That topless scene in Poldark turned him into a national heart-throb, but Aidan Turner doesn’t know what all the fuss is about. He talks about lies, laziness, and why his hair has its own Twitter account

If there is one bit of entertainment gossip that never goes away, it is the question of who will play the next James Bond. Even when a new Bond is announced – and four films ago we were given Daniel Craig, whose quizzical eyebrows have now haunted the face of the MI6 assassin for a decade – there is always the question of who’ll take over when that one gets too old for all the shooting and shagging. Will it be Idris Elba, Michael Fassbender or Tom Hiddleston? Rather suddenly, the smart money is now on Aidan Turner, who stars in the hit BBC1 period drama Poldark. Bookmaker William Hill has made a statement about Turner’s impressive chances, with the Sun backing up its “staggering 6/4 odds he’ll nab the role”.

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It’s such a hot topic that I am told, before interviewing Turner, he will not speak a word about it, which sort of suggests that it is true. Or that he’s trying not to put a foot wrong and say anything that might ruin his chances. Fortunately, our photographer has not been given this warning, and happily asks Turner if he’s going to be the next James Bond. A fixed grin takes over Turner’s face, and he chuckles awkwardly. “I didn’t ask that,” I point out cheerily, my dictaphone sitting between us. “And I’m not going to answer it,” he replies. We are in the photographer’s sunny flat in west London, where Turner’s been happily tussling with a dog (he’s called Hank, and belongs to the photographer’s sister) and chatting to the assistants about how he was a ballroom dancer when he was a kid (he competed at a professional level in Ireland).

But when I ask him about the dancing, he says he doesn’t want to talk about that stuff, doesn’t want people digging up his past. He seems to find it embarrassing that, long before he was a TV star in London, he was a dancer in Dublin. I’m slightly surprised, but, given that he’s still grinning, we proceed to other subjects. Turner’s screen career began with a couple of uncredited lines in the first episode of The Tudors in 2007, followed by various Irish arthouse films, and the bigger role of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the BBC2 costume drama about the pre-Raphaelites, Desperate Romantics. He then stopped being a human being for some time, casting off his earthly shackles to play a vampire in Being Human, a dwarf in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit film trilogy, and a werewolf in the action film Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. His return to our DNA saw him make Poldark – a conflicted 18th-century Cornish posho, who has lost his family wealth in the tin-mining recession – into an unlikely national heart-throb.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I don’t think Poldark knows where he’s at half the time.’ Photograph: Bella Howard for the Guardian

One particular scene – where he is topless in the fields, hacking away with a scythe, rugged hair falling about his muscular shoulders – sent the swoonometers racing. Twitter went crazy. In a Radio Times readers’ poll, it was voted the best telly moment of the year. “He single-handedly made scything sexy,” says a Turner fan website, run by people clearly besotted with him.

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Soon after, he appeared in a BBC adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. At one point he appeared in just a towel, adding to the hype. So who are all these fans? “Poldark is one of those shows,” Turner says in his soft Irish accent, “that people my age might say, ‘Oh, yeah, my mum loves the show,’ or ‘My auntie loves the show, but I’ve never seen it. But then they seem to know quite a bit about it, all the same…” He laughs. “And they’re the person who has recognised me, and I’m just some guy with a beard, walking down Carnaby Street or whatever. I used to get that with The Hobbit a lot, somebody would say, ‘Oh, my little brother’s really into The Hobbit. I mean I can’t stand it, but would you sign all these photographs I have in my bag?’ And I’d go, ‘Who do I make it out to? Julie? Oh, OK, your brother’s called Julie, fair enough.’”

He sits on the sofa, always moving, a bit like a puppy waiting to get off its lead. Today, the flowing Poldark locks are scraped back into a man-bun and he looks like any young fashionable guy you’d see in Soho, where he is living.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With Dean O’Gormon in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar/New Line Cinema

The cast are about to start filming the third series, while we are about to start watching the second. Adapted from Winston Graham’s novels, the action follows the ruggedly handsome Captain Ross Poldark returning to his native Cornwall after fighting in the American War of Independence, to take over his father’s mine. His family’s fortunes have plummeted because tin is now cheaper elsewhere: this is the start of globalisation. The people of Cornwall are starving, and Poldark is caught between them and his wealthy cousins. He is also caught between two surprising love affairs, again straddling the class divide. The man is compelling viewing because he doesn’t give a damn about the things he is supposed to.

I ask Turner if he intentionally makes his character so hard to read. “Well, it struck me that Ross is a real man – not a heroic, legendary guy who comes into town and is the people’s hero, like Robin Hood. There’s a lot wrong with Ross, which is what I love about him – that he’s a multitude of ups and downs and rights and wrongs. And I don’t think he knows where he’s at half the time.” Poldark begins in love with Elizabeth, his childhood sweetheart, but she marries his cousin and (spoiler alert, if you haven’t caught up with season one) he begins a relationship with his mysterious maid, Demelza.

Horse riding is a confidence game, like everything. It’s just blagging.

“Emotionally, he’s way more comfortable being a soldier and being with the lads than he is with Demelza and his baby, Julia. Love is a complete mystery to him. He can’t quite figure that out – does he still fancy Elizabeth, is he still in love with Elizabeth? Does he feel betrayed? Was it her fault? All these questions are still there in the second series. And they’re real questions.”

It has recently been revealed that, in the novels, Ross rapes Elizabeth, but the television programme has turned that moment into consensual sex. Turner suggests that this might have been overblown. “There’s very little in the book, just two lines. I think he just picks up Elizabeth and sort of frogmarches her up the stairs. We don’t do it that way at all, really. I mean Ross kind of – well, you’ll see. I think it’s well-measured. I think if we had taken it literally from the book, it wouldn’t have seemed like Ross.”

If this causes any kind of public outcry, there’s a chance that Turner won’t even know about it, as he claims not to read anything written about the programme. “When a show that I’m in goes out, I don’t really watch it. I don’t Google it or tune into any of the press.” He doesn’t search for mentions of his own name on Twitter? “Oh my God, no. Can you imagine? I’d have a nervous breakdown. My friends and family even know not to send me stuff. The agents won’t send me the ratings, either. None of that matters a great deal to me.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘You freak yourself out sometimes, thinking: what if I forget my lines?’ Photograph: Bella Howard for the Guardian

He thinks about this. “Mind you, they’ll send me funny stuff now and again.” Like what? “Like, ‘Poldark’s hair has its own Twitter account. Check out what your hair is saying this week.’” Head hair or chest hair? “Probably both. I mean, I was talking about the head hair, but the chest hair had something else going on over the summer, so God knows, these days.”

He’s laughing a lot, but he does seem rather appalled. “Social media isn’t really my bag. I don’t do it.” He doesn’t even have a secret Facebook account? “I don’t! Not because I’m an actor and I want to protect my profile or whatever that means. It’s just not for me. I literally don’t care about it. I email people, I text people, and even that I have trouble keeping up with. There is shit that I really need to get done that I don’t get done, so imagine me on Facebook or Instagram – ah, it would just be a disaster. I was an hour and a half late to this interview today, for Christ’s sake! What would I be like if I was on Facebook?”

I don’t know what it is about actors but some of us are inherently lazy

I get the strong impression that he doesn’t want to discuss being a heart-throb, or the debate around objectifying men that opened up in the wake of Poldark’s topless imagery. I bring it up and a half smile/half grimace appears across his face. He doesn’t speak. I say, “Do you just want to say that you’re sick of it, then we can move on?”

“I’m sick of it,” he says. “Let’s move on.”

Turner grew up in Dublin. His mother, Eileen, is an accountant and his father, Pearse, is an electrician. In his early teens, Turner sometimes accompanied his dad to work. “He used to call me the Little Apprentice. I used to pop around with him and do odd jobs. But that kind of manual labour… I don’t have it in me. My dad loves what he does and he’s still intrigued by it. He’ll show me how neat that last job is, the spotlights he has just put up or whatever it might be. But I just don’t get that buzz at all.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Radio Times best TV moment of 2015, in Poldark. Photograph: PA/BBC

But can he look at the spotlights in this room and instantly know what they are? “Oh, yeah. In fact,” he says, glancing at the ceiling, “they’re the same 60 watt kind I have in my house. But after that I worked in a cinema for two years, while I was at school. I was an usher for a while, then I worked selling popcorn. Never got allowed in the projection room – that would have been asking for trouble. But maybe that was where it started – I used to go and watch movies when I should have been working. I used to sneak around and check out all these films. I remember American Beauty was on, Fight Club was on…” Ah, that halcyon bit of the 1990s when Hollywood started getting good again. He nods, “I’ve seen both those films more than a dozen times each. I was a terrible usher. You’re only supposed to go in for five minutes to check the screen is right and everyone’s OK. I totally took advantage. But,” he reflects, with a touch of irony, “that was my entrance into the movie world.”

Aged six Turner took up dancing, didn’t like it until he got good and then his competitive streak kicked in; he actually represented Ireland in ballroom and Latin American dancing for 10 years. He didn’t ever ride horses, but when auditioning for Poldark he lied and said he had, then quickly took lessons. “Horse riding is a confidence game, like everything,” he says. “It’s just blagging.”

He tells me about Poldark’s steed. “He’s an Irish horse! He was picked up at Smithfield market in Dublin, weirdly enough. Seamus is about as Irish as you can get, for a horse’s name. He doesn’t stand still. He’s so smart, when he sees the clapperboard and hears it he wants to take off. So they can’t say ‘action’ on set. I think he may have been Tom Cruise’s horse on The Last Samurai.”

Did he not tell him for definite? “Seamus? No, he just mentioned something.”

At the age of 17, Turner took his first drama class and realised he was more than happy to give up other academic pursuits. Had he hated education? “It was more that the acting thing just happened. In my last eight months of school, I realised that this was what I wanted to do. I was very lucky to know – I mean, so many friends of mine, of my age, are still hopping around doing different courses, career changes. I realised early on.”

I ask if acting was a normal activity among his friends. “Well, it wasn’t really normal for me. I didn’t really care what people thought. If you tell people you want to be an actor, they say, ‘Jesus. Best of luck.’ I think everyone was quite surprised because I wasn’t a theatre kid, I never went to see plays. I didn’t do puppet shows in the living room for my grandparents, no, no. My brother did. But I was never an attention-seeker – I’d rather people didn’t look at me.” Well, apart from the dancing that he doesn’t want to talk about.

After school he went to one of Dublin’s two drama schools, the Gaiety School of Acting. “I’d realised I was still young enough to get away with not knowing anything, and drama school gives you this platform where you can fail all the time. You can constantly fuck up. That’s the luxury of going to drama school because, if you make those mistakes professionally, then it’s not quite the same; people aren’t so forgiving.”

He went straight from graduation to a job at the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s national theatre, and remained there, as a stage actor, for five years because play after play came up, and he was always in demand. Not that he didn’t still have the fear. “You freak yourself out sometimes, thinking: ‘I don’t know this well enough. What if I go dry? What if I forget my lines in the middle of that monologue?’ But when you walk on stage, that’s how you know if it’s for you. There is clarity. Your body is good at kicking into gear and knowing why you are there, what part of your brain to use.”

After auditioning for The Hobbit, his friends assumed that he would at least read the book. “And I thought, fuck that, I’m not going to read it unless I’m cast in it!” He says the filming schedule for Poldark is intense, “but you wait for months and months to work, and then you get given the shooting schedule and you go straight through it, circling your days off. I mean, I don’t know what it is about actors but some of us are inherently lazy.”

He clearly isn’t lazy at all these days, though it’s hard to get to the bottom of who he really is. On the one hand, he keeps joking about being a layabout, on the other, he’s desperate to be taken seriously as an actor, and only that. When I try to ask about other areas of his life, he puts up wall after wall. He will talk about Brexit and the possibility of Irish reunification off the record, but has to “steer clear of politics” when the tape is running “so I don’t get shot when I get home”.

He doesn’t want to give me anecdotes from his life, because that is “trivial”, and says he is worried that “you just slip into that celebrity bullshit and people don’t give a fuck about what you’re doing with the show. And I’ve noticed it’s happened – you stick on a tuxedo at an awards ceremony and people then start saying things, there are rumours of other things, you take a top off, and then it’s madness. I’d like to be casual about it, but I just can’t. Things blow up, you know? It’s interesting what people care about.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Turner in the BBC miniseries And Then There Were None, based on the Agatha Christie novel. Photograph: Robert Viglasky

A couple of weeks later I speak to him again for a catch-up call. He is back home in Dublin, recovering from a stag do with old schoolfriends he hadn’t seen for 15 years. They leased a boat and sailed down the river Shannon for two days. Fifteen years seems like a really long time. “I know. I don’t know what kept us,” he says, “it was only an old email address that sort of reignited it. One of the boys, in a last-ditch effort, said, ‘Hey dude I’m getting married, if you’re around.’ I just went, ‘Holy shit, that’s James.’ He was using the email address I had when I was a kid. It was just one of those occasions of serendipity, where everything comes together.”

So they sailed a boat down an enormous river, got quite lost, “and there wasn’t a phone charger between 10 of us, it was desperate times,” he laughs. “At one stage we were floating around and we didn’t know where we were, it all got a bit crazy for a while. It was brilliant.” Did he take a turn at being captain? “Oh, I certainly didn’t take the helm. I had way more important things to do than that,” he says. “Like boozing, and the general craic.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Samuel Barnett as John Millais, Sam Crane as Fred Walters, Aidan Turner as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Rafe Spall as William Holman Hunt. Photograph: BBC/Laurence Cendrowicz

He has a few Irish friends in London – including three women who live on a houseboat, where he often stays, even though it moves round the Regent’s Canal every couple of weeks as they don’t own a fixed mooring. He doesn’t take the helm there, either, “They shout at me a lot, and I can’t do it. They’re well capable and don’t need my help; they’re three powerful women.” When he first moved to London, he lived in a flat above Mornington Crescent tube station, he says. What, I say, over that little minicab office?

“That’s right!” he says, with the greatest enthusiasm I’ve ever heard from him. “The one with the yellow sign!” But that is basically a traffic island on a big London junction, with a massive nightclub across the road and a tube station rumbling underneath. “I know! It was right before Being Human. I shared with a friend and it was my first experience of London. Living in Camden, at 24 – I was loving every bit of it. It was a madhole! It was crazy, but I loved it and that was my vibe back then.” I rather wish it was his vibe now. But I suspect it still is, when the journalists aren’t watching.

• Poldark is on BBC1 on 4 September.