Shiver me shoulder pads! Is Poldark’s Demelza doing a Dynasty remake?
AS A star of Poldark, Eleanor Tomlinson is more associated with the 1780s than the 1980s.
But the actress has time-travelled a couple of centuries with her outlandish new look – sporting shoulder pads that would rival Joan Collins’s Dynasty soap queen Alexis Colby.
Tomlinson swapped Demelza’s lace bodices for the eye-catching blue and green baggy zip-up top to film scenes for her new BBC comedy thriller The Outlaws in Bristol last week.
In the series, she plays Gabby, an aristocratic social-media influencer with a drink and drug problem. Her russet hair had been gathered in a stylish up-do, and her look completed with pleated jeans and silver ankle boots as she filmed at a community centre near the River Avon.
The 29-year-old was making the second series of the show – about seven strangers who are forced together to complete a community service order – and relaxed between takes by reading quietly, vape in hand.
‘I was told by a member of the crew that it was her last day of filming,’ an onlooker told The Mail on Sunday. ‘All the filming took place inside the community centre. It took them about three hours to get what they wanted.
‘Right at the end when Eleanor had finished her final scene, all the crew went in and applauded her. Someone presented her with a bunch of flowers and I could see her carrying other presents out in her handbag.
‘They’ve been filming at the community centre for quite a while and I was told that they only had a few more days to do before finishing all the filming for the second series.’
The first six-part series of The Outlaws – which also features Hollywood legend Christopher Walken and Richard E. Grant – begins on BBC1 later this month. It was written by Stephen Merchant, who cocreated The Office with Ricky Gervais.
He has described Eleanor’s character Gabby as ‘an aristocratic celebutante whose glamour and life of leisure masks deep-rooted problems’, while Eleanor has said: ‘Gabby is wild and uncontrollable and, without being unkind, blissfully unaware of the lives of others around her, which makes her outrageously funny to play.’
According to fashionistas, Eleanor’s outfit in The Outlaws is perfectly on trend. Society magazine Harper’s Bazaar has told its readers that 1980s-style jackets with shoulder pads are making a comeback this year.