Poldark season 4: Star Aidan Turner chimes in on shirtless photo debate

Poldark star Aidan Turner has now added some of his own thoughts to what’s been a fairly active discussion as of late — whether or not the press has driven itself into a frenzy of objectification over a recent promotional photo for the show. The image above has been plastered atop many publications over the course of the past couple of weeks, and with that leads to a debate as to whether or not the series and the press is placing too much attention on Ross’ shirtlessness — and whether all of this constitutes a double standard. After all, what would the reaction be in 2018 if there were as many cover stories on the physical appearance of a female performer in a television show?

Speaking to BBC News, Turner responded to some of the controversy, and also a piece in the Radio Times that closely examined the coverage of the shirtless photo:

“These photographs were stills from the show, so in context it makes sense … “When you pull them out and stick a photograph on the front page of a national newspaper it becomes something very different.

“We’re not doing anything in our show that… I mean, Game of Thrones probably has far more nudity, or Vikings, or any of these shows, than we would have … So I never quite understood why our show was picked in particular, or why these images were concentrated on more so than any other shows, or other images of actors who’ve gone topless for any sex scenes.”

Basically, this is a case of one photo snowballing into something so much more. It happened back in season 1, as well, and we feel like the reason Poldark gets it more than some other shows is that there is some restraint elsewhere. This isn’t a show that is hyper-sexualized so when these moments happen, it stands out a little bit more.

In the end, we do see where many different sides are coming from with this particular debate. Do we think that this is something to eat in Turner necessarily thinks about a lot while filming? Probably not. Yet, we do think that there is an intentionality behind these photos being the specific ones that the BBC decides to release, knowing that shirtless Ross automatically leads to more attention and viewership towards the show. The major concern that we have is that so much attention gets put on to the appearance of the character that this at times causes there to be less attention on the fantastic performance Turner gives as the character. We never want that for any man or woman working in TV.

Related – Be sure to get some more coverage on Sunday night’s episode

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