HE grew up watching his dad striving to improve the working rights and lives of postmen in Warrington.

Now Safe House actor Gary Cargill is helping to bring to light another story from the 19th century about the struggle for reform.

Gary has been working with acclaimed British filmmaker Mike Leigh on Peterloo, which is due out next year. It is about a massacre in Manchester in 1819 which happened when government troops charged a crowd of around 60,000 people who gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation.

Gary, who plays the editor of the Liverpool Mercury, said: “I’ve always loved Mike Leigh’s work and so it was a great opportunity.

“It’s a great story. It’s a really important piece of history about working men coming together marching in peace for suffrage.

“The thing with Mike is all his stories are basically all about people and the attention to detail in this film is phenomenal.

“It’s been a real treat really because it’s kind of given me a confidence boost.

“I don’t think there’s a single character that I’d be afraid to take on after working with him.

“He’s given me a fresh way of developing a character that really can’t be pulled apart.”

What also helped Gary prepare was spending two days with David Teather, editor of the print edition of the Guardian newspaper.

“It’s quite phenomenal the way they work,” said Gary, who was a postman in Warrington before his acting career took off.

“Basically they start off in the morning having a meeting with the editor-in-chief Katharine Viner.

“She goes through yesterday’s newspaper page by page and with each story she kind of pulls it apart or raises it up.

“It’s a roomful of really intelligent, very ambitious journalists .

“Some of them are very young and they all have different political points of view.

“They don’t all think the same. It’s centre/centre left as a newspaper but they all have different political ideas.

“They argue among themselves and there was always a dynamic debate about how the news should be represented.”

Obviously news and how it is presented is very different now to how it was in 1819 especially with the rise of the internet.

But Gary reckons some things will never change.

He said: “What is the same is that idea that journalism is the first draft of history and that things are unfolding now might have big ramifications in the future.

“The character I play in this film is very wealthy so he doesn’t need the money.

“It’s something else. It’s addiction to storytelling in a world that’s changing in front of him.

“My character is there at the hustings. He’s a political figure and a huge anthropologist who set up the first night asylum in Liverpool – a place for homeless people to go so they weren’t exposed to the elements – and set up the first libraries so working men had access to print.

“He wanted to be there himself as the editor to witness what he thought was a seminal moment.

“That’s still the same today. The need to be there, to witness, to see. That’s still very prevalent.

“The Liverpool Mercury wasn’t in the pocket of big business and so it became his voice.

“He was able to articulate his political points of view through his newspaper and that was a rare thing at that time.

“At that time the only people who could vote were landowners and the only people who could stand in parliament and make the laws of the land were the people who owned even more land. Society became quite punitive to everyone else.”

It is subject matter that Gary is passionate about because he grew up in a political household.

The 43-year-old’s parents Dave and Ellen were – and still are – Labour councillors in Halton.

And Gary’s dad was recently made a freeman of the borough of Halton for his service to the area.

Dave and Ellen Cargill both had careers with Royal Mail and Dave was the Communication Workers’ Union secretary for Warrington.

Gary added: “Warrington had never been out on strike in its history until my dad turned up.

“They were out on strike within a couple of weeks and from that point he was able to change their working day.

“At that time you worked six days. He changed their working day so they could work longer hours, deliver more mail through the week and have a day off.

“That gives another postman an opportunity to pick up that round on that day so there would be more work for them, more overtime, or if they chose to they could work their day off.”

Gary, who was in Maleficent, The Legend of Tarzan, Shameless and Stan Lee’s Lucky Man, briefly followed in his parents’ footsteps but felt he had a different calling.

He said: “I started to go to the Liverpool Everyman youth theatre. A theatre when it’s empty has an atmosphere like a cathedral.

“There’s a sense of emotion there and I kind of fell in love with the concept of theatre.”

When Gary finished his A-Levels he became a postman in Warrington and his round was in Old Hall.

He then applied for drama schools when he was 19 and went to The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art where Mike Leigh went.

But rejections for film and TV parts in his early days led to Gary almost giving up.

He was thinking of packing it all in when he got a casting call for Buried, a gritty drama about life in prison.

Gary added: “I went in with attitude that I really didn’t care and whatever I walked in with in that room freed me up. It took all the pressure of my shoulders.

“I did some of my best work and got the job and from there I went into Merseybeat as a regular copper.”

Since then Gary has done everything from Coronation Street to Hollywood blockbusters.

He said: “I spent a wonderful summer doing The Legend of Tarzan. Practically every day for 16 weeks I was running around being this mercenary who lives in the jungle.

“Margot Robbie sat next to me every day like she’d fallen from Mount Olympus.

“Tarzan was great because it was a £200million budget and just to be there and see the size of that production was amazing.

“There were these huge green screens. Nobody stepped foot in Africa. It was all shot at Warner Bros Studios in Leavesden.”

But, of course, nothing beats being in Corrie if you are a northerner. Gary had a recurring role as a police detective sergeant.

“No matter what you do if you’re in Coronation Street it makes a big difference to the people that you love,” he added.

“I did a murder case, a hit and run, a fraud case and a bigamy case. My mum couldn’t have been happier...”