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turneradora · 1 month ago

Text

NEW 💯💯💯💯💯💯

Here below is the written transcription of the new press article, with a new Aidan's interview

From The Waitrose & Partners Weekend magazine, issue of today, October 3rd

Thanks to Emma Jones ! 🌹❤️😘

Note : I choose to repost, as the magazine did, this wonderful pic of Aidan (a zoomed version, with no improvement), taken last year, during the promotion of "Fifteen-Love".😍😍😍😍

"Aidan Turner looks back on Poldark-mania and tells Paul Kirkley why Disney’s racy all-star adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals is the most fun he’s had on a set

There was a time, not so long ago, when Aidan Turner thought his days of playing romantic leads might be behind him. Or at least, that’s what he’d started telling people. “I say these things… I mean, I say dierent things in every interview, but don’t believe any of it,” laughs the man who set millions of hearts aflutter as the dashing Captain Ross Poldark.

“You go through phases,” he reflects. “You play a character for a while, and if you’re lucky, that show might be a hit, and you might do it for a number of years, and then you just get a pain in the a*** with it for a while, don’t you? It’s the trajectory of every actor I know: you get bored with something, you move on, you try something else. For now, [a romantic lead] doesn’t seem like something that greatly interests me. But it’s dangerous to say I’ll never play those kinds of characters again. I never say never in this business.”

It would certainly be a stretch to call the 41-year-old Dubliner’s latest role – in Disney’s hotly anticipated, ludicrously star-studded TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 80s bonkbuster Rivals – a romantic lead. But there’s a certain nobility to the character of Declan O’Hara, a crusading TV interviewer who’s forced to take a big money job hosting a talk show for a regional broadcaster in Cooper’s fictional county of Rutshire. “He’s a straight shooter,” says Aidan. “He’d consider himself quite a serious, hardline political journalist, and then he finds himself hosting a sort of fluy chat show, which he’s not happy with at all.”

Cooper’s racy Rutshire Chronicles have sold million s have sold millions of copies (ex-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak revealed himself to be an unlikely fan), and recently earned their creator a damehood. But if sex and scandal among the moneyed, polo-playing classes of the Cotswolds – not to mention the rivalry between 1980s ITV franchises – seems like a left-field choice of material for an eight-part series on Disney+, the result is an absolute riot.

“Yeah, it’s a riot – I’d agree with you there,” says Aidan “Jilly is a great writer – and very British. It’s going to be interesting to see how this lands to an overseas market. But her stories are very accessible – they’re fun, they’re witty. And obviously they’re sexy. I read the scripts before I read Jilly’s book, and you get such a good sense of who all these well-rounded characters are.”

Those characters are brought to life by a veritable Who’s Who of Brit acting talent, including David Tennant as Declan’s boss, the ruthless Lord Tony Baddingham, and Danny Dyer as Freddie Jones, a likeable self-made electronics millionaire. There are also juicy roles for Katherine Parkinson, Emily Atack, Rufus Jones, Claire Rushbrook, Lisa McGrillis and Victoria Smurfit, while Alex Hassell takes on the mantle of Rutshire’s most disreputable cad, Rupert Campbell Black.

With a cast like that, the backstage gossip must have been o the scale, suggests Weekend. “I don’t really follow industry gossip – you probably know more about that than I do,” says Aidan. But, as someone usually cast as a series lead (romantic or otherwise), he relished the fact there was no real pecking order on set. “It’s a great thing when you feel something is equally shared. It really does feel like an ensemble piece.” Hanging out in a series of lavish country houses – including Chavenage House in Gloucestershire, which had previously doubled as the Poldark family home – also started to infect the cast’s behaviour, he admits. “They smell different, they feel different under your feet – and as soon as you’re in them, you do tend to start walking a bit differently. Which I think can only help the actors.”

As something of a pool shark (he’s heading o to play after our interview), Aidan bonded with Danny Dyer and Alex Hassell over the green baize. David Tennant also helped organise him a 40th birthday party, while Dame Jilly threw one of her famously boozy soirées at her own country pile. “I forget what we were celebrating – it could have been her birthday,” says Aidan. “Or maybe just general good times.”

Little wonder he’s described it as the most fun job of his career. “I feel a little embarrassed about saying that, but it’s true. It just happens once in a while, where all the planets align and there’s a dozen or so people you get on really well with. We all share a similar workload, we’re all staying in Bristol, which is a fun city. We’re working on great material. Also, it’s such a funny show, and I haven’t really done a lot in that genre. I mean, now that I say it out loud, I don’t think I’ve ever done anything like this.”

As Declan, Aidan also rocks an impressive, Tom Selleck style 80s ’tache. A decade ago, such face furniture might have been a talking point, he says, but in the hipster area of east London he now calls home, no one batted an eyelid. “You do forget you have it, though. And then suddenly you’ll pass a shop window or something, and give yourself a fright.”

There are times in Rivals when the moustache is the only thing Declan is wearing. Because this is, let’s not be coy, a show with an awful lot of sex (or bonking, as Dame Jilly would no doubt call it): one that required the services of two on-set intimacy coordinators. For Aidan, who’s spent the best part of a decade trying to move the conversation on from that topless scything scene in Poldark, isn’t this a little awkward? Was there a part of him that thought: ‘Oh God, here we go again?’ “No, not at all,” he insists. “It’s all part of the job. There’s a different tone and cadence to almost all the sex scenes in our show,” he adds. “So having good intimacy coordinators is a real addition. They were great.”

At one point, Declan asks a guest on his chat show to comment on “those James Bond rumours” – which is something of a sly in-joke, as Aidan’s name was regularly in the frame as a potential 007 at the height of Poldark-mania. “I think that’s stopped now,” he smiles. “But if your name’s in the mix, it’s probably not going to be you – isn’t that what they say?”

Five years after hanging up his tricorn hat, how does Aidan look back on the whole Poldark circus (which at one point saw his hair get its own fan Twitter account)? “It was a really positive experience,” he says. “The more you work, the more you realise

not everything you do is going to be a huge hit. But Poldark was. It had mass appeal, and a big audience. I enjoyed doing it, I made some good friends, and I’m proud of the work.” He’d been in popular shows and films before, playing a vampire in the BBC’s cult classic Being Human and a dwarf in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. But the BBC’s revival of Winston Graham’s Cornish saga made huge stars of Aidan and Eleanor Tomlinson, as Ross’s fiery wildcat bride, Demelza.

Did it take some adjusting to? “That’s a good question,” he ponders. “I remember being surprised by a lot of the attention. But by the time it came out, we were already working on the next series. So we just sort of rolled on with it. It’s a personal thing: some people might feel the need to make big adjustments to their life, but I really didn’t want it to change me. I didn’t want to be affected by how successful it was. Because if we all became aware of that, it might slip out of our hands. So my attitude was, ‘let’s keep cool heads, crack on and get the work done’.”

These days, if he’s approached in the street or on public transport, “people are lovely and sweet”, he says. “But it doesn’t happen often. It happens more when you’re on the telly, and as soon as the show is finished, it tends to go away a bit. I’m not at the level where it’s constant. I know some people who can’t get on the Tube, and I don’t ever want that.”

It probably helps that Aidan is nothing like the brooding, saturnine Poldark. Talking to Weekend over video from his sofa, he’s lively, animated – positively giggly, in fact. (And much more Irish, obviously.) He’s just returned from Canada, where his wife, American actor Caitlin Fitzgerald, is filming a TV show. The couple’s two-year-old son is also still in Canada, which may explain why he’s so perky, even though it’s 9am.

Becoming a dad has changed him “in the way it would change anybody”, he says. “It’s a momentous thing, but it’s incredible. We’re really happy.”

Growing up in the Dublin suburbs of Clondalkin and Walkinstown, the second son of an electrician father and accountant mother, Aidan got his first taste of performance as an elite dancer. “I represented Ireland in ballroom and Latin American dancing for about 10 years. It was very competitive. It wasn’t just a bit of fun. It was probably something I thought I was going to do professionally, but it’s really tough, and I wasn’t good enough.”

Even so, it probably rules him out of Strictly? “I think I rule myself out of Strictly,” he smiles. But not Bond? “I’m happy to pass on both of them,” he confirms.

On leaving school, he briefly worked for his father as an apprentice electrician, and considered becoming a snooker professional, until the day he spotted a notice for Dublin’s Gaiety School of Acting. After graduating from the school in 2004, he combined theatre work with a regular role in RTÉ soap The Clinic, before heading to London and landing his first leading screen role as Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the BBC’s Pre-Raphaelite drama Desperate Romantics.

Does it feel like 20 years since he started? “It’s a crazy thing,” he says. “Because this is a fickle business, so to still be working 20 years in… There are times when you think, ‘this is something I’m sure I’ll be doing forever’. But at the same time, you never know. There are ups and downs in every actor’s career. I know some who have big moments, then they disappear for a while and maybe do smaller projects, and then come back again. That’s just the nature of the business.”

The trick, he says, is to not to shoot for the moon every time. “You might want to do the bigger projects, with the bigger names, but the air is thinner up there, and you can’t always get those jobs. So you have to be patient. But to still be in the conversation 20 years later? Yeah, I’m proud of that.”

#aidanturnerinternational #aidan turner #séries #rivals #declan o’hara #declan

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