Turner Prize

From War & Peace to Fantastic Beasts, Callum Turner’s roles are anything but predictable. The Brit actor tells Sophie Goddard about counting Jeff Bridges as a friend and why he’s glad he skipped drama school

- Sophie Goddard

Callum Turner has just said goodbye to his colleague.

Smudge, he explains, is an exparatrooper training him to play Shaun Emery, a soldier convicted of murder in Afghanistan, in new sixpart BBC drama The Capture. ‘It’s intense,’ he says of the role, which sees the soldier fighting for his freedom. Later this year, Turner also joins Anya Taylor-Joy and Bill Nighy for the 2019 big-screen adaptation of Emma, in which he plays romantic deceiver Frank Churchill. Growing up on a council estate in London’s Chelsea, Turner left school at 16 to pursue modelling – ‘[school] was very rigid, I couldn’t wait to leave’ – before his first major role beckoned in 2014’s Glue. The BBC adaptation of War & Peace followed, then his breakout film, The Only Living Boy In New York, before Turner was selected by JK Rowling for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald, which firmly put him on the map. Now dating fellow actor Vanessa Kirby, who he met on 2014 drama Queen & Country, Turner explains where it all went right…

What was it like training with a real soldier for your character in The Capture?

‘I trained with Smudge four times a week. We learned surveillance and how to shoot guns. That stuffis so important because if you’re playing a trained soldier, it’s a completely different perspective on life.’

Is it ever surreal, thinking, ‘Who am I today?’

‘Yeah. I didn’t have it so much with Shaun, but I was doing a dance sequence in Emma and I had an out-of-body experience, like, “What’s going on?!”’

Do you think skipping drama school has had an impact on the kind of roles you’re offered?