Back when the British actor Callum Turner was working as a model in Japan, he earned himself a nickname. “Maguro man,” Turner says, with a hint of pride. Excuse me? “It means tuna man! I had this one sushi place I went to everyday, I’d walk in and the chef would say, ‘maguro man’, because all I’d have for lunch is six pieces of tuna.” The diet wasn’t born out of a love of raw fish, but of occupational necessity. “I had to lose loads of weight,” Turner says. His natural waist is a trim 34 inches; designers wanted 28. “It was hard, but I did it. I can be very militant with my mind.” Turns out the insouciant air of his best characters, embodied by his bad boy lothario Anatole in War & Peace, belies an inner steel.
Even before the success of that Tolstoy adaptation, the 33-year-old was a familiar face on British telly. There was ITV’s Leaving (2012), a Mrs Robinson-esque drama in which he played Helen McCrory’s younger lover, and the E4 whodunit Glue (2014). Later, Turner was excellent as a soldier in crisis in the wildly popular conspiracy series The Capture (2019). But it was his role as Eddie Redmayne’s brother in the Harry Potter-Fantastic Beasts franchise that awakened international audiences to Turner’s charms. “Halfway through the audition, I just grabbed Eddie and kissed him right on his face,” Turner recalls. “It was a bold move,” he laughs. “Got to make them notice ya.” He was hard to ignore too as the seductive Frank Churchill in Autumn de Wilde’s deliciously frothy Emma adaptation.
