{"id":476115,"date":"2026-05-09T08:54:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T08:54:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/476115\/"},"modified":"2026-05-09T08:54:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T08:54:13","slug":"aidan-turner-id-be-sitting-in-the-trailer-going-god-almighty-can-you-just-give-me-a-cop-drama-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/476115\/","title":{"rendered":"Aidan Turner: \u2018I\u2019d be sitting in the trailer going, \u2018God Almighty. Can you just give me a cop drama?\u2019\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Forty-two-year-old Clondalkin<\/a> man Aidan Turner<\/a> is a big deal. He played a magnetic and only occasionally murderous vampire in the excellent cult BBC<\/a> dramedy Being Human. He played a swashbuckling dwarf in Peter Jackson<\/a>\u2019s incredibly long The Hobbit<\/a>. He played a brooding but decent olden-days gentleman in Poldark<\/a> (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<\/a>\u2019s sex\u2019n\u2019business romp Rivals<\/a> (more swooning), and a less-than-honourable seducer in Les Liaisons Dangereuses in the National Theatre in London. He\u2019s talented and charismatic, and was once whispered to be in contention as the next James Bond<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yet somehow, I just want to ask him questions about when he was a competitive ballroom dancer in 1990s Dublin.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s survival of the fittest out there on the dance floor,\u201d he says, on a Zoom call from London. \u201cIt looks beautiful and graceful from the sides. When you\u2019re on there, you\u2019re sweating and you\u2019re meeting someone who\u2019s six foot three, swinging his elbows around in a tango, and you\u2019d better duck.\u201d<\/p>\n

Would people actually hurt each other? He laughs. \u201cOh, it would happen all the time. You crash into people. People wouldn\u2019t put down their arms. There\u2019s an etiquette. It\u2019s called dance-craft, where you move around [people]. And you\u2019re trained to do that. But there\u2019s lots of people who just would go straight through you… It\u2019s pretty ruthless.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s 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 \u201cstructure\u201d of ballroom; Latin dancing was a bit too showy for him, he says) and things weren\u2019t quite as combative. He discovered dancing when he was just 10. \u201cMy 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\u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

He won an All-Ireland championship. \u201cI 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\u2026 I think it was the competition I really enjoyed. It\u2019s a very weird and kind of brilliant world.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI wasn\u2019t in a tough crowd but there were tough lads there. And it\u2019s pretty out-there, Ballroom and Latin American dancing: fake tan, sequinned pants, high white collars. It\u2019s insane. You couldn\u2019t really hide it. I\u2019d have to miss days [of school], and I would go to Blackpool competing at the World Championships. They just didn\u2019t know what to do with it. There was a bit of laughing. Some kind of believed me, some didn\u2019t. I\u2019d have lads coming up to me going\u2026\u201d He adopts a tough-lad voice. \u201c\u2018Hey, are you a dancer? Everyone is saying you were in Blackpool doing the chachacha. What\u2019s that about?\u2019 I\u2019d show them photographs.\u201d He apes complete disbelief. \u201c\u2018No way!\u2019\u201d He shakes his head. \u201cAnd then they just wouldn\u2019t know how to take the piss because it was just so foreign to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Poldark star Aidan Turner: My shirtless scything scene was PhotoshoppedOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

He learned to be confident about who he was, he says. \u201cIt\u2019s when you cower away from those things and you try to hide them that the lads and girls suss it out. They\u2019ll smell it on you and then they\u2019ll come for blood. I guess I was unconsciously aware of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI realised that maybe I just wasn\u2019t good enough. It\u2019s just too hard. I was there with 25- and 28-year-olds, amazing strong dancers, and I\u2019m a little weak 17- or 18-year-old boy and just couldn\u2019t keep up with them, getting smashed with elbows in the face.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AidanAidan Turner: There were no arts connections in his family. His mother was an accountant, his father an electrician. Photograph: Nicola Tree <\/p>\n

Did he miss it when he stopped? He nods. \u201cThere was a void there,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

There were no arts connections in his family. His mother was an accountant, his father an electrician. \u201cI finished my Leaving Cert with pretty average results\u2026 It was only when I finished and went to drama school that I really enjoyed reading literature, Shakespeare<\/a> and Synge<\/a> and Brian Friel<\/a> and all these great Irish writers\u2026 The structure of school just didn\u2019t really work for me.\u201d <\/p>\n

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. \u201cIt was awful,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t know what I was thinking\u2026. The director of the school saw something in me, thankfully, and it was two of the greatest years.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019d only attended two plays in his life (Roald Dahl<\/a>\u2019s The Witches and Marie Jones<\/a>\u2019s 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. \u201cI remember one moment, it might have been the first day of drama school, in front of 20 peers I didn\u2019t know\u2026 There was this exercise, \u2018become a tree\u2019. 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\u2019m not scared. I\u2019m not f**king scared. From that moment, something broke in me, and for the rest of drama school I thought, I\u2019m not scared of this any more.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Rivals: The thrusting bum is intercut with spurting soap and overflowing champagne. We are in safe, if filthy, handsOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

He was soon on stage in the Abbey<\/a>, and then the Barbican in London. In the mid-noughties he got roles in quick succession on big TV shows \u2013 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. \u201cI remember watching it and thinking the same thing. God, it is a bit strange to have an Irish guy on the show and he\u2019s not \u2018the Irish guy\u2019. It\u2019s just a part of who he was.\u201d<\/p>\n

He realised the main trick to being a professional was just doing the work and learning the lines. \u201cAnd then just staying as healthy and as fit as you can. There\u2019s no excuse. You can\u2019t just decide \u2018I\u2019m having a bad day. I feel a bit fluey. I didn\u2019t sleep at all last night.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AidanAidan Turner gets brushed up for his role as Ross Poldark by crew in a behind-the-scenes publicity shot for the drama. Photograph: BBC <\/p>\n

His biggest role was in BBC\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt really surprised me that there was such a big audience,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was at the end of this when event television kind of meant something, when at Sunday night at nine o\u2019clock people would stay in\u2026 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\u2019t get the figures for weeks\u2026 It was lightning in a bottle. If Poldark had to be released six months later, who knows, maybe nobody would have watched it.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Poldark: He\u2019s so fertile, I may have got pregnant watching himOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

What does he think the appeal was in retrospect? \u201cI think there was a comfort in our show,\u201d he says. \u201cI think it had an older audience that could remember the original series that went out in the \u201970s. 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\u2026 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\u2019m very proud of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

How does it feel to be in a \u201chit\u201d? \u201cIt\u2019s two things at the same time. It\u2019s like, \u2018wow, job security, f**king hell.\u2019 As an actor, that\u2019s incredible. It\u2019s more money than I ever got paid in my life. I\u2019m really enjoying doing the job. I\u2019m leading the show. It\u2019s a tremendous amount of pressure, but that pressure has now been alleviated because the show is something of a success. I know what I\u2019m doing for the next five years. But then there\u2019s the other side of things, \u2018Oh God, I know what I\u2019m doing for the next five years.\u2019\u201d He laughs.<\/p>\n

What was it like to suddenly find himself being so famous? \u201cI\u2019ve 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\u2019t want to know what people are saying. I don\u2019t care. I just want to distance myself from it as much as I can.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Leonardo: Aidan Turner has great stubble, but don\u2019t expect Bridgerton-with-brushesOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Did he worry about being typecast? That always happens, he says. \u201cIt 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.\u201d He laughs. \u201cI\u2019m armoured up. I have a sword on me and a bow and arrow and I\u2019m sitting in the trailer going, \u2018God Almighty. Can you just give me a cop drama?\u2019 The industry takes a minute to move on.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Rivals:Rivals: Aidan Turner as Declan O’Hara in the Disney+ series based on the book by Jilly Cooper. Photograph: Disney+ <\/p>\n

His most recent TV show, Rivals, is a funny and clever adaptation of Jilly Cooper\u2019s best selling bonkbuster of the same name. It\u2019s about various kinds of British rich people (nouveau and otherwise) in the 1980s warring over the ownership of a regional television franchise… when they\u2019re not having enthusiastic sex with one another. He plays the Woganesque TV presenter Declan O\u2019Hara.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wasn\u2019t too familiar with Jilly Cooper,\u201d he says. \u201cI knew her name and that she wrote some racy books in the \u201980s. A girlfriend I had loved her books. I thought maybe it\u2019s going be a little silly or not for me, but very quickly I found it really funny. And I thought this character Declan O\u2019Hara was really interesting. He\u2019s an Irish guy and he feels like the outsider in this piece. I thought, \u2018Oh, he\u2019s the audience. He\u2019s the guy looking in and showing us this crazy world.\u2019 And thought that was a really interesting thing. He\u2019s not playing their games. He doesn\u2019t want to be immersed in this world. He thinks they\u2019re all f**king crazy, having sex with people, and they have no morals or ethics, and they don\u2019t care about work. He\u2019s not into this kind of small-talk bullshit. He\u2019s a straight-shooter journalist.\u201d<\/p>\n

He had an inkling this show would be a success. \u201cEveryone just was so warm and welcoming and funny. Danny Dyer and Katherine Parkinson and David Tennant, just all these brilliant, funny people. \u2018Oh my god, this is a really good cast.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

How does he feel about the (many) sex scenes? He laughs. \u201cThere\u2019s every single type of sex in our show. The O\u2019Hara sex tends to be quite passionate\u2026 It\u2019s quite a technical thing, for obvious reasons, you want to get a take and move on. \u2018Oh Jesus Christ. Do we have to keep kissing?\u2019 But myself and Victoria [Smurfit<\/a>, who plays his onscreen wife] have a lot of fun. She\u2019s really cool and great. And we\u2019ve intimacy co-ordinators who add a lot to the show and everyone feels safe. The sex is very much a character in our show.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the new series there\u2019s a bit where he has to hide his nudity with a box of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. He laughs. \u201cI think that\u2019s a nod to one of the old adverts.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 (\u201ca legend\u201d). He didn\u2019t bring the Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, but he still had Declan O\u2019Hara\u2019s moustache for the first few weeks of rehearsals, lest the Rivals team needed reshoots. He likes playing a villain for a change. \u201cDeclan is a very moral guy, quite grounded, respectful. He\u2019s a workaholic. Valmont doesn\u2019t have a job, doesn\u2019t want to work. He\u2019s a manipulator and a seducer. A rich aristocrat who likes f**king up people\u2019s lives by publicly humiliating them and sleeping with them. Everything Declan would be against. So they\u2019re entirely different people. I guess in some ways, that\u2019s why I was attracted to the role.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"LesleyLesley Manville and Aidan Turner in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National Theatre. Photograph: Alexandre Blossard <\/p>\n

Does he find acting cathartic? \u201cYou\u2019re doing very dramatic scenes and you feel pretty spent, after you do them,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd you get to do them for free without any real consequence to your own personal life. There are scenes with Maud [Smurfit\u2019s character in Rivals]. They\u2019re quite a fiery couple and we\u2019ll spend hours on any day screaming or shouting to loving each other \u2013 sometimes all in one scene. You do feel as if there\u2019s something you\u2019ve expelled that feels kind of good and you don\u2019t have to live with the repercussions. There is something cathartic about that. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s why I do the job, but it comes along with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Aidan Turner: \u2018That photograph. Yeah. It took away from the work\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Turner lives in London with his wife, the American actress Caitlin Fitzgerald, and their four-year-old son. He\u2019s enjoying parenthood. \u201cI still remember so well days when I would wake up before my son came along. And I would wake up and I would think, \u2018I wonder what I\u2019m going to do today\u2019.\u201d He laughs. Nowadays, life is busy, he says, and made up of \u201ca lot of normal, normal shit, orchestrating and organising family and paying bills and seeing relatives and working out our timetable. \u2018Oh, God, you\u2019re on set that day. I thought you weren\u2019t. Who can we get to mind the kid?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AidanAidan Turner lives in London with his wife, American actor Caitlin Fitzgerald, and their four-year-old son. He\u2019s enjoying parenthood. Photograph: Nicola Tree <\/p>\n

After his run on Les Liaisons Dangereuses, he\u2019s off to Canada \u201cwith the boy\u201d, where Fitzgerald is acting on a project. He\u2019ll spend the time child-wrangling and, also, painting. \u201cI\u2019ll rent a studio. I\u2019ll go there for part of the day, just me in the studio with a bunch of big white canvases that look terrifying, going, \u2018What am I doing? I\u2019m not a painter. I\u2019m shit. I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m doing here.\u2019 And then slowly, over a few months, you start to put things on the canvas.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201ctheir wall is looking a bit bare\u201d, but he doesn\u2019t exhibit them and has no plans to. What does he like about it? \u201cI think it\u2019s the silence,\u201d he says. \u201c[Acting is] a very busy job. Sets are really busy. There are lots and lots and lots of people. You\u2019re being asked questions all the time and making decisions on things all the time. And then you\u2019re balancing family life and everything else. It\u2019s just nice to walk into a studio and turn the key and it\u2019s quiet and it\u2019s tranquil and it\u2019s creative and it\u2019s scary. It\u2019s just for me. I really, really enjoy it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Forty-two-year-old Clondalkin man Aidan Turner is a big deal. He played a magnetic and only occasionally murderous vampire…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":476116,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[112771,71994,3412,49584,16470,18,117,2215,19,17,66703,123318,361,208571,55595,148204,82618,208572],"class_list":{"0":"post-476115","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-abbey-theatre","9":"tag-aidan-turner","10":"tag-bbc","11":"tag-brian-friel","12":"tag-clondalkin","13":"tag-eire","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-for-you","16":"tag-ie","17":"tag-ireland","18":"tag-jilly-cooper","19":"tag-john-millington-synge","20":"tag-magazine","21":"tag-marie-jones","22":"tag-peter-jackson","23":"tag-richard-shakespeare","24":"tag-roald-dahl","25":"tag-victoria-smurfit"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/476116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}