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, “Today I don’t feel like doing anything … except Aidan Turner.” 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. I was going for ‘dad’.” 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 New Yorker 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 good actor, and also known for being sexy, places him in a peculiar bind. If he doesn’t gamely play along, if he points out that he’s 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 and Rivals finds himself in a curious position. Turner is 43 now. (He is literally a dad – 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, and played Dante Gabriel Rossetti in Desperate Romantics, writing moody poetry in soft light.
Then, in 2015, he starred in the BBC’s 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 scythe. The attention that came with it made his career, but it also put him off sexy roles for a while.
Then a few years later, Rivals came along. Rivals is outrageously fun and smutty. It adapts Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles novels, the kind of books that would once have been known as bonkbusters, into big, brash television.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
