{"id":819865,"date":"2026-10-31T15:18:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T15:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/819865\/"},"modified":"2026-10-31T15:18:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T15:18:10","slug":"the-sexy-stuff-has-got-to-be-coming-to-an-end-right-rivals-star-aidan-turner-on-beards-ballroom-dancing-and-putting-poldark-to-bed-aidan-turner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/819865\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The sexy stuff has got to be coming to an end, right?\u2019: Rivals star Aidan Turner on beards, ballroom dancing and putting Poldark to bed | Aidan Turner"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aidan Turner has a tactical beard. For the last two decades or so, the actor has found himself in roles that have made him a smouldering pin-up. Audiences really love to look at him. You can buy mugs that say, \u201cToday I don\u2019t feel like doing anything \u2026 except Aidan Turner<\/a>.\u201d There are entire Reddit forums dedicated to sharing photographs of him looking hot. He knows this about himself, just like he knows that people want to ask him about it. \u201cI do get asked these questions,\u201d he says, a\u00a0little wearily. \u201cI do get the, you know, word \u2018smoulder\u2019 or \u2018sexy\u2019, and all that kind of shit.\u201d So right now, he has a\u00a0full beard, in the hope that he will not be accused of, for example, smouldering. \u201cI\u00a0thought it wouldn\u2019t happen so much with the beard,\u201d\u00a0he sighs. \u201cI thought I could get away with it. I was going for \u2018dad\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

The job of actors is to sell a story as well as they possibly can, and over the years plenty of the stories that 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\u00a0New\u00a0Yorker noted how much he smoulders. In some ways, Turner is one of those male performers who is, well, a little bit objectified. The fact that he is a\u00a0good actor, and also known for being sexy, places him in a\u00a0peculiar bind. If he doesn\u2019t gamely play along, if he points out that he\u2019s getting a bit tired of it actually, then he risks being seen as a killjoy. Sure, there are worse burdens to bear, but at times the star of Poldark<\/a> and Rivals<\/a> finds himself in a curious position.<\/p>\n

Turner is 43 now. (He is literally a dad \u2013 he and his wife, the American actor Caitlin FitzGerald, have got a small son.) His early roles showed off his ability to handsomely, pensively brood. He was a vampire in the sci-fi series Being Human<\/a>, and played Dante Gabriel Rossetti in Desperate Romantics, writing moody poetry in soft light. Then, in 2015, he starred in the BBC\u2019s 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\u00a0scythe. The attention that came with it made his career, but it also put him off sexy roles for a while. Then a\u00a0few years later, Rivals came along.<\/p>\n

Turner with his wife, Caitlin FitzGerald, in 2024. Photograph: Kate Green\/Bafta\/Getty Images for Bafta<\/p>\n

Rivals is outrageously fun and smutty. It adapts Jilly\u00a0Cooper\u2019s Rutshire Chronicles novels, the kind of books that would once have been known as bonkbusters, into big, brash television. In her fictionalised version of the Cotswolds in the 1980s, Cooper brought together aristocrats, MPs and cut\u2011throat television executives. Everyone is having sex with everyone; everyone is ready to stab their neighbour in their back, and probably have\u00a0sex with them at the same time. Everyone, that is, except Turner\u2019s character, Declan O\u2019Hara, a serious\u2011minded broadcast journalist who is unusually faithful to his wife, Maud \u2013 and also dashingly handsome. So here Turner is again, fielding questions about intimacy coordinators, sex scenes and his very full moustache.<\/p>\n

double quotation markJilly Cooper\u2019s parties were exactly what you would imagine. The champagne never stopped flowing, and her dogs were everywhere<\/p>\n

The moustache was his idea. \u201cI say it was my idea,\u201d he begins, then corrects himself. \u201cIt fucking was my idea.\u201d Turner swears like it is going out of fashion. He has just finished today\u2019s 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. \u201cYou end up eating hairs all day and if you smile it falls off,\u201d he says. \u201cI think everyone on set has now learned the lesson of no stickies.\u201d So they shaved him down to a moustache first, and decided they liked it, and that\u2019s what stuck. It also gave Declan a bit more gravitas. \u201cI don\u2019t want to make this about getting into character or anything. All that stuff gives me the creeps, actors talking about that,\u201d he says, squirming. \u201cBut [the moustache] is really helpful, because Declan feels older to me. Like, he\u2019s a bit more of a grownup than I am.\u201d 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. \u201cSo with that, and the geography teacher outfits, everything feels more mature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rivals has been a juggernaut for all involved. The TV series is nostalgic and knowing, horny and hilarious, but the new episodes find the show in a more gloomy mood. It opens with a funeral \u2013 don\u2019t panic; I counted, and it only takes 15 minutes to get to a sex scene \u2013 and trouble is brewing for Declan and Maud\u2019s marriage. \u201cIt\u2019s a big one,\u201d Turner nods, though spoiler etiquette dictates he cannot say too much.<\/p>\n

The fact that Rivals can swing so comfortably between profound grief, camp backstabbing and joyful infidelity gives it a very particular tone. Why does Turner think that audiences have lapped it up? \u201cI\u00a0mean, I was born in \u201983, and there is this yearning for that nostalgia, I suppose. And Jilly Cooper has a\u00a0certain tone. She was looked over for many years. It was seen as this low-rent, smutty kind of literature, and I don\u2019t know if a lot of people gave it a chance. That doesn\u2019t seem to be the case any more.\u201d He has noticed that it appeals to\u00a0lots of age groups, and for the first time in a\u00a0while people in their 20s are coming up to him in\u00a0the street. \u201cRivals is funny, and it knows exactly what\u00a0it\u00a0is,\u201d he offers. \u201cIt\u2019s unapologetic. It\u2019s on the front foot and it\u2019s out there, going, this is what we\u2019re doing, this is who we are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turner as Declan O\u2019Hara in Rivals. Photograph: Robert Viglasky\/ Disney+<\/p>\n

Cooper was heavily involved in the first season, and they were in the middle of shooting the second when the author died<\/a> suddenly, at the age of 88. Turner has fond memories of her. \u201cShe was famous for throwing these parties at her house in the Cotswolds that were just exactly what you would imagine,\u201d Turner says. \u201cThey were so much fun. The champagne never stopped\u00a0flowing, and her dogs were everywhere. She was so spirited.\u201d He was filming the immediate aftermath of those funeral scenes when he sensed that something was going on. \u201cIt was eerie already, and I\u00a0mentioned to\u00a0Victoria [Smurfit, who plays Maud] that\u00a0this feels\u00a0weird. It feels very dark, and, like, not Rivals. And then we took a break, and I knew something was up.\u201d The line producer broke the news to the cast that Cooper had died.<\/p>\n

Five weeks earlier, Turner says, he had been at one of those famous parties. \u201cAnd she was making speeches and drinking champagne and introducing me to people. She was her brilliant, funny, filthy self.\u201d Cooper would often swing by the set. \u201cI\u2019m just glad that she got a\u00a0chance to see the show, to see where it was going and how it was looking, and she was really proud of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cThey just kind of leave it to you. And I don\u2019t know whether that\u2019s a really good thing, you know, because it\u2019s, like, what the fuck do we do? And is this OK? And does this work?\u201d Having a professional who is there to figure that out is really useful. \u201cI think it\u2019s important, especially in a show like this, to sell the scene and to do what we\u2019re doing, because there are so many different types of sex in this show. It helps us a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turner was in his early 30s when he got the lead in Poldark, the BBC\u2019s second adaptation of the Winston Graham novels, about a soldier returning home from the American revolutionary war. It turned you into a pin-up, I suggest. He takes a breath so deep that it could fill a\u00a0Cornish tin mine. \u201cI suppose they were positioning Ross to be that,\u201d he concedes, carefully. \u201cThere was a\u00a0sex in Ross, wasn\u2019t there, I suppose,\u201d he says, with a\u00a0chuckle, \u201cthat previously wasn\u2019t there.\u201d He\u00a0mentions the photograph<\/a> of him taken behind the scenes, in a\u00a0field, topless, with a scythe. For the last 10\u00a0years, it has appeared again and again, which, he says,\u00a0is \u201call\u00a0quite\u00a0embarrassing. It kind of went everywhere.\u201d In it, Turner is being touched up by the show\u2019s makeup artist Jacqui Fowler, who is often airbrushed out of the shot, much to his disdain. \u201cShe\u2019s there with the makeup brush, brilliant Jacqui, and I\u00a0don\u2019t know what she\u2019s doing \u2026 \u201d<\/p>\n

Was she painting his muscles? (I meant enhancing them, rather than adding them.) \u201cNo! That was something I fucking worked hard for,\u201d he laughs. \u201cI\u00a0was 12 years younger. It was probably a lot easier to get in shape. But I was, like, no, this guy is a farmer. He\u2019s on the horse all the time. We never really see him eating. When he is, it\u2019s fucking gruel. He\u2019s probably quite lean.\u201d So Turner decided that he needed to get in shape, too. As with the Rivals moustache, it was his idea to go topless in the scything scene, and he had no idea that it would still be talked about a decade later. \u201cI made some friends on the show that I\u2019m still friends with now, and I\u2019m\u00a0proud of it. It had a really strong audience, and we tried to do something different with it, and I\u00a0think we did. But all of that stuff was embarrassing, because it just kind of follows you around a little bit. But it might not have been successful if we didn\u2019t have any of that at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turner as Ross Poldark with Eleanor Tomlinson as Poldark\u2019s wife, Demelza. Photograph: Landmark Media\/Alamy<\/p>\n

For a few years afterwards \u2013 until Rivals, in fact \u2013 Turner resisted taking roles that he knew would require him to be sexy. Did Poldark<\/a> put him off? \u201cIt did, yeah,\u201d he says. In photoshoots now, for example, he might politely decline to pose in a way that seems suggestive. \u201cIt just feels different, at 43, and being a dad,\u201d he shrugs. Then again, he admits, he is here to talk about Rivals. Also, he has just finished Les Liaisons Dangereuses, that famously sex-focused play, in which his character Valmont manipulates women into bed, for sport and for the sheer sociopathic thrill of it. \u201cAnd you\u2019re, like, well, I mean, you\u2019re asking for it, dude!\u201d he laughs. He\u00a0is\u00a0nothing if not self-aware. \u201cBut then, I feel like this sexy stuff has got to be coming to an end. Right? Tell me it\u2019s done.\u201d I\u00a0think that\u2019s up to him. \u201cFor sure, and it is. But the roles are getting more interesting, and less about \u2026 that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turner has never done social media and says he has never felt any pressure to sign up to it. \u201cNo. You would definitely get more free shit if you had a few million followers on Instagram. I do meet people and I\u2019m, like, where did you get that? And they\u2019re, like, oh, it got sent to me.\u201d But he knows it\u2019s not worth it. \u201cI don\u2019t need those trainers. Most people I know are on it, but I don\u2019t really want to share those things. And I don\u2019t think I\u2019d\u00a0be very good at doing it. I would probably get it wrong. I\u2019d\u00a0probably either overshare, or not do it enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turner does not strike me as an oversharer. He mentions early mornings taking his son to school after a\u00a0late night at the theatre, or trips with him to the West\u00a0End to see The Lion King and Paddington, but otherwise he is tight-lipped on life outside work. \u201cI\u00a0draw the line at the personal stuff. And plus, I\u2019ve\u00a0always just felt, like, who wants to hear from me? I always felt that, in the early days of Twitter or X or whatever. It takes so much confidence, doesn\u2019t it, to go, \u2018People want to hear exactly what I have to say in this sentence.\u2019 Wow. The balls on that. Jesus. I\u2019d love some of that courage.\u201d<\/p>\n

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When not being forced to examine the embarrassment of being objectified as a man in your 40s by horrible, intrusive journalists, Turner is great company. He is funny; he is as charming, as you might expect; and he is more than happy to discuss big, state\u2011of-the-world stuff. Take this morning. He was listening to a\u00a0podcast about Meta\u2019s new AI assistant<\/a>, he says. \u201cThey will do shit for you. They\u2019ll order food and deliver it to a\u00a0friend of yours, and they\u2019ll make sure that if you want to get paid, you\u2019ll get paid, and they\u2019ll make sure your mortgage gets done every month, and they\u2019ll do everything. But you\u2019ve just got to give them all of you.\u201d He realised, for the first time, that he was scared of what might happen next. \u201cThere could be a\u00a0moment where it\u2019s, like, no, sorry, Aidan, there is no money for you. We need that money for a datacentre.\u201d The podcast talked about how helpful AI could be, as well as how destructive. \u201cBut this has already been downloaded by millions of people, and I\u2019m, like, we\u2019re walking straight into this fire, aren\u2019t we? This might be coming for us faster than I thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

double quotation markI was actually quite a shy kid, and there\u2019s still a lot of that in there<\/p>\n

Does he worry about AI coming for his job? The late Gene Wilder\u2019s voice has been reactivated for a\u00a0Netflix reality show; Tilly Norwood<\/a>, the world\u2019s first AI actor, has been unleashed on Hollywood, to middling results. \u201cIt will get better and better, and it\u2019s about how comfortable we are when it does get amazing and we can\u2019t tell the difference,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t know whether I want to read a novel from an AI author. I want the human. I want the connection.\u201d Maybe he is showing his age, he says, \u201cbut I don\u2019t want to write us off yet. I\u00a0don\u2019t want a painting that\u2019s been generated by AI. I want to see oil and canvas and acrylic. Call me old school, but I want the humans to win that battle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turner lives in London now, with FitzGerald and their son. He moved to the city in his 20s, after a\u00a0few years of doing theatre in Dublin. \u201cMy first TV job brought me over, and I never really went back,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u00a0love London. For me, it\u2019s still one of the most exciting cities in the world.\u201d The couple have lived in the US for short periods of time, too, though neither was keen on settling there. For political reasons? \u201cI\u2019m\u00a0not\u00a0going to lie. \u00a0Guns scare me, and we have a young child, and I don\u2019t want to worry about that every day. I know we have our own problems in this country, but the guns thing scares me. I think the healthcare system is completely fucked [in\u00a0America]. God forbid you\u2019re not very wealthy, because if you get sick and you don\u2019t have much money, or even if you\u2019re doing all right, it will take everything. That just seems crazy to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turner grew up in Clondalkin, in the west of County Dublin, with his brother and his parents. \u201cWe were a\u00a0working-class family. My dad retired a few years ago, but he was an electrician, and my mum is an accountant.\u201d He had a grandmother who did amateur dramatics, but otherwise there was no history of performing in the family. When Turner realised he wanted to go to drama school, at 18, \u201cthere was a certain mould being broken, there\u201d. But, he says, he did have some experience of being on stage. \u201cIt would be remiss of me not to say that there was an unusual part of my childhood where I danced,\u201d he begins.<\/p>\n

He was not just a casual dancer. He danced ballroom and Latin American from the age of six to 17, and at one point he came third in the All-Ireland dance championships. \u201cThat\u2019s weird as fuck,\u201d he laughs. \u201cI\u00a0mean, not odd, but just not the norm for a kid from west Dublin, which is quite poor. My mum and dad spent\u00a0a lot of money to fund that.\u201d He describes the world of competitive dancing in vivid detail. \u201cThere were trophies everywhere, and we went to a competition and it was tails and suits and numbers on the back, and\u00a0fake tan and Elnett hairspray and pushy mums.<\/p>\n

\u201cI went to schools that were quite rough, and I\u00a0danced right up until I was 17,\u201d he continues. \u201cAnd I\u00a0told everyone!\u201d Was he given a hard time for it? \u201cI\u00a0don\u2019t think they believed me, that\u2019s my theory.\u201d He has seen old friends who have since read about his dancing years, and they told him that they didn\u2019t think he was being serious. \u201cThese are working-class boys, who are 14, 15, and we\u2019re all drinking cider on a Friday night and smoking cigarettes and doing whatever else. And you tell them that you\u2019re away to Blackpool this weekend, that you dance, and they might believe you. But they don\u2019t want to take part in this conversation. They move away. They still want to be your mate, but they don\u2019t have the faculties to deal with this conversation.\u201d He\u00a0gave up dancing when his dance partner got injured, and while on a break, he applied on a whim for drama school. \u201cI was actually quite a shy kid, and there\u2019s still a lot of that in there,\u201d he says. Acting made him less self-conscious, and he knew straight away that it was the life for him.<\/p>\n

Styling: Lewis Munro, assisted by Louis Wesnes. Grooming: Jessica Doyle. Brioni blazer; Burberry shirt; Mithri trousers; Giorgio Armani pocket square; Jimmy Choo shoes; Gieves and Hawkes tie. Blue Celine shirt; Loewe checked jacket. Black shirt: Mithridate; black scarf: Soho Scarves; cream trousers: Brioni<\/p>\n

Turner has roles coming up that take him beyond the heart-throb. He is waiting for work to start on Grendel, the live-action adaptation of the 1971 novel, which tells the story of Beowulf from the monster\u2019s perspective. Is\u00a0he playing a monster? \u201cNo, no, he\u2019s a\u00a0warrior. He\u2019s a\u00a0shit warrior,\u201d he jokes. \u201cI don\u2019t even know how much I can talk about that. I hope it\u2019s still happening.\u201d He\u00a0also plays the Apostle Andrew in Terrence Malick\u2019s forthcoming biblical epic, about the life of Jesus Christ, currently known as The Way of the Wind, though Malick\u00a0is, famously, not a fast worker, and it was filmed in 2019. \u201cSurely it\u2019s coming out soon? I don\u2019t know,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

But he has also, briefly, returned to The Diplomat<\/a>, Netflix\u2019s popular political thriller, reprising his role as the British spy Callum Ellis. And there is no denying it: Callum is a sexy guy. \u201cOh, come off it. I am not sexy in The Diplomat,\u201d he says, firmly. \u201cThat is all you.\u201d He really does think, or hope, that this era is almost behind him. \u201cIt must be coming to an end,\u201d he says. But what if he\u2019s got another 20 years of it left? \u201cOh no,\u201d he says, laughing. Then groans, as if he cannot think of anything worse.<\/p>\n

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