‘The sexy stuff has got to be coming to an end, right?’: Rivals star Aidan Turner on beards, ballroom dancing and putting Poldark to bed

His dashing lead role in Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster didn’t hurt the actor’s pin-up status, but now, he protests, he’s 43 – and a dad Aidan Turner has a tactical beard. For the last two decades or so, the actor has found himself in roles that have made him a smouldering pin-up. Aud

His dashing lead role in Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster didn’t hurt the actor’s pin-up status, but now, he protests, he’s 43 – and a dad Aidan Turner has a tactical beard. 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 do get asked these questions,” he says, a little wearily.

“I do get the, you know, word ‘smoulder’ or ‘sexy’, and all that kind of shit.” So right now, he has a full beard, in the hope that he will not be accused of, for example, smouldering. “I thought it wouldn’t happen so much with the beard,” he sighs. “I thought I could get away with 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.

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