Aidan Turner and Victoria Smurfit are certainly no strangers to a sex scene in Rivals.
Playing married couple Declan and Maud O’Hara in the TV adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooper’s racy novels, the pair have had their fair share of on-screen bonking over the show’s first two seasons.
In fact, both actors’ very first day on the set of season two was filming that raunchy shower scene.
“What’s more appropriate for Rivals than being in a shower, wearing a plaster over your lady biscuit?” Victoria told the Radio Times around the time of season two’s release.
Luckily, she said that her natural chemistry with Aidan helps in these more intimate scenes.
“Aidan’s a dote of a man,” she enthused. “I trust him implicitly, so it’s just two Paddies going at it.”
Victoria did admit that she worried about getting in shape when stripping down for Rivals’ many sex scenes, but compared it to “painting the laundry room”. “Does it need doing? Yes. Am I going to do it? No,” she said.
“Before the scene I feel like I’m at the edge of a black hole, but the minute I drop my gown, it’s fine,” Victoria continued.
“The crew have seen it all before. It’s just, ‘Here you go, lads and lasses, it’s all a bit lower than it was last year’, and we crack on.”
Aidan was seemingly less worried than his co-star about keeping fit for the small screen, saying he felt like his character would be too career-obsessed to work out.
“We don’t really see Declan train, his passion is his work. You have to work hard to achieve certain things with other roles, but that wasn’t required here, which was freeing,” the Poldark actor admitted.
As for getting naked together and filming these down-and-dirty scenes, Aidan said he and his co-star are “good pals” who “know how to support each other” in these moments.
Meanwhile, speaking at the Hay Festival in May, Victoria shared a story about how she and Aidan had originally been supposed to wear “modesty equipment” for the shoot.
“It was long, pink and a fucking plaster,” she told the crowd. “You take the plaster, you jam it on and hope it stays there.”
Victoria added: “I have to be honest with you – under a storming shower, it doesn’t stay there for long. You give up. You just realise that glue is not what it was in the 80s.”
She previously praised the show’s “fantastic” intimacy coordinators to The Gloss, thanking them for “how much they bring to the camera angles and the storytelling”.
“It’s not just to protect the actors; it’s much deeper,” she added.
Three new episodes of Rivals premiered on Disney+ on Wednesday 11 November, with the remaining three episodes of season two arriving weekly.
