It’s astonishing what a beard can achieve. The last time we saw Aidan Turner on screen, the Dublin actor was giving it the full hey-nonny-nonny as a sort of anglicised Leonardo da Vinci, in a short-lived Italian biopic of the Renaissance artist.
That series reimagined da Vinci as a tortured Lothario rather than as a painter with a sideline in helicopter design. But Turner has gone in a completely different direction with The Suspect (Monday, ITV), a ripe thriller in which he is virtually unrecognisable behind a vast, loamy craft beard (and which airs on a channel that has only patchy availability in Ireland). When he first turns up I don’t know whether to laugh or order a soy macchiato.
Turner plays Joe O’Loughlin, a charming if intense psychotherapist who was recently diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s. (It largely manifests as twitchy fingers.) But we are alerted to a potentially darker side to Joe when a young woman’s body is found in a shallow grave in a cemetery.
Joe just happened to be in the graveyard when the remains were found. Later, he manoeuvres himself so that he is hired to help with the murder inquiry as a consultant. It is while doing so that he sneaks into the morgue for some weird alone time with the body. And then it emerges that the dead woman is a former patient of Joe’s and that she claimed he had sexually assaulted her (an assertion later withdrawn).
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So Joe is culpable as sin, yes? This is where Turner comes in. He sells you on the possibility that it’s all a misunderstanding and that he’s a victim of a chain of unfortunate circumstances. There is also the fact that, having telegraphed his guilt, it would perhaps be too obvious for the show to unmask him as the killer. My money is on his wife or the chummy therapist who diagnosed with him Parkinson’s – or perhaps the low-key bestie played by Sian Clifford, from Fleabag.
Turner is, of course, best known for Poldark, where he wore a tricorne hat and whipped off his shirt (though never at the same time, which seems a missed opportunity in hindsight).
[ Aidan Turner: ‘That photograph. Yeah. It took away from the work’Opens in new window ]
But he appears to have tired of costume drama. And in The Suspect (not to be confused with the recent James Nesbitt series Suspect) he displays real relish getting stuck into the part of a morally ambivalent Everyman.
He is also a steadying influence on what could easily have been an over-the-top potboiler (and possibly still is). Even behind that huge wedge of facial hair, Turner’s low-key, chill-dude energy keeps things grounded. As a thriller, The Suspect may well lose the plot sooner rather than later. For Turner, it is a positive start to life after tricorne hats and bared midriffs.
