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Alex Hassell is not the ‘blond and blue-eyed Adonis’ that writer Jilly Cooper envisioned for her character Rupert Campbell-Black. But the author is now 100 per cent behind Disney’s casting decision
Jilly Cooper has defended the casting of Alex Hassell as the leading man in Disney’s Rivals – despite him looking nothing like the “blond and beautiful” man she described in her books.
The author of the 1980s bonkbusters admits she was “slightly concerned”, when writer and producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins decided Hassell – the first actor to be auditioned for the role – was better than any of the others who followed.
But she says his acting skills and dashing good looks soon won her over and it was decided charater Rupert Campbell-Black would no longer be blond – although even Hassell himself assumed he’d be having his hair dyed or wearing a wig.
“I’m over the moon that Alex is playing my superhero Rupert Campbell-Black,” Dame Jilly, 87, insisted. “I was slightly concerned at first because my Rupert in the book is a blond and blue-eyed Adonis, and Alex is very dark-eyed and olive-skinned but he is such a good actor, who’s done a great deal of Shakespeare, that the moment he appears on screen, he exudes ruthless glamour and later even tenderness and vulnerability.
“The more I see of him, the better and sexier he gets. And he’s very good. They’re building Rupert out as a multi-layered character, which they’ve done brilliantly.” The show, released on Disney+ last week, has proved a huge hit and has got everyone talking – but some die-hard fans struggling to accept Alex as their Rupert, however good he is as an actor.
One wrote on the Horse & Hound forum they were “disappointed” with the casting. “He’s described as ‘blond and beautiful’ in the books and his looks are often how he gets away with his behaviour.” Another advised: “I’ve decided to treat it as a completely new experience and not link it to the book at all, so I don’t get annoyed at all the discrepancies.”
Even the actor, 44, has admitted that when he saw who he was playing, he tried to get out of the audition. “I read the description and just thought, ‘They’re not going to cast me as that role.’ I phoned my agent and said that the project was good and really interesting, but I just thought there’d be no point – he’s blond and blue-eyed in the book. But they convinced me otherwise, and somehow I ended up getting the part, and then had to try and get over the idea that he had that description.”
He says it took a while for him to have the confidence to believe he could be a different sort of Rupert. “I assumed I was going to have my hair dyed and maybe even have contact lenses – but that was just never a discussion. I think they just decided, for reasons I’m still not sure of, that they would lean towards the actor that they found.
“I think they met lots of blond people, and I know, obviously, in Jilly’s mind, Rupert has looked a certain way for her entire imaginative history of writing it. But I think, ultimately, they felt that there was something I could put across that they thought was more important, that that was what Rupert was, rather than having blond hair and blue eyes.”
But since filming the role he grew to love it so much that he says he didn’t steal one prop from the set. “We are all so keen for the show to go again that I didn’t want to do anything to affect that by nicking any of the props.”
The series has been deemed a hit with 441,000 tuning in to the first episode during the first 24 hours of release last Friday and reviewers awarding it five stars for its “fabulous awfulness”.
