Aidan Turner, is that you? The Poldark star seems to have grown a nifty disguise, perhaps so that I don’t ask him any annoying questions about male objectification. But no, that’s not it. The thick brown brush of a moustache above his top lip is actually for a role in Jilly Cooper’s raunchy Rivals, which has been adapted for Disney+. And sometimes even he gets confused about who the guy with the ’tache is. “You walk by a Boots,” he says, mimicking catching himself in a window reflection, “and you’re like, ‘Ahh, s***. That’s me. I’m that creep!’” He won’t be keeping it, then? “No way!” he replies, with jovial outrage. “No way. I find it a touch embarrassing. People don’t know that it’s not a choice, you know what I mean? They think you’re loving this thing.”
Obviously, disguise or otherwise, I am still going to ask Turner annoying questions about male objectification. Since taking his top off in the BBC’s historic drama Poldark in 2015, setting hearts aflutter, the Irish actor has been on the receiving end of relentless hand-wringing questions about the politics and ethics of objectifying men. I confess the debate has always frustrated me. It seems to deliberately miss the point: finding people attractive isn’t illegal! The problem is when a person is only allowed to be an object, which happens to women more than men. “It probably feels different than it would for a woman, certainly,” he muses. “Some women might feel there’s a danger that comes with it. I don’t feel like I’m in danger. If a woman is objectified and she has men leering at her, that quickly becomes a different situation to one that I might be in, even if the situation can be read as similar.”
