David Tennant and Aidan Turner Team Up for Jilly Cooper Adaptation 'Rivals'
It's a running joke among Anglophiles that there are only so many actors in England. It's why we tend to see the same faces pop up in all sorts of series, year in and year out, from period dramas to police procedurals. But every so often the stars align just so, and several of our ultimate favorites somehow end up in a project together. Such is the case with Rivals, a Disney+ UK original series that will feature two of our all-time favorite performers among its leads: David Tennant (Doctor Who) and Aidan Turner (Poldark).
Rivals is an adaptation of the second installment in bestselling author Jilly Cooper's Rutshire Chronicles, a soapy series of novels that follows the stories of the upper-class families of a fictional British county and features sex, scandal, betrayal, and everything in between.
Set amid all the drama and excess of 1980s England, the eight-part series will explore the cutthroat world of British television, as a longstanding rivalry between two powerful men slowly comes to a head. (Get it...Rivals?) The Tragedy of Macbeth's Alex Hassell stars as the incorrigible and dangerously charismatic Rupert Campbell Black, a Tory MP and former Olympian. Tennant is his ambitious, single-minded, and utterly egotistical Rutshire neighbor, Lord Tony Babbington, who also happens to be the head of Corinium Television. And as the two men lock horns over the future of the company, it sounds like everyone around them will be caught in the crossfire.
