Tories, bonking and naked tennis: David Tennant and the Rivals cast on bringing Jilly Cooper’s novel to screen

It’s been almost 40 years since Jilly Cooper released her scandalous, sex-filled novel ‘Rivals’, and now it’s finally been adapted for the small screen. Ellie Muir speaks to the cast about playing posh, and showrunner Dominic Treadwell-Collins tells her about the love letters he sent the author to try to convince her to come on board

It all begins with a moan. In the opening seconds of Rivals, the Disney+ adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s bestselling bonkbuster, breathy cries of ecstasy flutter across a peppy orchestral score, as we’re introduced to a naked bottom belonging to lothario Rupert Campbell-Black. He’s a Tory MP, and he’s humping a journalist in a Concorde loo. When he’s done, he proudly returns to his seat – gold-framed aviator shades and all – as the women in the cabin practically faint at his feet.

I should probably make this clear: the rutting happens on every surface possible in Rivals. It occurs within TV studio storage cupboards, atop office desks and on four-poster beds in stately homes. Would it be a spoiler to tell you there’s naked tennis? It’s a sensory overload – but then again, it is set in the glorious Cooper-verse: the 1980s world of the Tory elite living in the Cotswolds, who deal exclusively in excess. It’s a setting that’s enchanted (and titillated) Cooper fans for more than three decades through the 12 books in her Rutshire Chronicles, including the mischievously named Riders, Tackle!, Mount! and Score!

At the centre of this horny parade is jockey-turned-Conservative sports minister Rupert, played by chiselled actor Alex Hassell. The hunky horserider is described in Cooper’s books as “Britain’s sexiest man”, so no pressure, then. In order to encourage the actor to fully embrace his heartthrob status, Rivals showrunner Dominic Treadwell-Collins had a plan. He told the crew that whenever Hassell entered a room, they must gawp at him as if he were a megastar like Harry Styles.

“That’s not my day-to-day life,” laughs Hassell as we speak in a Soho hotel. “There was definitely a wish fulfilment aspect to it. It was a great way to live.” He says it’s disappointing now that this charade is over. “My wife swoons when I walk in a room but that’s about it,” he says, with mock self-pity. That’s when his co-star, David Tennant – who plays Lord Tony Baddingham, the conniving head honcho of a TV studio called Corinium – steps in to reassure him. “Stop it, we all swoon over you!”

There’s been a lot of sweet talking to bring all this swooning to life on the small screen. Treadwell-Collins, like Rishi Sunak, has been hooked on Cooper since he was a teen. He spent the past 10 years sending dozens of love letters to Cooper, telling her how much he adored Rivals – and that he wanted the rights. After years of communication via her agent, Cooper finally said yes. “I was told, ‘Jilly wants to give you the rights and said because your letter was so well-written, you should write the script too,”’ a chirpy Treadwell-Collins tells me. He was working on EastEnders and other projects at the time. “I was going through the adoption process with my husband and so much was going on. But I kept on coming back to the script.”

But when Treadwell-Collins began to contact prospective TV studios, he found that execs – both men and women, but mainly men – were dismissive of the idea due to preconceived ideas they had about Cooper’s work, despite having never read it. “Everyone said ‘Jilly Cooper, oh, it’s a bit silly,’” recalls the director. “But it’s not silly! She’s an amazing storyteller. There’s a really complicated love story at the heart of it. She pulls apart Britishness and class and the way we all behave towards each other.” He remembers seeing Rivals on his mother’s bookcase as a child and knowing it was naughty (the suggestive covers of all of Cooper’s books were a huge giveaway). “I think it was a group of people who saw Jilly’s work as naff but another group who saw it as dangerous and sexy,” he says. “I knew I wanted to turn it into telly.”

Did the actors have the same relationship with Cooper’s work? Tennant admits to making judgements about the books, which eventually didn’t carry when he read them himself. “I suppose as a teenager in Paisley in the Eighties, I didn’t feel like I was the target audience,” the Scottish actor says. “I had made assumptions that were slightly unfair to just how nuanced and clever the books are.” The very fact that there’s an adaptation more than 30 years later proves the intelligence of Cooper’s writing, he says. “It’s not the initial thing people recognise about it, but these books have tenacity.”

‘Rivals’ stars (from left) Nafessa Williams, Aidan Turner, David Tennant, Alex Hassell and Bella Maclean (Supplied)

The next thing Tennant knew, he had been dunked in fake tan, his hair perfectly coiffed and a cigar permanently fixed to his lips as showbiz tyrant Tony. When he first saw his hair, he reckoned he looked like the suave French actor Louis Jourdan. “Hmmm, I was quite pleased with that," he ponders. "And then a couple of days later, I saw a picture of myself and I thought, no, it’s more Terry Wogan. They are both good touchstones for me.” He read the biography of former TV super-boss Michael Grade to help him embody his character, too. “Visually, he became quite a source material with the braces and the large cigars.”

As we’ve established, the characters in Rivals are insanely posh. When they’re not doing the deed, they spend their days strolling around country grounds, buying horses and/or football clubs and intermittently receiving calls from Margaret Thatcher. I note that it’s an ironic detail, given how Thatcher’s attitudes towards sex and promiscuity contradict the indulgent world we see in the series. “Are you suggesting there was some hypocrisy in the world of the government?” teases Tennant. “It’s not the Eighties I remember. But I remember it being the kind of era of excess… the money on an almost gross level of conspicuous consumption.”

David Tennant as Lord Tony Baddingham, the conniving head honcho of Corinium TV (Robert Viglasky)

Hassell agrees, pointing out that there are still different rules for the elite and extremely wealthy – the sort of standards that make his character untouchable. “Rupert gets away with absolutely terrible things because he has money and privilege. There’s a different rule for the super-rich… it’s a great time for the show to be coming out.”

One character who finds himself in a bitter rivalry with Rupert is chat show host Declan O’Hara, played by Poldark actor Aidan Turner, who discovers that both his wife, Maud (Victoria Smurfit), and daughter, Taggie (Bella Maclean) – like every other woman in the series – have a crush on the sports minister. Turner thinks the elite world in the show is entirely transactional. “They’re either denying their class, imposing their class or escaping their class. I think sex is used in that way too. Almost for all of the characters, sex is a tool in some way, even if it’s a tool for enjoyment,” he says. His character Declan, who is Irish, never fully seems pulled in by the class system that those around him are obsessed with. “Declan would never trust the British class system,” he says. “He thinks the class system is weird – he’s dubious about British politics generally speaking, as I think a lot of Irish people will be.”

Alex Hassell plays the hunky Tory MP Rupert Campbell-Black (Robert Viglasky)

Getting to grips with that class system was an education for Nafessa Williams, who is the only American in the cast. She plays TV industry ballbuster Cameron Cooke, a colleague of Tony’s, who has flown into Corinium from New York. The sheer Britishness of Cooper’s books left Williams with lots of questions for her co-stars. “Someone mentioned going to the loo – I had no clue what that was… like, do I need to come with you? Do I stay? What is that?” she says in her Philly accent. It was helpful, then, that the cast had a WhatsApp group where she could vent. “I remember texting the group… What the hell is Boots? I only eat fish, where can I get it from?” she laughs. “Didn’t I hear you say, who the f*** are the Tories one day?” Turner asks her. She nods. “Yeah, like who the f*** is that?”

I couldn’t possibly say what happened at Jilly Cooper’s party

Alex Hassell

Speaking of Tories: it was during filming when our former PM admitted that Cooper’s racy 1985 book Riders was one of his favourites. That moment sent the internet into a frenzy. Everyone imagined Sunak hunkering down with a hot mug of cocoa as he devoured the Rupert and Taggie sex scenes. It similarly caused a buzz among the cast and crew. “Jilly has fans everywhere,” laughs Treadwell-Collins, recalling that day. “And whatever your political views are, someone saying they like Jilly’s books is making everyone think you’re a populist person. I think that’s what we took from it.”

There were many days on set where the cast were in fits of laughter, the actors all say. They got on so well that Cooper invited them to a party at her home – Rutshire style. When I try to get the goss on what goes down at a Cooper house party, Hassell doesn’t give too much away. “I couldn’t possibly say what happened,” he jokes. “We saw the cabin under a tree in her garden where she wrote Rivals. It looks out over this valley, where she imagined Declan’s house would have been.” All sounds very wholesome. Surely he’s being coy?

He gives in. “There were vol-au-vents and lots of champagne...” Well, it’s Jilly Cooper, darling. One would not expect anything less.

‘Rivals’ premieres 18 October exclusively on Disney+