The actor David Morrissey has said young working-class people are being priced out of the profession and called on the creative industries to do more to end their "economic exclusion".

Morrissey, acclaimed for his role as Gordon Brown in The Deal, said the arts was a "very rich community" but was not doing enough to support young people.

"Television is doing very well for itself, but the trickle-down effect isn't working," he told the new issue of the Radio Times.

"We're creating an intern culture – it's happening in journalism and politics as well – and we have to be very careful because the fight is not going to be there for people from more disadvantaged backgrounds."

Morrissey is the latest star to air concerns about poorer people being squeezed out of the acting profession amid fears that it no longer reflects all sectors of society.

Dame Judi Dench said financial barriers to training had made the profession more elitist.

"Anyone who's in the theatre gets letters countless times a week asking for help to get through drama school," she said. "You can do so much, but you can't do an endless thing. It is very expensive."

Morrissey, who starred in BBC1's State of Play and US drama The Walking Dead, said: "There's an economic exclusion of working-class people happening now.

"I got lucky, but if I was starting out now, it would be a lot harder, because my parents could never have supported me through that 'Is it going to happen?' period."

A lifelong socialist, Morrissey left school at 16 and went from Liverpool's Everyman Theatre to study at Rada. He will return to BBC1 next week in three-part drama, The Driver.

He said: "I was able to go to drama school with a grant. I was able to do stuff at the Everyman and work there at the same time. Too often now, people come into the profession subsidised by their parents and they're not being paid.

"It worries me that in the arts, which is essentially a very rich community, we're not offering more support."

The BBC's controller of drama commissioning, Ben Stephenson, and the chairman of the Arts Council, Sir Peter Bazalgette, are among those to have aired concerns about the make-up of the acting profession.

Stephenson told the Guardian Edinburgh TV Festival last month that acting had become a middle class profession because it was too expensive for people from disadvantaged backgrounds, while Bazalgette said actors from public schools were "out of proportion".

Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch, who went to Harrow and is one of a number of public school educated stars, including Damian Lewis, Dominic West and Laurence Fox, has railed against the typecasting of "posh" actors and said it was lazy to treat all public school actors the same way.

Cumberbatch, who has said he was sick of being seen as a "moaning, rich, public school bastard", said last year: "One of the best things about being an actor is that it's a meritocracy."

But actor Freddie Fox, son of Edward Fox and another of the Fox acting dynasty, rubbished Cumberbatch's complaint that he was the victim of "posh bashing".

Fox, who stars in the new film The Riot Club, about a fictional, exclusive Oxford undergraduate dining society drawing comparisons with the Bullingdon Club, told the Radio Times: "A load of bollocks. I mean, Ben's doing alright isn't he? It's not like too many people are hating him in Hollywood."