The Full Monty star Mark Addy hopes the return of the cult film as a new TV series will show how the Tories have failed the country.
The Disney+ programme revisits the steelworkers 25 years on in their home city of Sheffield and shows families struggling even harder.
Addy says: “Things in the country are worse than they were 25 years ago. It is good though that more people are taking an interest in politics now.
“The original movie, we shot it in 1996 and it came out in 1997. New Labour had just come in after the Tories had been running the country.
“We have now come full circle and there is a need for some sort of change. They [the Tories] have got to go.”
He also said the Conservatives have done nothing to encourage youngsters to get into acting.
Addy explained: “The local government grant system that used to pay for your education, that is now gone. Certainly people from a poor background can’t afford to go.
“My parents would not have been able to send me to drama school without a grant. So I probably would not be doing this now and nor would Robert [Carlyle].
“There is a whole slew of talent that is not being recognised as financially they are not able to do it.
“I mean, do we want the Eton boys taking on working class roles and pretending to be working class? You had to scrape money together in order to survive but your training as an actor didn’t cost you anything. That has gone now.
“There will be a working class gap now as who can afford to go to drama school? It is tragic and it means you have people from a different background playing working class characters.”
Current Old Etonian actors include Dominic West, Damian Lewis and Eddie Redmayne. Yorkshire-born Addy, 58, starred alongside Robert Carlyle, Steve Huison and Lesley Sharp in the 1997 BAFTA winning film.
In the eight-part TV comedy Addy, Carlyle, Huison and Sharp reprise their roles in the story, which introduced the world to the six jobless South Yorkshire steel workers who turn to stripping to make ends meet.
Carlyle, 62, previously said the series does not shy away from highlighting the effects of austerity and that it was “impossible” to separate politics from The Full Monty.
“These men have lived through what everybody has lived through...25 years, near enough, of austerity,” he said.
“Their whole being has been chipped away, the whole infrastructure of the country has been chipped away.”
* The Full Monty is coming to Disney+ from Wednesday.
