Bella Maclean and the on-screen relationship age-gap that had the whole world talking

One of the many reasons that we all fell for the television adaptation of Rivals was the casting, wasn’t it? Danny Dyer as the lovable tubby tech millionaire Freddie Jones; David Tennant as the villainous Lord Baddingham; Alex Hassell as the swaggering, smouldering Rupert Campbell-Black; and Bella Maclean as the sweet-natured, tongue-tied ingénue Taggie O’Hara.

Maclean in the flesh is immensely Taggie – doe-eyed, slightly hesitant, that husky voice. She has long, dark, tangled hair and is wearing baggy trousers with one hem held up by a safety pin, which is also very Taggie, because in the books, the character has a natural beauty, but is also scruffy, undone and never that close to a hairbrush.

“I think I’m really, really like her in ways that I probably wouldn’t want to admit,” says Maclean, screwing up her face as if we’re in a confessional. “She’s really dorky and I’m …”

“A dork?”

“Yes. Just, like … I can be quite awkward, and I’m really clumsy.”

“Can you cook?” I ask, thinking of Taggie’s shepherd’s pies and devilled eggs.

“I love cooking, but it doesn’t mean I’m any good at it,” she says with Taggie-ish modesty. “And I’m a massive dog person.”

This is Maclean’s breakout role. Yes, yes, she played kindly riding instructor Jem in the final series of Sex Education in 2023, but Rivals is the biggie, the part that means the 28-year-old now gets recognised and stopped on the streets of North London, where she lives.

The show, released towards the end of 2024, was a massive, joyful, shagtastic hit. It notched up orgasmic reviews and bagged multiple awards and nominations, including a Bafta nod for the famous nude tennis scene.

Many of us, in these troubled times, have been enraptured by the sheer joy and escapism of the series, the unrestrained hilarity of the bonking and bad behaviour, its lack of finger-wagging political correctness, the 1980s music, the taffeta and the shoulder pads.

Sadly, for much of the filming of the second season, there was one very notable absence: Dame Jilly Cooper herself, author of Rivals as well as dozens of other adored books, which have sold more than 11 million copies in the UK alone. She died in October last year, when shooting for season two had already started; having been such a presence on set for the first season, she was clearly enormously missed by the cast.

“It makes me emotional,” says Maclean, dipping her head. “She was the person steering the ship. She was a goddess, a guardian angel watching over all of us in this mammoth thing, and she had such a wonderfully relaxed, positive energy, so you always felt held when she was around. It was really, really surreal, and it didn’t feel real for a long time.”

Despite the millions of sales, Cooper was long sneered at for writing what many considered to be lowbrow potboilers – and yet her books are up there with Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope in terms of their wry and sharp-eyed observations about human behaviour. Dominic Treadwell-Collins, the determined producer and writer who adapted Rivals, spent two decades pitching her work to television executives, but kept being knocked back because it was deemed unfashionable. It was only after a five-hour lunch with Cooper and encouraging conversations with Disney that it swung into action.

Maclean pulls off the English rose act very convincingly, given that she started out life as an American. She was born in New York City to British parents who worked in the art world, and lived there until she was 10, when the family moved to the UK. She had an American accent, although this soon wore off at school – first in Sussex, and then at boarding school, which wasn’t an enormous success because she didn’t like boarding. Why did her parents send Maclean and her older twin sisters away? “I think they just couldn’t believe we got into such a good school.”

Luckily, salvation came in the form of a London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art teacher who encouraged her nascent acting skills, and soon she’d persuaded the staff to allow her up to London at weekends for Junior Guildhall classes, missing Saturday lessons. Acting made up for the misery of school. “I just found it really exhilarating, and a form of escapism. I have always felt a lot, especially when younger … and I didn’t understand what the feelings were, so I think that’s why I kept going back to acting, as a way of experiencing things that I might not be able to express in my own life.”

Maclean grins self-consciously from under her fringe, dyed dark chestnut so she could avoid the thick wig she wore for the first series of Rivals. “I did not know this was turning into a therapy session.”

She left school and graduated from Junior Guildhall to Guildhall proper, playing Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Helen of Troy in The Trojan Women, among other roles, although this three-year spell was also difficult at times. “It was really hard. It’s like shoving a mirror in your face, and you realise a lot about yourself and your flaws. I don’t know if I was any good, and still don’t know if I’m any good at acting,” she says (another Taggie-esque moment of self-deprecation), “but it was the most valuable time.”

Various roles followed after drama school – in a short film about drag, in a revival of Spring Awakening directed by Rupert Goold at the Almeida theatre, in Silent Witness as a prescription-drug-addled teenager. Then came her first major screen role, in Netflix’s Sex Education, and after that, Rivals.

Jilly Cooper’s books – those perky, jodhpur-clad bottoms – were familiar from her mother’s bookshelves, but Maclean had never picked one up. On reading the script, she liked Taggie’s moral backbone (among a cast of shaggers and boozers, Taggie’s by far the most virtuous character), but she also knew that the part needed updating for a modern audience: “making her less of a wallflower, giving her more agency”.

A Gen Z-er picking up one of those bonkbusters today might be surprised by the blunt language. Women are “fat”. Infidelity’s par for the course. Male coercion is all part of the fun. When I interviewed Alex Hassell about playing Campbell-Black before the first series was released, I asked whether taking on the role of such an arrogant, swashbuckling groper worried him. He replied that it didn’t because Rivals was a “period piece”. Newsflash: the 1980s are now lumped in with the Regency, in television terms. “It is period,” agrees Maclean.

Still, the age gap between Taggie and Rupert made her “nervous”. When they meet in the book, Taggie’s 18 and he’s in his late 30s. It’s been tweaked for the series to make it more palatable. Taggie is no longer a teenager, but Rupert remains her dad’s friend and is closer to her father’s generation than hers. And yet teenage viewers have apparently loved it, peppering social media feeds with pictures of the couple. “My friends send me funny compilations of Taggie and Rupert from loads of 14-year-olds or 16-year-olds being like, ‘We love the age gap!’

“It’s a point of conflict between Rupert and Taggie,” she goes on, “but I really believe their love is pure; they love each other on a soul level. I’ve been there before, when you meet someone and you’re like, I don’t know why, but I do love you.”

I try to slip in a subtle question about whether she’s single, but it’s a “no comment” with an apologetic smile. Although she does live alone, in a flat in North London, where she takes long baths and, as an early riser, has a curious morning habit. “I wake up early every morning, and go downstairs and make a coffee, then sit and watch a film.”

Maclean reels off her recent watches: Winter Boy, The Souvenir, Nickel Boys, Sentimental Value, Close – “which is my favourite film of all time”.

She would love to get a dog, but work makes it too difficult right now. Rivals meant 10 months of shooting; she’s also recently returned from Mississippi, working on a forthcoming indie film called In Starland, about a middle-aged man who comes across a gang of artists, one of whom is Maclean.

It was a conscious choice, she says, to do something entirely different from Rivals. Although rumour has it that several of Cooper’s books are now under option with the same production company, Happy Prince, so the show could roll and roll. After all, Taggie and Rupert’s storyline runs into later books, including Wicked!, Jump! and Cooper’s final novel, Tackle!.

“I think they’ve bought the rights to the whole Rutshire Chronicles, [the series Rivals is based on] which is a clever move, because they’re just the most juicy stories,” says Maclean, who’s read ahead to see what unfolds between Taggie and Rupert. “Keep ’em coming,” she adds, with another grin.

Amen. It’s just the tonic we all need.

Three episodes of the second part of Rivals season two will stream on Disney+ from November 11.

The Telegraph, UK

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