Meet the man about to out-buff Poldark

Posted by Artie Phelan on Monday, April 22, 2024

Ben Batt is explaining how much he loves puppies. He holds up an imaginary one in the air before discussing his favourite breed at length [a blue roan cocker spaniel] before concluding, “gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous”.

If it was already tricky not to succumb to his woodchopper good looks, disarming charm and gravelled Mancunian tones, the sight of Batt’s upper arm muscles doing battle with the seams of his crisp checked shirt while he fantasises about puppy love would have anyone sunk.

And this is before we see a whole lot more of him - as the star of a new BBC adaption of L P Hartley’s novel, The Go-Between, set in 1900, Batt is continuing the fine tradition of Sunday night being ladies night: playing Ted Burgess, a beleaguered farmer seemingly allergic to clothing and embroiled in a forbidden romance with aristocratic Marian Maudsley (played by Joanna Vanderham).

It has been almost exactly 20 years since Colin Firth first set the Sunday night bar, emerging sodden-shirted from a lake in the 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Since then, we’ve had Rupert Penry-Jones piercing hearts in tight britches in Persuasion and floppy-haired Dan Stevens setting them fluttering in Downton Abbey, before Aiden Turner’s Poldark knocked the swoon-o-metre out of the park in March, slathered in baby oil and scything topless in a field.

Next Sunday, 29 year-old Batt may top them all: swimming nude in a river (after performing a graceful bare-bottomed dive), sunbathing naked and - in a remarkable dramatic coincidence - scything shirtless in a hay field in near identical scenes to those that proved so successful for Poldark.

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Whether the parallels being drawn with Turner begin to grate once The Go-Between airs, remains to be seen. But for the moment, Batt is sanguine about the comparison, saying he “really wants a part in [Poldark]” now that it is confirmed to be returning for a second series.

Rather offputtingly, he saw images of Turner’s scythe scene before he was due to shoot his own: “I just thought, what are you doing to me? I am a little ginger northerner [Batt is 5ft 10ins] and have you seen him? He is beautiful. His [scything scene] looks better than mine, I have to be honest.”

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Perhaps fair enough, given Batt had just 12 days to get into shape after hearing he had landed the role. An ardent gym goer, he was already in pretty good shape, but stepped up his fitness routine to include three hours a day with a personal trainer and a strict carb and protein-only regime, where he had to eat small portions of foods eggs, salmon, chick peas or spinach six times a day, every two and a half hours.

Surely it is exhausting enough learning lines without turning your digestive system inside out?

“It is a shame there is a lot of pressure for actors to look a certain way,” he concedes. “Girls still have it a lot worse than boys but it’s still there for us too. If you play a certain part at a certain age you are expected to have a six-pack and keep yourself trim. There’s that pressure to go one step further.”

Batt won’t be drawn on whether (or why) it is more acceptable to objectify men than women, on screen - a sea change Aiden Turner dubbed “strange”, questioning: “would it be the same if it was a female lead role and she had a bikini scene on the beach? Would the papers show it the same way?”

Still, he must be braced for the inevitable avalanche of female attention?

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“Not at all! Honestly, it’s ridiculous,” he tells me in a Manchester hotel bar, nursing a coffee (it is 9am). “Most of the attention so far has been around my backside. I’ve never really been called [a heartthrob] before. It’s a bit weird. I had bright red hair as a kid, my name was Batt and I was freckly, pale and into acting. It’s a strange concept for me to get my head around.”

Most of the attention so far has been around my backside

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