Poldark producer: We didn’t audition Aidan Turner with his top off, honest
The team that cast the TV series insist they were 'pretty innocent' about the amount of times Ross appears topless in the drama
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Your support makes all the difference.He’s the ab-tastic actor who has been linked to a supposed bump in Cornish property prices, but Poldark producers claim they had no idea Aidan Turner’s torso would cause such a flurry of national interest.
Damien Timmer, one of the BBC drama’s executive producers, claims the team who cast the crusading lead actor was “pretty innocent” about the amount of times Turner’s Ross takes his shirt off.
“Ross does it in the book, he goes swimming, he washes himself clean. And he’s a farmer, and it’s very hot in Cornwall! Besides, we didn’t audition him with his clothes off,” he told Radio Times.
Turner seems equally modest about his mass appeal to women up and down the country, claiming he has not read any press about himself or the show.
But he has been unable to avoid the half-naked picture of himself holding a scythe as a make-up artist paints a tattoo on him, which has graced the front pages of newspapers across the country.
The 31-year-old told the magazine: “It was quite odd to walk into a newsagent and see myself holding a scythe with a peculiar smile on my face.”
Turner is apparently unaware that his hair has his own Twitter account, that there are Playmobil figures of his character Ross skinny-dipping, or that George Osborne has demanded eight more series of the BBC drama.
Viewers who take more of an interest in Turner’s television output than the actor does will be rewarded with a second series of Poldark next year.
It is thought the TV series, based on Winston Graham’s novels Poldark’s Cornwall, could continue for a third series and possibly beyond given there are 12 books.
Writer Debbie Horsfield said the next series will see Ross bring himself “to the brink of disaster” with Demelza taken along with him.
The Poldark finale airs on Sunday 26 April at 9pm on BBC1.
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