Mr Darcy’s wet shirt moment in Pride & Prejudice. Connell’s chain in Normal People. The Duke licking a spoon in Bridgerton. To add to this TV thirst-trap cannon we now have Alex Hassell’s Rupert Campbell-Black sensually eating a jam roly-poly in Rivals, aka the best thing on TV right now.
The eight-part adaptation of Jilly Cooper's 1988 bonkbuster, set in the fictional Cotswolds county of Rutshire and the cut throat world of 80s regional TV, is brought to life by a pitch perfect British ensemble, with Hassell as Cooper’s dastardly playboy. Was he prepared become a national heartthrob? ‘No, not at all,’ he laughs. Although he had an inkling of what he was letting himself in for when he signed up for the show. ‘My mum and dad had the books on their top shelf, next to The Joy of Sex.’ Appropriate. ‘I remember thinking as a kid that they must be racy,’ he says, ‘and when I got the role it was made very clear to me that playing Rupert would involve being incorrigible and taking my kit off.’
There’s a lot of sex in Rivals - par for the course when it comes to Cooper content. ‘The fun of sex is a big part of the show,’ says Hassell, 44. He’s not wrong. Ten seconds into the first episode and RCB is joining the mile high club on Concorde in time to Robert Palmer’s Addicted To Love. Hassell credits an army of intimacy coordinators with steering the sex scene ship on set. ‘Thank goodness they exist,’ he says, ‘it’s bizarre to think that until recently they didn’t.’
Best known for roles in His Dark Materials, The Boys and an acclaimed stint as Henry V for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Hassell – who is married to fellow actor Emma King (the pair met at drama school) – is the epitome of tall, dark and handsome. But not, as Cooper stans noted, the blond-haired, blue-eyed lothario described in the books. In the same year that Billie Piper wore a £10k wig in Scoop and more than £40k worth of wigs were made for Nicola Coughlan in Bridgerton, why did Disney hold back the hair dye for one of Britain’s best loved literary heroes? ‘To be honest, I don’t actually know,’ says Hassell, who reportedly beat out more than 600 actors to bag the role, ‘I think they felt that I had some important Rupert-ness that carried further.’
He won Cooper’s blessing at any rate and the authour was a regular visitor to the set. Daunting surely: Colin Firth never had to deal with Jane Austen looking over his shoulder. ‘She was always very respectful and encouraging,’ says Hassell, ‘but there were some things she filtered - she would remind me of how competitive and alpha he is if it became apparent I was trying to endear him to a modern audience and she was right - there has to be something to grapple with.’
The script doesn’t swerve controversy. The love story between Campbell-Black and Taggie O’Hara (Bella Maclean) kicks off with a problematic. Rivals is a period drama set against a backdrop of eighties excess – and morals. ‘The show shines a light on how far we’ve come since then,’ says Hassell, ‘and it’s important for the arc of the character and his relationship with Taggie, not to shy away from the fact that Rupert is a total shit - if you stop at episode two, he’s just an arsehole, but that’s where he has to come back from.’
So what does the prep for playing a Jilly Cooper anti-hero involve? ‘Fake tan, curling my eyelashes, doing lots of pull-ups, press-ups and learning to ride a horse,’ Hassell runs through the list on his fingers, ‘I have to do quite a lot of smouldering.’
When audiences meet RCB in Rivals, he’s a retired international show jumper and Britain’s newly minted Minister for Sport. ‘He’s dripping in privilege,’ explains Hassell, ‘he went to Harrow, lives in the upper echelons of society and has been adored by men and women alike for as long as he can remember. I went to a comprehensive in Essex, grew up lower-middle-class; my dad was a vicar, my mum ended up as a hospice nurse. They’re pretty different ways of moving through the world.’
Hassell is getting a taste of those Campbell-Black levels of adoration now, though, something his co-star Aidan Turner, who plays Rivals’ fiery TV journalist Declan O’Hara, knows a thing or two about after setting pulses racing as the BBC’s scythe-wielding Poldark. ‘One of the most useful things Aidan said to me is: it’s alright! Things can happen that you have to navigate, but mostly people are nice and respectful.’
Meanwhile, Danny Dyer (who gives a genius comedic performance as Rivals’ resident tech tycoon Freddie Jones) has assumed the role of Hassell’s hype man. ‘He’s been excitedly saying that everything’s going to change for me, but who knows?’ Cue the Hassell hysteria.
Stream all episodes of Rivals on Disney+