A idan Turner has a tactical beard. For the last two decades or so, the actor has found himself in roles that have made him a smouldering pin-up. Audiences really love to look at him. You can buy mugs that say, “Today I don’t feel like doing anything … except Aidan Turner .” There are entire Reddit forums dedicated to sharing photographs of him looking hot. He knows this about himself, just like he knows that people want to ask him about it. “I do get asked these questions,” he says, a little wearily. “I do get the, you know, word ‘smoulder’ or ‘sexy’, and all that kind of shit.” So right now, he has a full beard, in the hope that he will not be accused of, for example, smouldering. “I thought it wouldn’t happen so much with the beard,” he sighs. “I thought I could get away with it. I was going for ‘dad’.”

The job of actors is to sell a story as well as they possibly can, and over the years plenty of the stories that Turner has sold have involved romance and sex.…