'Rivals' Actor Aidan Turner On Filming Those Titillating Sex Scenes
Poldark's Aidan Turner, who's set pulses racing in Disney+'s recent adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooper's book Rivals, has opened up about filming the series' sauciest scenes.
'We didn't care, we just got straight involved,' Aidan told the Sunday Times of he and his on-screen wife, Victoria Smurfit's (Maud O'Hara) approach to filming the scenes. Turner also admitted that Smurfit wasn't aware there were even going to be intimacy coordinators until the pair arrived on set.
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The actor said: 'It's technical but you do have to have a sense of fun about it as well, it can't just be laborious. It's like a dance. There are 50 hairy men hanging around with cameras.'
The sex scenes weren't the only thing that raised eyebrows about the show. Its approach to the very much pre-#MeToo era of the 1980s and how women were often belittled by men was intentional. Dominic Treadwell-Collins, the show's executive producer and writer, told the newly-launched Rivals podcast: 'We talked a lot about the groping scene between Taggie and Rupert and whether we could show that on screen and, yes, we sat in the writer's room and wriggled that out.
'Some of the younger writers said, "You can't keep that in because we would never want Rupert and Taggie to get together if he has groped her."'
'And we said well he's got to change, that's got to stay in, it's a comment on the 1980s and these men.'
Commenting on the groping incident in the series, Alex Hassell (who plays the series' protagonist, Rupert Campbell-Black) told Grazia: 'The show shines a light on how far we've come since then and it's important for the arc of the character and his relationship with Taggie.'
'Not to shy away from the fact that Rupert is a total s**t — if you stop at episode two, he's just an arsehole, but that's where he has to come back from.'
The eight-episode series, which is based on the second out of 11 of the author's Rutshire Chronicles, centres on the cutthroat world of 1980s independent television in the era of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The storyline centres on Declan O'Hara (Aidan Turner), a dishy Irish TV presenter who is roped into working at the failing Corinium television studios by its owner, Lord Baddingham (David Tennant). Also recruited by Lord Baddingham is Nafessa Williams' character, the glamorous American TV producer Cameron Cook, with the two initially butting heads.
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