Aidan Turner on becoming a dad and his new drama, The Suspect
Three years on from Poldark, the actor wants less scything and more nuance in his roles — and has found it in a new ITV series
The man who for four pectoral-perfect years was Poldark is recalling the moment he felt he had arrived as an actor. Aidan Turner was 27, perhaps 28, and playing both an accidentally lethal vampire in BBC3's Being Human and the more deliberately dangerous Dante Gabriel Rossetti in BBC2's Desperate Romantics. His career was going so well that he rented his first place in London, a flat above Mornington Crescent station.
"I was chuffed with myself. It was the coolest thing, hanging out with cool actors and going to bars and trying to live this hedonistic lifestyle that the artists were living. And I still had the energy every morning to go to work."
I hope, I say, he realises that is all over, now that he is a father.
"Oh, yeah. I don't go out at all any more. I'll be home by nine o'clock or in deep trouble for sure. Hangovers just aren't worth it these days."
Turner, who is a Dubliner and off-screen sounds like one, married the American actress Caitlin Fitzgerald in Italy a year ago. They had met on what was, for almost everyone apart from them, a forgettable low-budget 2018 film, The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot. Earlier this year, Fitzgerald gave birth, although Turner, who some time ago made the decision not to talk about his private life (it seems to have involved a healthy number of girlfriends but no scandal), asks me not even to disclose the baby's sex. All we know is that he or she is not one of babyland's great sleepers.
"The sleepless nights are a real thing. There's a huge shift for sure. I think every man will understand what I mean by that," he says. Ross Poldark, I point out, was a father, but not even his most adoring fan would accuse him of being hands-on.' "Hardly does anything! He goes to the kitchen, grabs a chunk of bread, then he's up on a horse and he's off again, getting involved in somebody else's business."
Turner is not only a father but also 39 years old. I wonder if he feels grown up. He deftly diverts the question towards his new series, his first for IT V, a psychological thriller - about a psychologist - called The Suspect (and not to be confused with Channel 4's recently derided Suspect starring his Hobbit co-star James Nesbitt).
"Certainly The Suspect feels like a very grown-up role for me and the genre and the tone of the piece too feels like I've sort of broken into a different place," he says in the Soho Hotel in central London before its press screening.
"The scripts that are coming in now, they tend to be like that. Maybe it's being a dad, maybe it's just being that bit older, but there has been a shift of late,which is great."
In The Suspect he plays Joe O'Loughlin, who may or may not have killed a former patient. The five-parter keeps us guessing. Withholding the truth from the viewer, while being true to Joe's character, was not as hard as you might think, he says. Joe could be a murderer, he is certainly flawed.
"That's what I loved about the character: he's complicated. We do these things in life we regret." We're all guilty of something, I offer. "We're all guilty of something," he agrees.
Just as he read Winston Graham's Poldark novels before playing their hero, Turner did due research for Joe. He met a forensic elinical psychologist, Dr Robert Lambert-Simpson, who had worked with dangerous criminals and recommended that Turner master a therapist's empathetic but noncommittal grunt. Joe has been diagnosed with Parkinson's and Turner discussed the condition with Drew Hallam, the same age as him but diagnosed with the disease when he was 35. The point Hallam made was that although he knew Parkinson's would not kill him, he also knew he would die with it. In finding Joe's character, Turner says, Hallam was more helpful than any of the books he read.
Despite the telltale tremor in Joe's hand, the series nevertheless opens with him climbing out of a multi storey building to talk down a suicidal young man about to throw himself off. Turner shot the scene in a film lot and was two, rather than 25, floors up. "But I was dangled pretty high and I'm not good with heights and those gasps and screams are real. I was terrified.'
Did he enjoy playing vulnerability? "That's what I loved about Joe too. He's not just this heroic protagonist who is there to be the stock character we've seen 100 times before - and that I've played 100 times before."
I wasn't going to say it."But that's what really attracted me to him. It doesn't feel cookie cutter and that's where I'm trying to go now with things, roles where there's more layers and it's more complicated and more dense. It just feels right. I had my own accent for this too, which was really interesting. It felt really grounded for the character. And I had a beard, which is what I usually wear. It was closer to me."
It is nevertheless undeniable that Captain Ross Poldark remains the role of his career so far and that Turner brought to it, as well as his beauty, tremendous patrician authority, for which he fielded a more or less RP English accent. But Poldark was not really a complex man. He made mistakes, but they came from the heart - or, at least, the nether regions. I mention the last episode of the fifth and final season three years ago. It was hardly a surprise to learn that Ross was neither cheating on his wife, Demelza, nor collaborating with the French enemy.
A similar lack of nuance doomed Leonardo, last year's eight-part Euro-pudding of a bio-drama shown on Sky. Turner as the Renaissance painter again played a man of passionate virtue, again asserted in public-school English. The artist was trapped in a murder plot but who doubted his innocence? The Guardian called Leonardo "awful"; our own Hugo Rifkind deemed it "not dreadful". It has not, despite what fans may have read, been renewed. "It did get kicked around in the press a little bit. I had no qualms about that. It was a fear I had going in and discussions we had about where the narrative might go, but it was always going to be difficult when you try to change history on a TV show. And there's no need. He has a very, very interesting life, Leonardo, we don't need to fictionalise elements of it, I don't think."
Could it have been done without a murder? "Of course it could. There was no need for it." His sexuality is interesting enough? "Exactly. And we covered some of that in Leonardo. I think we could have gone further with that."
Next he will star in Fifteen-Love, a new drama for Amazon, in which he plays a maverick tennis coach. Ella Lily Hyland plays his star prodigy who makes an explosive allegation against him.
"It's worth waiting for the right thing," he says. "I have a child and I don't want to work as much and I really only want to do the work that I'm passionate about and thankfully there's stuff around for me.
"I've done a lot of costume drama and supernatural shows or science fiction and that kind of thing. I've kind of done that for now. More contemporary pieces, especially a psychological thriller like The Suspect- these are shows that I really watch."
The Suspect has a habit of scrutinising Turner's face in intense close-up. In the flesh, with only a light beard, he looks hardly older than when I met him eight years ago in the West Country filming the initial series of Poldark - neither of us, poor fools, guessing at the phenomenon it would become. On screen now with a much heavier beard, and with the creases round his eyes somehow accentuated, he looks tons older and scarcely recognisable. Perhaps that was the idea of the beard.
"You do feel quite hidden. There is a veil there. And for me as well. I think maybe one time in 18 months I got recognised with the beard also adopted for Leonardo. The day I shaved it off, it happened three or four times in town.
How much does he hate that? "I don't hate it. People have only ever been really, really kind, really lovely. And it's only ever fans. I don't love it because
I'd like to not be noticed and I think a lot of actors too quite enjoy people- watching and observing and that goes out the window if you're getting recognised. People are locking eyes with you. It just feels unsettling. It feels a bit creepy."
Is the attention all from women? "Is it all women? Mostly. Mostly, is the accurate answer. At the height of his torso's scythe-waving fame did he feel objectified? "No, I didn't. I mean, I know it's different for a young guy to show up in some of those photographs or that kind of show, and have that kind of press, in comparison to it happening to a young girl. It's a different thing. I don't fear for my safety when I walk around. My demographic for Poldark was more women."
At the height of his torso's scythe-waving fame did he feel objectified? "No, I didn't. I mean, I know it's different for a young guy to show up in some of those photographs or that kind of show, and have that kind of press, in comparison to it happening to a young girl. It's a different thing. I don't fear for my safety when I walk around. My demographic for Poldark was more women."
I have it on good authority that when he played in Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore in the West End in 2018 female audience members would gasp just at the sight of his bare arms. "There was a bit of that. Some nights you'd hear comments. But then very quickly it would calm down. But that was fun. I mean, every time I do theatre, I just want to do more theatre."
Turner talks so comfortably it is hard to imagine him as a shy child growing up in Dublin, the son of an electrician father and an accountant mother. Although he spent eight childhood years competing at ballroom dancing - he reached international level - the shyness endured, he says, until he went to the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin, where his confidence grew "quite quickly". He left and landed a role in a primetime RTE medical drama. Barely four years later, via the vampire and his first great painter, he was in New Zealand filming The Hobbit trilogy for Peter Jackson.
And rather than his typical alpha male roles, he played a small man. "They shrank us. I played a dwarf on that one. But got away with not wearing yak hair beards, which is what a lot of the other guys were wearing."
The only thing he has not done - or not done enough - is comedy, and he is very good at it. On Toast of Tinseltown this year he played Uncle Barney, a lunatic cowboy in pursuit of a rattlesnake. His sibilant, ten-second assault on the word "message" stole a scene clean away from Matt Berry. Perhaps, he muses, another comedy, like The Lieutenant of Inishmore, should be his return to the stage.
If he is missing solemn old Captain Ross, he must be doing it at a level it would take Joe O'Loughlin to uncover. He does, he will concede, miss riding Poldark's Co Wexford horse, Seamus, but mostly he is missing his child and his wife. Fitzgerald has just left for New York where she is shooting a movie. "It is hard. It's the first time. She's only been gone a couple of days. So yeah, it's difficult, but I'm busy: keeping busy is definitely a good thing for me while they're away."
A decade on from landing in London, Turner now has the luxury of choosing to keep busy or not. Now, that must be what "arriving" really means. The Suspect will be on ITV and the ITV Hub later this month. X
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