Forty-two-year-old Clondalkin man Aidan Turner is a big deal. He played a magnetic and only occasionally murderous vampire in the excellent cult BBC dramedy Being Human. He played a swashbuckling dwarf in Peter Jackson’s incredibly long The Hobbit. He played a brooding but decent olden-days gentleman in Poldark (and he took his top off from time to time, which caused much fainting across these shared islands). He currently plays a slightly exasperated but honourable 1980s TV presenter in the Disney adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s sex’n’business romp Rivals (more swooning), and a less-than-honourable seducer in Les Liaisons Dangereuses in the National Theatre in London. He’s talented and charismatic, and was once whispered to be in contention as the next James Bond.
Yet somehow, I just want to ask him questions about when he was a competitive ballroom dancer in 1990s Dublin.
“It’s survival of the fittest out there on the dance floor,” he says, on a Zoom call from London. “It looks beautiful and graceful from the sides. When you’re on there, you’re sweating and you’re meeting someone who’s six foot three, swinging his elbows around in a tango, and you’d better duck.”
Would people actually hurt each other? He laughs. “Oh, it would happen all the time. You crash into people. People wouldn’t put down their arms. There’s an etiquette. It’s called dance-craft, where you move around [people]. And you’re trained to do that. But there’s lots of people who just would go straight through you… It’s pretty ruthless.”
That’s when Turner was transitioning into the world of grown-up ballroom dancing. In his teenage years he was a champion ballroom dancer (he liked the “structure” of ballroom; Latin dancing was a bit too showy for him, he says) and things weren’t quite as combative. He discovered dancing when he was just 10. “My mother started going with her sister, and I just tagged along with my cousins. And then there were younger teachers there that would just show us a few steps… Before I knew it, my mam was safety-pinning numbers onto my back. And then I was dancing in competitions. And then I started to win a little bit.”
He won an All-Ireland championship. “I would have been training four or five nights a week for a couple of hours every night, on Saturday, all day. We were travelling to the UK almost every month for competitions… I think it was the competition I really enjoyed. It’s a very weird and kind of brilliant world.”
Given that he went to a very normal secondary school, Firhouse Community College in Tallaght, how did his dancing exploits go down with other students? He laughs. “I wasn’t in a tough crowd but there were tough lads there. And it’s pretty out-there, Ballroom and Latin American dancing: fake tan, sequinned pants, high white collars. It’s insane. You couldn’t really hide it. I’d have to miss days [of school], and I would go to Blackpool competing at the World Championships. They just didn’t know what to do with it. There was a bit of laughing. Some kind of believed me, some didn’t. I’d have lads coming up to me going…” He adopts a tough-lad voice. “‘Hey, are you a dancer? Everyone is saying you were in Blackpool doing the chachacha. What’s that about?’ I’d show them photographs.” He apes complete disbelief. “‘No way!’” He shakes his head. “And then they just wouldn’t know how to take the piss because it was just so foreign to them.”
[ Poldark star Aidan Turner: My shirtless scything scene was PhotoshoppedOpens in new window ]
He learned to be confident about who he was, he says. “It’s when you cower away from those things and you try to hide them that the lads and girls suss it out. They’ll smell it on you and then they’ll come for blood. I guess I was unconsciously aware of that.”
He quit dancing just before he turned 18. He had gone from being one of the top-ranking junior dancers to suddenly competing with adults. “I realised that maybe I just wasn’t good enough. It’s just too hard. I was there with 25- and 28-year-olds, amazing strong dancers, and I’m a little weak 17- or 18-year-old boy and just couldn’t keep up with them, getting smashed with elbows in the face.”
Aidan Turner: There were no arts connections in his family. His mother was an accountant, his father an electrician. Photograph: Nicola Tree
Did he miss it when he stopped? He nods. “There was a void there,” he says.
There were no arts connections in his family. His mother was an accountant, his father an electrician. “I finished my Leaving Cert with pretty average results… It was only when I finished and went to drama school that I really enjoyed reading literature, Shakespeare and Synge and Brian Friel and all these great Irish writers… The structure of school just didn’t really work for me.”
He started doing an evening course at the Gaiety in his sixth year of school, and then applied for the full-time course. He chose King Lear for his monologue, a teenager pretending to be an old man. “It was awful,” he says. “I don’t know what I was thinking…. The director of the school saw something in me, thankfully, and it was two of the greatest years.”
He’d only attended two plays in his life (Roald Dahl’s The Witches and Marie Jones’s Stones in His Pockets) and many of his classmates came from acting families, so he initially felt like an outsider. But that quickly changed, he says. “I remember one moment, it might have been the first day of drama school, in front of 20 peers I didn’t know… There was this exercise, ‘become a tree’. You start off in the bottom of your head, and you just slowly move your hands up and absorb the room and you become a tree. And I just remember feeling like so liberated by doing this, thinking, I’m not scared. I’m not f**king scared. From that moment, something broke in me, and for the rest of drama school I thought, I’m not scared of this any more.”
He was soon on stage in the Abbey, and then the Barbican in London. In the mid-noughties he got roles in quick succession on big TV shows – The Clinic, Desperate Romantics (he played the pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti) and the cult BBC horror comedy Being Human (where he played an Irish house-sharing vampire). I last interviewed him when he was publicising that show in 2009. At the time, it was a novelty to hear an Irish accent on UK TV. “I remember watching it and thinking the same thing. God, it is a bit strange to have an Irish guy on the show and he’s not ‘the Irish guy’. It’s just a part of who he was.”
He realised the main trick to being a professional was just doing the work and learning the lines. “And then just staying as healthy and as fit as you can. There’s no excuse. You can’t just decide ‘I’m having a bad day. I feel a bit fluey. I didn’t sleep at all last night.’”
Aidan Turner gets brushed up for his role as Ross Poldark by crew in a behind-the-scenes publicity shot for the drama. Photograph: BBC
His biggest role was in BBC’s Poldark, an adaptation of the Winston Graham novels that ran from 2015 to 2019, previously adapted for television in the 1970s. He played the eponymous Ross Poldark, a smouldering, brooding British soldier who returns from the American revolutionary war to find his estate in ruins and his beloved married to another man. It ran for five seasons.
“It really surprised me that there was such a big audience,” he says. “It was at the end of this when event television kind of meant something, when at Sunday night at nine o’clock people would stay in… I remember the papers the next day were reporting the ratings and how big they were, like it mattered. It did matter at the time. Now people watch TV in a different way. You don’t get the figures for weeks… It was lightning in a bottle. If Poldark had to be released six months later, who knows, maybe nobody would have watched it.”
[ Poldark: He’s so fertile, I may have got pregnant watching himOpens in new window ]
What does he think the appeal was in retrospect? “I think there was a comfort in our show,” he says. “I think it had an older audience that could remember the original series that went out in the ’70s. There was obviously something of a new twist in our show. It felt fresher and sexier. It made Britain look amazing. It looked like it was shot in the south of France… Myself and Eleanor [Tomlinson, his co-star], we played it for real, and it felt very real to us, that world. I think that sort of mattered. I’m very proud of that.”
How does it feel to be in a “hit”? “It’s two things at the same time. It’s like, ‘wow, job security, f**king hell.’ As an actor, that’s incredible. It’s more money than I ever got paid in my life. I’m really enjoying doing the job. I’m leading the show. It’s a tremendous amount of pressure, but that pressure has now been alleviated because the show is something of a success. I know what I’m doing for the next five years. But then there’s the other side of things, ‘Oh God, I know what I’m doing for the next five years.’” He laughs.
What was it like to suddenly find himself being so famous? “I’ve never done social media or engaged with any of that stuff. So I really did remove myself from a lot of that. I told friends I don’t want to know what people are saying. I don’t care. I just want to distance myself from it as much as I can.”
Did he worry about being typecast? That always happens, he says. “It happened when I was in Being Human as well. When I quit that show, I went on to do The Hobbit in New Zealand. And I remember scripts coming in and it was a lot of vampires and werewolves and supernatural shows.” He laughs. “I’m armoured up. I have a sword on me and a bow and arrow and I’m sitting in the trailer going, ‘God Almighty. Can you just give me a cop drama?’ The industry takes a minute to move on.”
Rivals: Aidan Turner as Declan O’Hara in the Disney+ series based on the book by Jilly Cooper. Photograph: Disney+
His most recent TV show, Rivals, is a funny and clever adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s best selling bonkbuster of the same name. It’s about various kinds of British rich people (nouveau and otherwise) in the 1980s warring over the ownership of a regional television franchise… when they’re not having enthusiastic sex with one another. He plays the Woganesque TV presenter Declan O’Hara.
“I wasn’t too familiar with Jilly Cooper,” he says. “I knew her name and that she wrote some racy books in the ’80s. A girlfriend I had loved her books. I thought maybe it’s going be a little silly or not for me, but very quickly I found it really funny. And I thought this character Declan O’Hara was really interesting. He’s an Irish guy and he feels like the outsider in this piece. I thought, ‘Oh, he’s the audience. He’s the guy looking in and showing us this crazy world.’ And thought that was a really interesting thing. He’s not playing their games. He doesn’t want to be immersed in this world. He thinks they’re all f**king crazy, having sex with people, and they have no morals or ethics, and they don’t care about work. He’s not into this kind of small-talk bullshit. He’s a straight-shooter journalist.”
He had an inkling this show would be a success. “Everyone just was so warm and welcoming and funny. Danny Dyer and Katherine Parkinson and David Tennant, just all these brilliant, funny people. ‘Oh my god, this is a really good cast.’”
How does he feel about the (many) sex scenes? He laughs. “There’s every single type of sex in our show. The O’Hara sex tends to be quite passionate… It’s quite a technical thing, for obvious reasons, you want to get a take and move on. ‘Oh Jesus Christ. Do we have to keep kissing?’ But myself and Victoria [Smurfit, who plays his onscreen wife] have a lot of fun. She’s really cool and great. And we’ve intimacy co-ordinators who add a lot to the show and everyone feels safe. The sex is very much a character in our show.”
In the new series there’s a bit where he has to hide his nudity with a box of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. He laughs. “I think that’s a nod to one of the old adverts.”
He went straight from the set of Rivals to the National Theatre to play the nefarious Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, alongside Lesley Manville (“a legend”). He didn’t bring the Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, but he still had Declan O’Hara’s moustache for the first few weeks of rehearsals, lest the Rivals team needed reshoots. He likes playing a villain for a change. “Declan is a very moral guy, quite grounded, respectful. He’s a workaholic. Valmont doesn’t have a job, doesn’t want to work. He’s a manipulator and a seducer. A rich aristocrat who likes f**king up people’s lives by publicly humiliating them and sleeping with them. Everything Declan would be against. So they’re entirely different people. I guess in some ways, that’s why I was attracted to the role.”
Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National Theatre. Photograph: Alexandre Blossard
Does he find acting cathartic? “You’re doing very dramatic scenes and you feel pretty spent, after you do them,” he says. “And you get to do them for free without any real consequence to your own personal life. There are scenes with Maud [Smurfit’s character in Rivals]. They’re quite a fiery couple and we’ll spend hours on any day screaming or shouting to loving each other – sometimes all in one scene. You do feel as if there’s something you’ve expelled that feels kind of good and you don’t have to live with the repercussions. There is something cathartic about that. I don’t think it’s why I do the job, but it comes along with it.”
[ Aidan Turner: ‘That photograph. Yeah. It took away from the work’Opens in new window ]
Turner lives in London with his wife, the American actress Caitlin Fitzgerald, and their four-year-old son. He’s enjoying parenthood. “I still remember so well days when I would wake up before my son came along. And I would wake up and I would think, ‘I wonder what I’m going to do today’.” He laughs. Nowadays, life is busy, he says, and made up of “a lot of normal, normal shit, orchestrating and organising family and paying bills and seeing relatives and working out our timetable. ‘Oh, God, you’re on set that day. I thought you weren’t. Who can we get to mind the kid?’”
Aidan Turner lives in London with his wife, American actor Caitlin Fitzgerald, and their four-year-old son. He’s enjoying parenthood. Photograph: Nicola Tree
After his run on Les Liaisons Dangereuses, he’s off to Canada “with the boy”, where Fitzgerald is acting on a project. He’ll spend the time child-wrangling and, also, painting. “I’ll rent a studio. I’ll go there for part of the day, just me in the studio with a bunch of big white canvases that look terrifying, going, ‘What am I doing? I’m not a painter. I’m shit. I don’t know what I’m doing here.’ And then slowly, over a few months, you start to put things on the canvas.”
He discovered painting while working on The Hobbit in New Zealand (and not, strangely, when he was actually playing a painter on Desperate Romantics). Occasionally, a friend will ask for one of his canvases if “their wall is looking a bit bare”, but he doesn’t exhibit them and has no plans to. What does he like about it? “I think it’s the silence,” he says. “[Acting is] a very busy job. Sets are really busy. There are lots and lots and lots of people. You’re being asked questions all the time and making decisions on things all the time. And then you’re balancing family life and everything else. It’s just nice to walk into a studio and turn the key and it’s quiet and it’s tranquil and it’s creative and it’s scary. It’s just for me. I really, really enjoy it.”
Les Liaisons Dangereuses is at the National Theatre in London until June 6th and will be screened in cinemas worldwide, including Ireland, from June 25th via NT Live. The second season of Rivals comes to Disney+ on May 15th.