Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Poldark in pinstripes!
Aidan Turner on his VERY different new look – and how his life’s changed since he shot to fame
actors, a kind of bucket list thing a lot of us want to tick off. And now I can. I liked wearing the clothes of the time too. I think we’ve got it wrong now with jeans and all this low-waisted stuff and T-shirts. I was wearing these high-waisted pants for a lot of this show, they’re really comfortable and quite flattering!’
Coincidentally, filming the first scenes where the ten guests head for the island meant Aidan had to return to Cornwall, where Poldark was filmed and which was doubling for Devon. That must have been strange? ‘It was quite surreal actually, seeing the cliffs and the sea and those familiar sights. Filming those scenes attracted a lot of public interest, which of course slowed things up, but then we moved to an isolated location, Harefield House in Buckinghamshire, for the rest of the shoot so there was none of that. Not that I’m complaining about the public taking an interest in my work,’ he adds, ‘they probably wouldn’t be if Poldark hadn’t been such a success.’
Born in Dublin on 19 June 1983 to accountant Eileen and electrician Pat, Aidan has certainly paid his dues. He studied at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin where Colin Farrell also trained, graduating in 2004, although he says he never felt the call to act deep in his soul. ‘I honestly don’t know where it came from, I’ve been asked this question a ton of times and I don’t really have an answer,’ he says. ‘I just kind of fell into it. I finished school and thought acting might be fun. I started reading a lot more, all these amazing Irish playwrights, and I just got into it. The possibilities of being unemployed are terrifying but it makes you disciplined. My mum and dad are honest, hardworking folk so it came out of left field for them, but they’ve always been supportive. They remember the original Poldark too, so they were thrilled about that.’
He spent years on the rep theatre circuit before his first proper stab at a smouldering period hero, playing Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Casanova of his day, in BBC2’s pre-Raphaelite raunchfest Desperate Romantics in 2009. But thanks to his role as vampire John Mitchell in BBC3’s Being Human later that year, Hollywood came calling and in 2010 he was cast as the dwarf Kili in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, but not without a very hairy moment. ‘My agent sent an audition tape to Peter and six months later I met him in London,’ recalls Aidan. ‘But I hadn’t read the book – a book you could read in a weekend, so I had no excuses. When I walked into the room Peter said, “I’m a really big fan of Being Human” and I thought, “I have it in the bag now, it’s mine to blow.” Then he said, “Have you read the book?” and I had that moment of, “Do I lie? Can I blag it? Will he appreciate me telling the truth?” So I said, “No, I haven’t read it” and he spent the next hour talking me through it! I knew I had it then.’
It’s a measure of his upward trajectory that he didn’t have to audition for Poldark. ‘No, I didn’t, it was offered to
me,’ he says rather sheepishly. ‘I was very lucky. I don’t think I’m telling tales out of school when I say that when Debbie Horsfield was writing the adaptation she had me in mind to play him, which is amazing. I’m so flattered. I presume she’d seen me in Desperate Romantics or Being Human but I’m not sure.’
For the past three years he’s been going out with 29-year-old Irish actress Sarah Greene, who was Tony-nominated last year for her role in The Cripple Of Inishmaan with Daniel Radcliffe on Broadway. Sarah also appears on TV in Sky’s Penny Dreadful and stars with Bradley Cooper in the recently released film about chefs, Burnt. They met in 2005 on a production of Titus Andronicus in Dublin but only got together in 2012, and divide their time between Dublin and London. ‘It was all very platonic, but that’s how we got to know each other,’ he’s said. ‘Years later we met again and it just sort of took off. But we stay away from all the red carpets and the spotlight. We don’t do the celebrity thing.’
While many couples in the limelight have seen their relationship founder under the pressure of work commitments, they’ve managed to overcome that problem. ‘You meet someone, you fall in love, then you can only see them over Skype or phone calls or texts and emails. But then you have this whole other side to your relationship, and it’s fun. We never thought, “God this is hard.” It’s all we’ve ever known as a couple and it makes for good times when we meet again and maybe have a month straight just watching movies every day.’ So she doesn’t get jealous about all the female attention? ‘Oh God no. She finds it funny. Because it’s ridiculous, isn’t it? We don’t take ourselves too seriously.’
Aidan admits that the overwhelming success of Poldark – which has been commissioned for a further five series, the next to be seen on BBC1 next year – was a surprise. ‘The truth is nobody expected it to be the success it was,’ he says. ‘It’s always a nice surprise when anything you’re in is a big hit because these things are so hard to predict, regardless of who’s in the cast or who’s written the screenplay. So I’m obviously not going to predict whether And Then There Were None is going to be a hit, but I’m quietly confident it will find an audience.’
What with the Agatha Christie and Poldark, which has just started filming again in Cornwall, he’s had little time back in Dublin over the past few years. ‘But I love going back,’ he says. ‘It’s a lot more relaxed and I can be more disciplined about getting things done there – although Mum has this huge garage out the back, it fits about ten cars in it, so I built a pool hall in it. I have a couple of pool tables, a bar, a big sound system and a big screen, and I play a lot of pool. That’s what I’m usually doing when I should be focusing on my career.’