Until he was cast as the lusted-after antihero in the Disney+ adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooper’s 1988 bonkbuster, Rivals, Alex Hassell had never even heard of Rupert Campbell-Black. Sitting in Repton Boxing Club in Bethnal Green, after dancing around the ring in a variety of high-fashion outfits for our shoot, the 45-year-old actor tells me he’s glad he had no idea of Cooper’s ardent, engaged fandom. Her saucy novels have sold 11 million copies in the UK alone and there was minor uproar when the dark-haired Hassell was cast as Cooper’s flaxen lothario. “The thing that made me nervous is the level of potency that Rupert is meant to have,” he says. “I thought I’d be really uncomfortable in that skin. I didn’t get that he had loads of other levels to him.”
As the host of Rivals: The Official Podcast, this is my fourth time interviewing the actor and I am always struck anew by the extraordinary cloak he pulls on to play RCB: showjumper, politician, TV executive and epic slut. In person, Hassell, who has been married to fellow actor Emma King for 15 years, is thoughtful, curious, witty and low-key, while as Rupert he is 100 per cent distilled arrogance: all laconic, leonine prowl and dismissive, crystal-cut RP.
There was extensive beauty prep — lashings of fake tan; hair and eyelashes dyed (“because I’m quite grey”); even a stunt bottom for season one (he built his own bottom for season two, something he is immensely proud of, because it required daily toiling in the gym) — and Rupert holds himself like an off-duty model, which meant Hassell “had to be so self-conscious about how I held my body,” he says. “I got in and out of the car 20 times, to do it in the most economical, cool way — because [Rupert] should be really cool, way cooler than me.”
Alex Hassell by numbers
600 Number of hopefuls who went for the role of Rupert Campbell-Black in Rivals
10 Number of months the rivals cast and crew spent filming the second series
2011 Year Hassell married fellow actor Emma King. The couple met at drama school
6 Number of inches hassell lost from his waist after being diagnosed with a severe allium allergy
1,000 Number of pieces in the jigsaw puzzles Hassell likes to do with his morning coffee
11 million Number of books Dame Jilly Cooper sold in the UK
After a wildly successful season one in 2024, the 1980s shagfest, set in the fictional county of Rutshire, is back for season two. Lead writer and executive producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins describes it as “bigger, better and sexier”, with plenty of luscious storylines which I’m under strict instruction not to spoil. Along with the will-they-won’t they of Rupert and Taggie O’Hara, the second series is notable for its compelling exploration of masculinity, across David Tennant’s vile Tony Baddingham, Aidan Turner’s soulful Declan O’Hara and Danny Dyer’s sweet electronics tycoon Jones.
Rupert has a very chequered backstory. A life-long Cooper fan, Treadwell-Collins doesn’t shy away from this and neither does Hassell. “Rupert in our version has still done very, very bad things. If you just watch the first three episodes of season one, he’s a total arsehole! He’s a groping misogynist arsehole.” (He gropes Taggie between the legs as she serves pavlova at a dinner party).
Rupert is “very misguided about what masculinity [is] and how you are meant to treat women” Hassell says, bolstered by the fact that “everyone in his sphere has thrown themselves at him for years and years and years”. Given the current attention on toxic masculinity — Hassell watched Louis Theroux’s manosphere documentary, which he found “really shocking and upsetting” — it’s a particularly interesting time to be crafting complex male characters on television. There was a balance to be struck, between creating an RCB to whom a modern audience would be receptive and staying true to Cooper’s vision of 1980s masculinity. Her stage directions to Hassell were: “Be macho, don’t show weakness, you mustn’t ever cry.”
Hassell had no interest in making Rupert squeaky clean. “I love people who have foibles and they do things that f*** me off and I do things that f*** them off. That’s what being alive is like.” But his Rupert is also changing, slowly. Taggie is a lot younger than him and he fears he might destroy her sweetness. “And this is a new thing, for him, to think about another person and their happiness,” Hassell says.
There were no real-life RCBs on set. Famously, the producers operated a “no c***s policy” whereby they called at least three people each actor had worked with previously to check them out. Was there really no one you’d toss overboard, given the choice? “Not one c***. It would be a nightmare if there were a bunch of egos, because there are so many of us — 45 of us in the main cast!”
Cooper passed away in October last year, at 88, while season two was being filmed. Every cast member I ask has an anecdote to illustrate her kindness and sauciness. I ask Hassell for his, and he begins giggling. “We were doing a press photo with four of us in polo gear and Jilly was there and they said, ‘Oh, let’s get Jilly in’ and Danny goes, ‘Oh Jilly, you’d take all of us on, wouldn’t you’, and she, without a beat, went, “It would be a gran bang”. And we lost our shit. Me and Luca [Pasqualino, who plays Bas Baddingham] were crying with laughter. Because she was obviously quite frail by the end of it, but inside was this incredibly sharp, filthy [mind] - much filthier than anything we could come up with!”
Disappointingly for Cooper — who, on her first set visit, asked Turner who was bonking who — there was no out-of-hours slap and tickle. “To my knowledge, there has been no bonking,” confirms Hassell. Season two was an epic 10-month shoot, mostly in Bristol, and the cast grew even closer. “We are so lucky that we really love being with each other,” he says. Humour is essential when you’re being vulnerable, explains Hassell. “You are signing up for a job where you all have to get your clothes off and pretend to have sex with each other.” Who was the silliest? “Bella [Maclean, who plays Taggie] and I bring the silly out in each other. It can descend into non-verbal sound-making quite quickly. Lisa McGrillis [who plays Valerie Jones] has an absurd sense of humour. Danny is hilarious. Aidan and I laugh all the time. But really — everyone.”
‘I was sensitive, into drama... everyone bullied me for being gay’
Hassell, who was picked from 600 hopefuls to play Rupert, “struggled to accept why anyone would cast me” as “a macho-y figure”. Growing up in 1990s Essex, there was one way to be a lad — and Hassell was not it. Born in Southend-on-Sea and raised in Chelmsford as the youngest of four children, he was “creative, sensitive, into drama” and “everyone bullied me for being gay”. He refused to rise to the bait — “my dad was a vicar [a groovy, progressive one, who kept Rivals and The Joy of Sex on a shelf in his office and wrote his sermons on pink paper] and I thought the idea of going, ‘No, I’m not gay’ would [suggest] it would be okay to bully someone for being gay.”
But the trauma embedded itself in Hassell, as these things often do, and there was a certain amount of tricking himself into Rupert’s confidence and arrogance. One such example was an improvised nude cartwheel across a tennis court, in the first episode of season one, during a game of naked tennis. “I [wanted to] own my feelings of being uncomfortable. I thought, if I go further and make myself really vulnerable, then the bit I have to do on camera will feel less scary.”
Hassell has a robust body of work behind him, including Suburbicon (directed by George Clooney, who has watched Rivals twice “and called Hulu, campaigning for a second series!”) and His Dark Materials, but he readily accepts Rivals is “my biggest thing”.
Is he glad that it’s happened now, at an age when he is able to metabolise the weirdness of fame? “It was really painful to not be where I wanted to be where I was young [but] I also was much less sure of myself,” he says. This was not just because it took a lot of therapy to overcome the bullying of his adolescent years, but also due to chronic stomach issues which, up until the age of 30, gave Hassell a distended “dog belly”, as his family called it (when he finally figured out it was due to a serious allium allergy, he lost six inches off his waist) and because of how “really difficult it is, being an actor, and I have had a bumpy road of it”. Did you ever feel like quitting? “Yes,” he says, instantly. “Just because it hurt too much. You think, I must just be shit… It just turns in on you.”
After an early experience at the Globe, aged 24, didn’t continue into the career he hoped — “[it was a] huge, huge high, and I thought everything would take off from there, and it sort of sputtered” — he co-founded a theatre company, The Factory, in 2006.“The difficulty with being an actor is unless someone gives you a job, you can’t act. So we wanted to set up an environment where you could do that.” Hassell directed “three or four” of the plays and would love to direct again.
While Rupert would have no doubt dressed for our interview in bespoke Savile Row, Hassell is wearing a faded caramel T-shirt that he’s repaired himself, skinny jeans, battered brown boots and a green wax cap. In his downtime, he loves travelling with his wife —“it’s so lush not to know where you are and what you are doing next” — and doing 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles. “My brain goes mental in the mornings and [doing a puzzle] with a coffee is really helpful to calm me down.” It’s meditative, but also social. “People come over and we sit around and they get sucked into it. It’s pretty un-Rupert,” he says.
That said, playing Rupert has been healing for Hassell’s teenage self. “The process of being cast in Rivals and not being deemed to have disgustingly f***ed it up… I’m feeling quite a tectonic sea change — to mix two geographical ideas.” Is it weird being objectified? “With all this shit at school, it’s been really helpful,” he says. “It feels, so far, pretty good.”
Photos: Ryan Saradjola
Styling: Clementine Brown; Hair & Makeup: Carlos Ferraz
Location: Repton Boxing Gym
Art direction and production by Ped Millichamp and Francesca D’Avanzo
Series two of Rivals is on Disney+ on May 15. Pandora Sykes presents Rivals: the official podcast, first episode available on May 15; Sykes is also the author of Books+Bits, the UK’s No.1 books newsletter, published bi-weekly on Substack
