Aidan Turner as Declan O’Hara in Rivals. Photo / Disney
The actor struggled with being a sensation in Poldark but is loving every minute of being in the Jilly Cooper bonkbuster.
Halfway through the production of Rivals, a Disney+ adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s novel, the cast visited Cooper for a garden party at her countryside home in the Cotswolds, England. Aidan Turner, who plays the Irish TV presenter Declan O’Hara in the series, remembers “a fun party in a stunning place. We drank too much and were bowled into cars and vans at 3am, realising on the way back we were due back on set in two or three hours.” Before they left, Cooper took Turner aside and showed him the table where she wrote Rivals (published in 1988) and she pointed out the imaginary locations of the homes of her characters amid the hilly landscape. “She told me in a way that wasn’t tongue-in-cheek. It’s a very real world for her. She believes in that world so much you don’t doubt it for a second.”
Turner also felt a sense of real-world familiarity when he was making Rivals. In a stroke of serendipity, the location of O’Hara’s home ‒ Chavenage House in the Cotswolds ‒ also happened to be the family pile in Poldark, BBC1′s period drama in which Turner played the lead. “My first scene on the first day of production in Poldark was me riding up to Chavenage on a horse. In Rivals my first scene was driving a car up to the house.”
That is where the parallels between the two productions end. Much has changed for the actor from west Dublin, who was never out of the spotlight after Poldark became a huge hit. If the tabloids weren’t discussing his love life or his attractiveness, they were putting odds on him as the next James Bond. The whole experience became overwhelming, he says: “The attention was a lot for me. I felt like I had impostor syndrome.”
Today he has consigned all that to the past. “Poldark is over. I’ve let it go. I can almost not remember some of the stuff in Poldark.” He makes it sound traumatic. “It’s not traumatic. There’s just not room in my tiny brain for all of that.”
The actor definitely needs headspace for Rivals, a fantastically debauched drama about sex-fuelled social elites in 1980s Britain. O’Hara is a hotshot presenter who absconds from the BBC to work at an independent TV channel owned by Lord Baddingham (David Tennant). Turner’s character is being plagued by Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), a roguish local MP who’s trying to seduce O’Hara’s wife and daughter. Turner became a father in 2021 and relishes playing a family man. “Becoming a dad in the last few years makes this feel like full circle. It was also fun to play an Irish character.”
The actor migrated to London at the age of 22 and found most of his work in the UK and beyond. “They didn’t really know what to do with me [in Ireland]. I had lots of friends from drama school who were constantly getting work and I struggled a little bit. I don’t really look Irish, I suppose, even though my heritage is entirely Irish.”
O’Hara’s nationality feels like an important part of the story in Rivals. Heritage, race and class informed everything in Thatcher’s Britain and O’Hara ‒ an Irishman in a cut-throat media world ‒ is the perennial outsider. “I felt like he’s the only sane person in the room. Everyone’s a lunatic. They’re all riding each other. There’s treachery and transgression everywhere. He’s the only person whose moral compass is pointing remotely in the right direction. I don’t think he trusts a lot of these people. There’s something that feels fundamentally Irish about his outlook in the Cotswolds with these moneyed Tory lunatics.”
In Rivals O’Hara hosts chat shows, which were filmed with a real studio audience. In the creation of this character, Turner was inspired by political TV hosts like William F Buckley Jr, light entertainers (Terry Wogan, Michael Parkinson and Graham Norton) and the Irish comedian Dave Allen. O’Hara is assisted by an impressive moustache (somewhere between Ned Flanders from The Simpsons and Borat). Turner often channels his characters through facial hair, I suggest. “This is not untrue,” he says, laughing. “I grow good face furniture.”
Turner’s father was the final building block for O’Hara. “My dad’s from Westmeath where the accent is earthy: there’s a flatness to it that gives it roots. That accent felt very grounding for Declan. I also referenced my dad’s physicality. My dad had a handlebar moustache forever. There’s a lot of my dad in this character.”
Turner briefly worked for his father, who was an electrician, before launching his acting career in Irish theatre. His breakthrough role was on RTE’s The Clinic in 2009, in which he shared episodes with Victoria Smurfit, who coincidentally plays his wife in Rivals. “I was a lowly receptionist [in The Clinic] and Victoria was a consultant on the first floor. I don’t think I ever made it up the stairs. I was floating around the reception making coffee and using the photocopier. I don’t think we had scenes together, although neither of us can remember.”
They certainly share moments in Rivals ‒ the pair consummate their relationship in steamy Jilly Cooper style. “Victoria is such a legend. She’s a pal. I love her. We didn’t care,” Turner says of their sex scenes. “We just got straight involved. Victoria didn’t even know there were intimacy co-ordinators until we were doing the scene. It’s technical but you do have to have a sense of fun about it as well. It can’t just be laborious. It’s like a dance. There are 50 hairy men hanging around with cameras. It’s not uncomfortable, but I think you need the spirit of the scene. So we just kind of got on with it.”
The Clinic led to Being Human, a supernatural TV series for the BBC, which prompted the director Peter Jackson to cast Turner in his epic Hobbit trilogy. The actor describes the 17-month shoot in New Zealand, across three blockbuster movies, as life-changing. “Walking on the first day of the shoot, I knew this was going to be a hit.”
The same can’t be said for Poldark, a historical drama about an army veteran who returns to his home in Cornwall after the revolutionary war in America. “I thought, ‘I don’t know this world enough. I’m not educated in this genre of television. I didn’t know if anyone would want to see the show. I didn’t even know if I was cast right. I had to put those demons to bed for the first season in my head when we were shooting.”
Turner could not have been more wrong. The first season of Poldark was a sensation with over 8 million viewers in the UK every Sunday night ‒ many of whom tuned in just to watch the lead actor remove his clothing. Even Turner’s scything abilities were analysed to death. “I found that [attention] embarrassing. I thought, ‘Oh God, what’s this about?’ They were right: my [scything] technique was terrible. Awful. All they [the media] cared about was my abs.”
The actor settled into the role over four subsequent seasons and when it was discontinued in 2019 he never looked back. He relished playing morally dubious characters, such as a tennis coach in Fifteen-Love (2023) who is accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a young student and a clinical psychologist in The Suspect (2022) accused of murder. Were acting decisions like this a conscious reaction to his romantic lead in Poldark? “Yeah, I think it was. Characters that are more morally complicated tend to be more fun to play. People are complicated. Life is muddy and murky and difficult and confusing. It doesn’t always go according to plan.”
There is, however, a sense that his career is going to plan. Any nagging impostor syndrome is now banished. “I absolutely do not feel that when I’m playing Declan O’Hara in Rivals,” he says. “I feel like I know this guy. I know this world. I know our audience. I understand it.”
Rivals is on Disney +
Written by: Pavel Barter
© The Times of London
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