Aidan Turner on his tactical beard: ‘I was going for dad’
Aidan Turner has a tactical beard. For about two decades, the actor has taken roles that made him a smouldering pin-up, and he knows audiences want to ask him about it. “I do get asked these questions,” he says, a little wearily. “I do get the, you know, word ‘smoulder’ or ‘sexy’, and all that kind of shit.” So right now he has a full beard, hoping he will not be accused of smouldering. “I thought it wouldn’t happen so much with the beard,” he sighs. “I thought I could get away with it. I was going for ‘dad’.”
Plenty of the stories Turner has sold have involved romance and sex. He appeared in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National Theatre in London this summer, and even the New Yorker noted how much he smoulders. In some ways, he is one of those male performers who is a little bit objectified. Being a good actor and also known for being sexy places him in a peculiar bind: if he does not gamely play along, he risks being seen as a killjoy. There are worse burdens to bear, but at times the star of Poldark and Rivals finds himself in a curious position.
Turner is 43 now, and literally a dad – he and his wife, the American actor Caitlin FitzGerald, have a small son. His early roles showed off his ability to handsomely, pensively brood: a vampire in the sci-fi series Being Human, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in Desperate Romantics, writing moody poetry in soft light. Then in 2015 he starred in the BBC’s hugely popular adaptation of Poldark, which turned him into a household name. As Ross Poldark, an 18th-century soldier, he loved, fought and, very famously, swung a scythe. The attention made his career, but it also put him off sexy roles for a while. Then a few years later, Rivals came along.
Rivals is outrageously fun and smutty. It adapts Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles novels, the kind of books once known as bonkbusters, into big, brash television. In her fictionalised version of the Cotswolds in the 1980s, Cooper brought together aristocrats, MPs and cut-throat television executives. Everyone is having sex with everyone; everyone is ready to stab their neighbour in the back, and probably have sex with them at the same time. Everyone, that is, except Turner’s character, Declan O’Hara, a serious-minded broadcast journalist who is unusually faithful to his wife, Maud – and also dashingly handsome. So here Turner is again, fielding questions about intimacy coordinators, sex scenes and his very full moustache.
The moustache was his idea. “I say it was my idea,” he begins, then corrects himself. “It fucking was my idea.” Turner swears like it is going out of fashion. He has just finished today’s photoshoot, so we have gone to find a quiet spot to chat, and have ended up in a basement, surrounded by bikes and cleaning products and tools. He is out of the fancy clothes and back in his east London dad uniform of white T-shirt, navy chore jacket and jeans. He explains that he had turned up for the Rivals job with a full beard, and if they were going to shave it off, he told them, he had no intention of using a stick-on prosthetic. “You end up eating hairs all day and if you smile it falls off,” he says. “I think everyone on set has now learned the lesson of no stickies.” So they shaved him down to a moustache first, and decided they liked it, and that’s what stuck. It also gave Declan a bit more gravitas. “I don’t want to make this about getting into character or anything. All that stuff gives me the creeps, actors talking about that,” he says, squirming. “But [the moustache] is really helpful, because Declan feels older to me. Like, he’s a bit more of a grownup than I am.”
Turner grew up in Dublin and has the accent to prove it, but Declan has a Westmeath accent, a bit deeper than his own, which he borrowed from his father, Pearse. “So with that, and the geography teacher outfits, everything feels more mature.” Cooper was heavily involved in the first season, and they were in the middle of shooting the second when the author died suddenly, at the age of 88. Turner has fond memories of her. “She was famous for throwing these parties at her house in the Cotswolds that were just exactly what you would imagine,” Turner says. “They were so much fun. The champagne never stopped flowing, and her dogs were everywhere. She was so spirited.” He was filming the immediate aftermath of those funeral scenes when he sensed that something was going on. “It was eerie already, and I mentioned to Victoria [Smurfit, who plays Maud] that this feels weird. It feels very dark, and, like, not Rivals. And then we took a break, and I knew something was up.” The line producer broke the news to the cast that Cooper had died.
Five weeks earlier, Turner says, he had been at one of those famous parties. “And she was making speeches and drinking champagne and introducing me to people. She was her brilliant, funny, filthy self.” Cooper would often swing by the set. “I’m just glad that she got a chance to see the show, to see where it was going and how it was looking, and she was really proud of it.”
Given the amount of sex involved in Rivals, it is no surprise that they use intimacy coordinators to assist with the choreography. Turner remembers the time before intimacy coordinators were commonplace, and he finds it much better, and much easier, now that they are readily available on sets. In the past, he remembers working with directors who were hands-off or awkward when it came to sex scenes. “They just kind of leave it to you. And I don’t know whether that’s a really good thing, you know, because it’s, like, what the fuck do we do? And is this OK? And does this work?” Having a professional who is there to figure that out is really useful. “I think it’s important, especially in a show like this, to sell the scene and to do what we’re doing, because there are so many different types of sex in this show. It helps us a lot.”
Turner was in his early 30s when he got the lead in Poldark, the
