STACK Jun #128

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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.
04/ Apparently there were problems involving
an uncooperative ox during the shoot...
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.
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
JUNE 2015 JB Hi-Fi
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
visit Q&A EXTRAS