Irishman Aidan Turner is 29 today!
Aidan plays the dwarf Kili in The Hobbit and has been labelled the “sexy dwarf” by his co-stars, who envy his lack of prosthetics. Casting director Ros Hubbard says she was keen to get Aidan into films although she “…didn’t think it would be as big as this [The Hobbit].” But his cousin is reported to have said that Aidan madly impressed at the auditions and was signed up straight away.
Aidan comes from Dublin. He left St. Mac Dara’s Community College at the age of eighteen and, feeling less than enthusiastic about university, enrolled in a part-time acting course because “…it seemed like fun”. This was not on a complete whim: his cousin is an actor and Aidan’s experience of representing Ireland in Latin American and ballroom dancing, shows he has artistic flair and a love of performing. Enjoying drama, he went on to train and graduated from the Gaiety School of Acting in 2004.
Aidan’s career began in the theatre. His credits include The Crock of Gold, where a critic described his character Pan as “…beautifully played…his strutting around the stage is hilarious,” and Cyrano. Aidan stole the show as Christian in Cyrano and was hailed by critics as “The next James Bond”. Audiences even got to hear him sing!
In 2007 Aidan started to do some television and film work including the award-winning short film The Sound of People. He played the lead in the feature film Alarm, which was released the following year. Aidan began 2008 showing off his dance moves in Romeo and Juliet at Ireland’s national theatre, The Abbey. He followed this with the first of two seasons in the Irish drama, The Clinic. He then did something crazy. With his career taking off in Ireland he moved to London with no prospect of a job in sight. But the gamble paid off as he was immediately cast in the role of the vampire Mitchell, in what was to become the award-winning cult TV show Being Human. There quickly followed the BBC series Desperate Romantics and later, the critically acclaimed TV drama Hattie, where Aidan starred alongside fellow Hobbit actor John Bell (Bain, Bard’s son, in The Hobbit).
In 2009 Aidan was awarded the Hamilton Deane Award by the Dracula Society for best dramatic performance/presentation in a supernatural genre. Previous recipients of the award include fellow Hobbit actors Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Christopher Lee. The director Guillermo del Toro won it in 2006.
Commenting on fame Aidan says that, whilst he gets recognised in the street, he’s glad he hasn’t reached the level of stardom experienced by Robert Pattinson. He says, “That’s insane, like Britney Spears-style crazy fame. I don’t know how I‘d deal with that.” Well, I guess that in six months time he’s going to find out!
Aidan is a keen photographer and would sometimes carry his camera to the set of Being Human. He once joked that, no matter how hard he tried, he would never be able to do one-arm push-ups. No doubt his recent roles and Hobbit boot-camp have changed all that!
Aidan is known to be Flight of the Conchords fan so he may well be celebrating his birthday at the FOC show in Wellington tonight. But however he celebrates, here’s sending Aidan best wishes for a fabulous birthday from the Middle-earth Network team.
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