Speaking inside the foyer of the iconic Savoy cinema on O’Connell Street for its first screening in Ireland, Turner said it was “quite special” to be home.
“It’s always nice to come home. I don’t get to do it that often. It really feels great, and different to anywhere else we will be doing this,” he told the Irish Independent as family, friends and figures from Irish cinema stepped in through the red carpeted entrance.
Turner plays irreverent TV presenter Declan O’Hara at the heart of a power struggle for control of the airwaves in Rivals, a Disney+ adaptation of Cooper’s raunchy best-selling novel from the 1980s.
Turner’s character has his mind set on being the best TV anchor Corinium television has ever seen until he realises that the managing director, Lord Tony Baddingham, played by David Tennant, is a crook who has recruited him merely to help retain the franchise.
Smurfit plays his glamorous albeit self-absorbed wife Maud O’Hara, who is by his side and determined to stay on top.
Cooper told the BBC this week that the show will contain “lots and lots of sex”.
“You are going to get horses, you are going to get dogs, you are going to get to cry, you are going to get to fall in love with so many people and you are going to get Jilly Cooper’s novel brought to life,” Smurfit said.
The Irish Film and Television Award-winning actress said she grew up reading Cooper’s novel Rivals as well as having “read all her books”.
“To be in the Cooperverse is just such a delight and something I would have crawled over hot coals to do. I’m very lucky,” she said.
Set against the backdrop of the 1980s during Margaret Thatcher’s tenure at 10 Downing Street, morality is all but thrown out the window.
“It was lovely to be able to play a woman so complex and vulnerable and emotional and over the top and outrageous and selfish and nihilistic. She was just divine, every day you never knew quite what she could do,” she said.
The show premieres on Disney + on October 18 in eight parts.
