STACK #128 Jun 2016

EXTRAS

Q&A

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40 years ago, we used to rehearse an episode over five days like a play, and on the sixth day we’d shoot the entire episode with five cameras – the exteriors in the morning and interiors in the afternoon’. I thought that was really interesting because we would do the opposite – we’d sometimes cover six or eight episodes in a day, jumping all over the place. But that’s the way we do it – shoot per location as opposed to any kind of chronological order. A very different way of doing it. There was. One of the wranglers got chucked in the air. An ox took a run at him and the horn went in somewhere it shouldn’t have gone and it flipped him. That was kind of crazy, but we’ve been pretty lucky. Considering it’s been such a long shoot, we haven’t had many accidents, mishaps or injuries at all. My stunt rider, Ben Atkinson, who does the dangerous stuff like galloping close to the cliffs, has never been injured in his life. But of course on my very first day in the very first scene, I gallop up and he’s the groom and I chuck him the reins, and as he took them the horse took a little step and stood on his toe and split it in two, right down to the bone! And God love him, he held it together for the shot; his eyes were wide and then he hobbled offscreen and was gone for a month. 05/ You played a vampire for a few years and then a dwarf. Is Ross Poldark some kind of reality check? [Laughs] Yeah, it is. I did say that when I was in New Zealand playing a dwarf in Middle-earth. I was doing press for the second Hobbit film and someone asked, ’What do you want to do next?’ And I said, ‘I want to play a real person’. It was funny but so true. Poldark ticked so many boxes for me when it came along, and I thought ‘this is almost too good to be true’ – it’s exactly the sort of thing I want to be doing now. There was a trend beginning to happen with a lot of the roles; when you do something and it’s popular, you can get pigeonholed quite quickly and they don’t want to see you in anything else. In the movie The Mortal Instruments , where I play a werewolf, it just seemed that something was beginning to happen, and I thought I should make a conscious decision to kind of step away from that now. There are a lot of offers for supernatural films and TV shows – it’s weird... it’s all about comic book stuff now, but it’s something I don’t have an interest in at the moment.   04/ Apparently there were problems involving an uncooperative ox during the shoot...

He’s played a vampire in Being Human and a dwarf in The Hobbit Trilogy . NowAidanTurner gets back to reality as Ross Poldark, in a new adaptation of the books byWinston Graham that inspired the beloved 1970’s historical series. AIDAN TURNER Poldark: Series One is out on June 3

01/ Were you familiar with the ‘70s series and the books before you took on the role? AIDANTURNER: No, I wasn’t at all. I’d never heard of Winston Graham or Ross Poldark, which was kind of nice actually. When I got the offer to play Ross, I received the books and the script on the same day, so I could just completely immerse myself in the character and the story. I could formulate my ideas purely based on what I was reading as opposed to mimicking or trying to do what [original star] Robin Ellis did so well and find the character through his portrayal. What we’re doing is a new adaptation of Winston Graham’s stories. Robin Ellis’s series has nothing to do with what we’re doing. We’re not basing anything

on that whatsoever; we’re purely basing our adaptation on Winston’s books. We have nothing to do with the old series at all, really. Apart from having Robin Ellis in our show, which is amazing. 02/ Has Robin given you any feedback? He hasn’t at all. We’ve never discussed Ross Poldark, funnily enough. But we did talk about what it was like to shoot Poldark in his day, the differences, and he talked about the enormity of the role, how he’d got a lot of fan mail – and still does from time to time.

03/ How does making the series today differ? On the set, Robin would say, ‘When I did this

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