We had to do mad stuff but I was at ease doing sex scenes with Aidan, says Rivals’ Victoria Smurfit as film hits screens
ACTRESS Victoria Smurfit’s latest steamy role will stun fans who know her as barmaid Orla O’Connell in BBC drama Ballykissangel.
She is making her TV comeback as sex-mad Maud in Rivals, the eagerly anticipated adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Eighties bonkbuster.
And she was at ease doing raunchy scenes with Poldark hunk Aidan Turner because they have been friends for years.
Victoria, 50, recalls: “I remember meeting him and thinking, ‘What a good-looking man,’ and then watching him and thinking, ‘What a talented young man’.
“We had to do some pretty mad stuff together and at no point did either of us feel in any way uncomfortable. It was just like, bosh, let’s go!”
The plot charts the battle between show jumper turned Tory MP Rupert Campbell-Black — actor Alex Hassell — and Lord Tony Baddingham, played by Dr Who star David Tennant, over a TV production company.
In the first scene, viewers will be treated to the sight of Campbell-Black’s bare buttocks thrusting between the thighs of a woman wearing red stilettos in a plane toilet cubicle.
The air hostess pops a champagne cork and soap squirts out of the dispenser as they reach the heights of ecstasy.
The eight-part series, which begins on Disney+ on Friday, is a romp through the lives of posh, privileged toffs bonking and backstabbing their way around sprawling mansions in the Cotswolds.
Its cast also includes Sherwood star Claire Rushbrook, former EastEnder Danny Dyer, Humans actress Katherine Parkinson and ex-Inbetweeners actress Emily Atack who joins bed-hopping Rupert for a game of naked tennis and giggles about something being “ten inches” over the line.
The show’s executive producer has said there was an “equal opportunities” approach to nudity with “a willy for every pair of t*ts”.
Talking about her character, mum-of-three Victoria says: “She likes a little tipple and loves to flirt.
“She’d flirt with the wall if she thought the wall would go, ‘You’re a good-looking beast there, missus’.”
Victoria argues that anybody who criticises Cooper’s racy writing must be sex-starved.
She says: “Every sex scene Jilly writes is exciting and aspirational.
“Every single character is just in need of love, and that will come through being needy or misbehaving or whipping your horse or being mean to your wife, or being disrespectful to your husband, or having sex or not having sex.
“It’s all power tools to find love. So to minimise all that she’s written into ‘a bonkbuster’ means, buddy, you wish you were getting some.”
As the series is set in the Eighties, there will be plenty of champagne, big hair and shoulder pads.
‘I was grateful for the elasticated waists’
Glam Victoria is starting to notice signs of ageing — and was glad of the show’s forgiving Eighties fashion when she was feeling below par.
She says: “On days when I might have had too many bacon sandwiches, I was grateful for the elasticated waists and big jumpers.
“My mask when I go out into the public arena is a glamorous look.
“I really want to be divested of that image.
“I’m watching those storylines rather than focusing on myself, because then you just become nit-picky about my wrinkles or whatever boring thing that’s highly irrelevant.”
Victoria comes from one of the wealthiest family dynasties in Ireland — but insists she is not posh.
My mask when I go out into the public arena is a glamorous look
Victoria Smurfit
Her grandfather Jefferson Smurfit founded a cardboard box company in Dublin in 1934.
The packaging business, Smurfit Kappa, is now the largest in Europe and worth billions.
And just like another famous Victoria, she was driven around in a Rolls-Royce as a kid — although unlike Mrs Beckham, she had to clean the car to earn her pocket money.
Recalling her privileged childhood, she says: “People would be charming to me, overly charming, or overly sniffy.
“And, of course, it would be because of the surname.”
But at the height of The Troubles in Ireland, her dad Dermot uprooted the family from their mansion in Dublin to a £1.2million hunting lodge in Surrey and Victoria was sent to an exclusive girls boarding school at the age of 14, which she hated.
Victoria recalls: “Everybody there was called Camilla and Lucinda and they all said, ‘Oh, my God! You’re Irish? Have you ever seen a bomb? Has your house ever been blown up?’
“Questions like that, which were just from not knowing any better and being 14 and living in Surrey.”
Victoria’s parents feared for their children’s safety after the supermarket tycoon Ben Dunne was kidnapped for ransom by the IRA in 1981.
She says: “Mum said to us naughty men had taken away some friends of dad and we had to be careful.
“It was part of our reality. It was a scary time.”
When she decided to move into the showbiz world, Victoria ignored casting agents who advised her to change her unusual surname and quickly proved them wrong.
Mum said to us naughty men had taken away some friends of dad and we had to be careful. It was part of our reality. It was a scary time
Victoria Smurfit
Following her breakout role on Ballykissangel alongside Colin Farrell, she got parts in major movies including The Beach and About A Boy before making her name playing DCI Roisin Connor in the TV adaptation of Lynda La Plante’s Trial & Retribution.
After moving to LA in 2011 she starred in the horror series Dracula on Sky Living, before playing Cruella de Vil in the US fantasy series Once Upon A Time.
She also appeared as James Nesbitt’s lover in Cold Feet and teamed up with him again recently in gritty crime drama Bloodlands.
Victoria says: “I don’t want credit for something my dad or uncle has done. That was their great success.
“I always wanted to be a working actor and I’ve managed to do that.”
Victoria has three children — Evie, 20, Ridley, 17 and 15-year-old Flynn — with her former husband, film producer Doug Baxter. She struggled when they split in 2015 while the family were living in LA.
‘I would curl up on bottom step and stay there’
Victoria says: “I lost a ton of weight, I couldn’t eat, I felt someone had hands around my throat so even if I did put food in my mouth, there’s no chance of swallowing it.
“I didn’t feel hungry for about nine months. That’s going into shock, I presume — but I took the kids to school all jolly.
“The house that I was in, there was a very large bottom step about three foot in from the front door and that’s as far as I could get once I dropped the kids to school.
“I would lie down on the bottom step and curl up and stay there until I had to go pick them up again.
“I’d just lie there and wet would just pour out of my eyes, down my cheeks and into the carpet.”
It took her almost a year to feel normal again.
I lost a ton of weight, I couldn’t eat, I felt someone had hands around my throat so even if I did put food in my mouth, there’s no chance of swallowing it
Victoria Smurfit
Then she relocated her family to London in 2019 after receiving a chilling text warning there could be a gunman in her kids’ school — and they were hiding in silence.
In 2021 she met millionaire banker Steve Jacobs and after a whirlwind romance they married last Christmas.
“Don’t tell him, but he makes me very happy,” she says with a laugh.
But Victoria faced an agonising ordeal when daughter Evie was diagnosed with macular dystrophy, a rare genetic eye disorder, and has since lost most of her vision.
She says: “If there is a problem with your kid, you find a solution.
“But to be in a position where that is a much harder thing to find, because it hasn’t been created yet, it’s astonishing.”
Victoria has watched proudly as Ridley has helped her elder sister.
She says: “I hadn’t realised just how much Ridley had to manage for her, simple things like, ‘No don’t cross the road now’ or ‘I’ll tell you what’s on the menu’ or ‘I’ll tell you what’s there, or go that way, don’t go this way’.”
There is a lot for Victoria to be proud of — including her career — which thanks to Jilly Cooper really is riding on a high.
- Rivals is on Disney+ from Friday.