he is well aware of his social standing, privilege, and access. "Looking at it from a working-class perspective, we can get working-class people into drama schools, but getting them into our business for the first four or five years is difficult." And, ipso facto, acting becomes a middle-class occupation since it requires the backing of mom and dad's bank."

Bridgerton had race, not colorblind casting as much as color-conscious casting: black performers portrayed aristocrats, not in the modern theatrical way of race being invisible, but with race and racism overtly incorporated into their character experiences. Dynevor has played so many parts in such a short career - including Snatch, Dickensian, and Younger – that it's maybe not surprising that she's at the forefront of a new push for diversity on television. But breaking the rules of who belongs on TV and who doesn't is also extremely essential to her.

"I grew up watching TV and seeing people who looked just like me. I always wanted to be an actor, and when your notion of an actress is Keira Knightley [and] Audrey Hepburn... ladies that look like me, it's easy to see yourself in that role. 'Oh, so many people aren't seeing themselves,' I didn't realize till I did Bridgerton." (She quickly explains that Knightley and Hepburn only resemble her in the sense that they are both white; they do, however, look a little like her.)

From a casting standpoint, Morrissey deems Bridgerton "an absolute gamechanger," but adds, "I feel like [if] we're seeing diversity in front of the camera, [then] we're seeing it less behind the camera." As a result, we now need greater diversity among directors, producers, and writers. For me, that change is still quite slow."

I last saw him in Baton Rouge in 2005, just after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, less than 100 miles away; the city was nervous and unhappy, and he was working on a picture that may or might not have been his big-budget Hollywood breakout – it wasn't.

The Reaping, a horror film starring Hilary Swank, received mixed reviews and did not have the same impact on Swank's career as the British TV series that preceded it: State of Play, The Deal (with his remarkably acute portrayal of Gordon Brown), Blackpool, Viva Blackpool, and Red Riding, a remake of David Peace's Yorkshire noir quartet. He's directed a few things, but says his preferred method of working as an actor is to "disappear into it and concentrate on that." As a result, I'd never be able to direct myself; as a filmmaker, you need a broad vision."

His career demonstrates this; he doesn't appear to select a role based on where it could lead him, or see projects as stopovers on the journey to fame or glory. In reality, he looks a lot like his character in The Colour Room: humble, skilled, knowledgeable, and self-effacing. But that may just be a trick of the light. Maybe he's simply vanishing into his character.

Meanwhile, just because of Bridgerton's popularity, Dynevor has been so closely connected with the part of Daphne that playing Clarice Cliff, such a different character, is a clever, tactical move: "Daphne is this woman who comes from complete privilege and only has one option." She needs to be self-aware, and she is. Clarice is the polar opposite: she is completely unaware of herself; all she cares about is what she can visualize and make, what she can perceive."

"With these colors, this boldness, she reminded me of someone who was coming into a tired world," Morrissey recalls of Cliff. "Like any revolution, it's quite frightening." They've discovered the danger in art deco ceramics between them. It's a quiet film, yet it's strangely evocative and lasting.

Thanks to Zoe Williams at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.