Rivals, based on Dame Jilly Cooper’s beloved Rutshire Chronicles, plunges viewers back into a gloriously heightened 1980s world of country estates, horse-mad aristocrats, power struggles, huge hair and unapologetic bed-hopping. At its centre is Rupert Campbell-Black, played by Alex Hassell, the dangerously charismatic former showjumper whose orbit pulls everyone else into chaos.
Into this mix steps Rupert Everett as Malise Gordon – an old-school horseman who once managed the showjumping team and is now married to Campbell-Black’s ex-wife, acting as a kind of moral (and occasionally literal) steadying hand.
In the second series the battle for the Central South West television franchise reaches fever pitch as the war between Corinium and Venturer enters a dangerous new phase. More ruthless than ever, Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) is determined to dismantle his foes piece by piece, weaponising scandal and manipulating those closest to him to maintain his grip on power.
Amid the hedonistic glamour of ’80s excess, the personal lives of our Rutshire heroes spiral into chaos. Marriages fracture under the weight of ambition, illicit affairs threaten to shatter families and long-buried secrets ignite with explosive consequences. And after a dramatic mid-season finale, viewers face an agonising wait until November to discover how it all plays out.
The ensemble cast includes Aidan Turner, Danny Dyer, Nafessa Williams, Claire Rushbrook, Emily Atack, Bella Maclean, Katherine Parkinson, Victoria Smurfit, Luca Pasqualino and Hayley Atwell as Rupert Campbell-Black’s ex-wife, Helen.
For Rupert, joining Rivals was irresistible. He’d watched and loved the first series, admired the care taken to recreate Jilly Cooper’s ’80s – and, crucially, already counted Dame Jilly herself as a friend. Playing Malise, he says, became both a tribute to her and a reminder of a world that’s fast disappearing.
The Norfolk-born actor didn’t have to be coaxed into Dame Jilly’s universe – he knocked on the door himself.
‘I loved it – I thought it was beautifully made,’ he says. ‘The ’80s is a difficult era in one sense, because it’s similar to now but completely different. The acting was all great, very well directed, very well written. At first, I thought, God, why wasn’t I in it?’
Rupert already knew Dame Jilly socially, so he did what any self-respecting star with a soft spot for Rutshire might do: he rang her. ‘I was friends with Jilly, so I approached her, and then I suddenly got the part.’
Born in Burnham Deepdale and raised in the area (Lady Glenconner is a great friend and he appears in her books), BAFTA and Golden Globe-nominated Rupert’s breakthrough as an actor came in
Julian Mitchell’s acclaimed play and film Another Country.
He went on to star in hit films including My Best Friend’s Wedding, An Ideal Husband, A Royal Night Out, the Shrek movies (as the voice of Prince Charming) and played Oscar Wilde in The Happy Prince, which he wrote and directed.
On stage he has starred in plays including The Vortex, The Judas Kiss, Pygmalion and Uncle Vanya, which he also directed.
He has written about his extraordinary showbiz life in several jaw-droppingly frank autobiographies and last year his first short story collection, The American No, was published.
Alongside Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley he is a patron of Norfolk Screen, which promotes the county as a film and TV location.
For him, part of the appeal of Rivals lies in Dame Jilly’s bracingly un‑prudish take on desire. ‘I loved that Jilly advocates bonking without the kind of serious recriminations that have become our normal way of dealing with it today. Her attitude to sex is so refreshing compared to today’s mealy‑mouthed tiptoeing around the subject. We’re now almost as complex about sex as we might have been in the 19th century,’ he says.
That frankness, he feels, is one reason her books now feel newly vital.
‘People wrote her off slightly at the start, but I think she’s an extraordinary writer – a kind of ’70s, ’80s Jane Austen,’ he says. ‘She probably had to put up with quite a lot – some people were very cruel about her writing. Then the books were a huge success. It was lovely that she died knowing they’d come back and people were adoring them.’
Dame Jilly had been a regular presence on set during filming ‒ she sadly died after a fall at her home, aged 88.
‘When I was shooting Rivals, she came on set every day and we had lunch, and
I thought, God, I’m going to start a wonderful new friendship with her,’ Rupert recalls. ‘She was lively, humble, curious, wildly intelligent, terribly funny – a total icon. It was really, really sad when she died. She died a week after my own mother, so the two things together were just terrible.’
Although the series is titled Rivals, Rupert’s character, Malise Gordon, gallops in from another Jilly Cooper favourite, Riders.
‘He’s not really in the story of Rivals much – he’s really more from Riders,’ he explains. ‘He managed the show-jumping team, and his role in this series is that he’s the only person to whom Rupert Campbell‑Black really listens, or who could possibly control him in any sense. And he’s married to Rupert’s ex‑wife and is a kind of stepfather to Rupert’s children. Rupert gets into trouble and Malise is there.
‘It’s all really about Rupert,’ he continues. ‘We’re just little reflections of various sides of him. Helen is obviously wounded by Rupert’s infidelities, and I’m not sure how she and Malise are getting on. Rupert is the vortex of a cyclone and various things happen around him. We’re one of those things.’
Rivals is rooted in horses, stables and muddy fields, which meant Rupert getting into the saddle.
‘I rode as a child and on and off all my life. It’s just that I’m so old now that it’s almost impossible to open my hips enough,’ he laughs. ‘But I managed. They have lovely horses...I can’t get on and off with much aplomb, so I had to be careful about how
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I showed myself, because Malise is meant to be a very good rider. I think I pulled it off.’
Dame Jilly, reassuringly, agreed. ‘I was pleased that she thought I had a good seat on a horse, which was very nice,’ he says.
For Rupert, filming in ‘Rutshire’ ‒ in and around the Cotswolds‒ meant a rare luxury: work that didn’t require endless hotel rooms and airports.
‘It was October when I was there, and it was beautiful,’ he says. ‘We were shooting quite near where I live, and it was a great pleasure. I’d so enjoyed watching the first series that it was just enormous fun to come into it. And to have Jilly there – it felt like a kind of coming‑home experience.’
Rupert is aware of how much care has gone into recreating that mid‑’80s atmosphere.
‘They’ve put so much effort into making it feel authentic,’ he says. ‘Part of that is down to the director of photography – it’s beautifully shot. They’ve got great locations and they took real care. You feel you’ve gone into that period. They really do Jilly justice.’
If Dame Jilly’s books were once dismissed as frothy bonkbusters, Rupert sees them – and this TV incarnation – as something more serious: a record of a vanished way of life. This series, you even have to watch it as you would have done back in the ’80s. Rather than bingeing the whole boxset in one go, a new episode is being released every Friday.
‘This TV adaptation seems to be becoming a legacy. It’s a wonderful legacy,’ he says. ‘As everyone peels off from Tom Stoppard to Jilly Cooper, and we move more firmly into this kind of progressive, puritanical, angry, snitty, backbiting virtual world that really takes place on an iPhone, I think Jilly’s legacy and this TV company in the country is a kind of allegory for everything I feel we’ve lost – to do with eccentricity, personality and ways of life.’
He compares her to a Restoration playwright. ‘She becomes almost like Vanbrugh – she shows us an era that’s now almost ancient history, because things move so fast,’ he says.
‘The ’80s were the product of the ’70s and ’60s, and really, everything goes back to the Second World War. By the ’80s, you had the remains of a world – people who’d been through the ’60s, had free love and the Rolling Stones, then the economic crash of the late ’70s, then the extraordinary resurgence with Thatcher and deregulation. Jilly’s world is, in a way, the remains of something 19th century, too. It’s an extraordinary era. Looking back, it seems like a golden era – it wasn’t at the time, but it looks like that now. That’s what makes the series so unique. They’ve looked into it carefully and with detail.’.
Rivals is on Disney+. The second half of series two will be released in November
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