Aiden Turner stars as Philip Lombard in And Then There Were None

The flowing black hair has been radically trimmed to a short back and sides and the six-pack stomach is hidden beneath a check shirt and tweed jacket.

Those knee-high black leather boots have been replaced by sensible brown shoes, and the razor’s clearly been working overtime too – there’s no hint of that famous stubble.

Yes, this is Aidan Turner in his first role since Poldark, the TV sensation that catapulted him to fame back in the spring.

At first glance he’s unrecognisable, but look more closely at the distinctive dark eyes framed by those heavy, arched eyebrows and you’re taken straight back to brooding Captain Ross Poldark, the devilishly handsome hero at the heart of the show.

His performance had an impact not seen since Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy swaggered onto the screen in that wet shirt in Pride And Prejudice 20 years ago, and while you might think it must be unnerving to suddenly have half of the country lusting after you, it seems Aidan’s taking it all in his stride.

‘Well, I still don’t see myself as a sex symbol,’ he says with a mischievous grin. ‘Nothing has changed for me in that regard. There were parts of the show where people could relate to that idea I suppose, but I never felt like a sex symbol. I wasn’t thinking, “Here’s me being a sex symbol” when Poldark went into the sea for a swim.’

Not even when the series went out and Britain went Poldark barmy? ‘No,’ he insists. ‘I couldn’t understand why people thought either me or Ross was a sex symbol. None of it made any sense to me so I just didn’t bother with it. When you’re in the eye of the storm it just feels like a natural progression, I don’t feel this stratospheric rise or anything. I come across sweet people in the street now who ask for a photograph, but I can’t stop other people just taking them. You have to get on with it.

‘And then there was that picture of me holding that scythe topless in the show that seemed to go round for quite a while.

'That was very strange, although it didn’t take attention away from the show so I was fine with it. And at least because there was a “Ross gets his top off” scene every couple of weeks, it stopped me drinking beer and eating pasties.’

In person he’s nothing but charming, warm and polite, if a little shy. He speaks quietly and rather quickly in his soft Irish accent, and doesn’t seem to have had his head turned in the slightest by all the adulation.

Aidan (third left) and some of the cast arriving on the island on which they’ll be marooned

Of course, the tricky thing with a huge hit like Poldark is how to follow it up, but Aidan’s convinced he’s made the right move with And Then There Were None, a three-part BBC1 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s most brutal (and most popular, having sold 100 million copies) whodunnit in which he joins a stellar cast including Charles Dance, Miranda Richardson, Toby Stephens and Anna Maxwell Martin.

Just don’t expect another Poldark, he warns. ‘My character, Philip Lombard, is exactly the kind of person I was looking to play after Poldark because he’s such a contrast to Ross – both physically and mentally,’ he says. ‘Lombard may be clean-cut and neatly dressed but he’s a mercenary, a gun for hire. He’s done a lot of nasty things for his own benefit, really immoral, only cares about himself, massive ego, but a smart, confident, charming guy.

‘Ross Poldark is an honourable man who treats people with respect if they earn it, so to then jump to Lombard is interesting. They’re very different people, their moral compasses are very different. And Lombard wears his hair very short too, totally unlike Ross.

I know some actors have clauses in their contracts that forbid them from cutting their hair between series, and I’m grateful there wasn’t one in mine. Although of course I’ve had to grow it again for series two of Poldark, but luckily it grows pretty quickly.’

Aiden shot to fame after starring as Poldark

Poldark’s look didn’t come about by accident, though. Aidan actually had very short hair when he landed the role, so hair and make-up designer Jacqueline Fowler created two looks for him. The first was for the opening scenes when he went off to war with a ponytail tied back in a black ribbon. Four years later when he returned, the ponytail was gone. ‘We wanted to give the impression he’d just lopped it off to give him the messy bob look,’ said Jacqueline.

So here he is, close-cropped once more, playing a charming villain in his first Agatha Christie which will be shown in the lead-up to Christmas. Set in 1939, And Then There Were None begins with ten people being invited to a house on an island off the coast of Devon which is then cut off from the mainland by rising tides.

Among them are a doctor, a judge, a businessman, a corrupt ex-copper and of course Lombard, but conspicuous by their absence are the owners of the property who invited the visitors in the first place.

The guests are forced to listen to a gramophone record which details a terrible secret each of them is hiding, a crime they’ve committed in the past but seem to have got away with. Then, as the days pass, they’re bumped off one by one and it becomes clear there’s a murderer at large.

Surely Aidan didn’t do it? ‘Oh, there are plenty of potential murderers in the show,’ he laughs. ‘It’s probably Agatha Christie’s darkest tale, with lots of deaths, but it’s also her most popular. I watched her whodunnits when I was growing up in Dublin, and my mum was a fan too.

'I didn’t feel I could turn down the chance to be a part of this because being in an Agatha Christie film is special, it’s a rite of passage for actors, a kind of bucket list thing a lot of us want to tick off. And now I can. I liked wearing the clothes of the time too. I think we’ve got it wrong now with jeans and all this low-waisted stuff and T-shirts. I was wearing these high-waisted pants for a lot of this show, they’re really comfortable and quite flattering!’

Coincidentally, filming the first scenes where the ten guests head for the island meant Aidan had to return to Cornwall, where Poldark was filmed and which was doubling for Devon. That must have been strange?

‘It was quite surreal actually, seeing the cliffs and the sea and those familiar sights. Filming those scenes attracted a lot of public interest, which of course slowed things up, but then we moved to an isolated location, Harefield House in Buckinghamshire, for the rest of the shoot so there was none of that. Not that I’m complaining about the public taking an interest in my work,’ he adds, ‘they probably wouldn’t be if Poldark hadn’t been such a success.’

Born in Dublin on 19 June 1983 to accountant Eileen and electrician Pat, Aidan has certainly paid his dues. He studied at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin where Colin Farrell also trained, graduating in 2004, although he says he never felt the call to act deep in his soul. ‘I honestly don’t know where it came from, I’ve been asked this question a ton of times and I don’t really have an answer,’ he says.

At least the topless scenes stopped me eating pasties

‘I just kind of fell into it. I finished school and thought acting might be fun. I started reading a lot more, all these amazing Irish playwrights, and I just got into it. The possibilities of being unemployed are terrifying but it makes you disciplined. My mum and dad are honest, hardworking folk so it came out of left field for them, but they’ve always been supportive. They remember the original Poldark too, so they were thrilled about that.’

He spent years on the rep theatre circuit before his first proper stab at a smouldering period hero, playing Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Casanova of his day, in BBC2’s pre-Raphaelite raunchfest Desperate Romantics in 2009. But thanks to his role as vampire John Mitchell in BBC3’s Being Human later that year, Hollywood came calling and in 2010 he was cast as the dwarf Kili in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, but not without a very hairy moment.

‘My agent sent an audition tape to Peter and six months later I met him in London,’ recalls Aidan. ‘But I hadn’t read the book – a book you could read in a weekend, so I had no excuses. When I walked into the room Peter said, “I’m a really big fan of Being Human” and I thought, “I have it in the bag now, it’s mine to blow.” Then he said, “Have you read the book?” and I had that moment of, “Do I lie? Can I blag it? Will he appreciate me telling the truth?” So I said, “No, I haven’t read it” and he spent the next hour talking me through it! I knew I had it then.’

It’s a measure of his upward trajectory that he didn’t have to audition for Poldark. ‘No, I didn’t, it was offered to me,’ he says rather sheepishly. ‘I was very lucky. I don’t think I’m telling tales out of school when I say that when Debbie Horsfield was writing the adaptation she had me in mind to play him, which is amazing. I’m so flattered. I presume she’d seen me in Desperate Romantics or Being Human but I’m not sure.’

Aidan admits that the overwhelming success of Poldark – which has been commissioned for a further five series, the next to be seen on BBC1 next year – was a surprise. ‘The truth is nobody expected it to be the success it was,’ he says.

‘It’s always a nice surprise when anything you’re in is a big hit because these things are so hard to predict, regardless of who’s in the cast or who’s written the screenplay. So I’m obviously not going to predict whether And Then There Were None is going to be a hit, but I’m quietly confident it will find an audience.’

What with the Agatha Christie and Poldark, which has just started filming again in Cornwall, he’s had little time back in Dublin over the past few years.

‘But I love going back,’ he says. ‘It’s a lot more relaxed and I can be more disciplined about getting things done there – although Mum has this huge garage out the back, it fits about ten cars in it, so I built a pool hall in it. I have a couple of pool tables, a bar, a big sound system and a big screen, and I play a lot of pool. That’s what I’m usually doing when I should be focusing on my career.’