Aidan Turner thinks actors should leave their roles on set: 'It doesn't serve anybody'

Watch: Aidan Turner discusses how he found leaving his Fifteen-Love character on set

Aidan Turner feels it's important for actors to leave their roles on set at the end of the day, particularly if it's a role as dark as his character Glenn in Fifteen-Love he tells Yahoo UK.

The tennis drama premieres on Prime Video on 21 July, and it sees Turner play a coach accused of sexually abusing his former prodigy Justine (Ella Lily Hyland).

Glenn refuses to back down from the fight and goes to increasingly extreme lengths to shut Justine up, but she's equally as determined to take him down and discovers some dark truths about his predatory nature.

It is a much darker role than the Poldark star is known for, which impacted how he found shedding the character when he was done filming for the day and he says he always made a "conscious effort" to rid himself of the role before heading home.

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Turner admits he has "an aversion to talking about acting and the actual method of doing it" when discussing the role as he adds: "I always feel like I’m taking myself too seriously, it isn't the approach, and then talking about the craft I sometimes find awkward.

"What am I getting at? I’m getting at this: I was talking with my wife [Caitlin Fitzgerald] the other day about how she's doing a play [The Crucible] and it's quite dark at the moment, and she was talking about how shaking that off is difficult 'cause it stays with you.

"Like, how do you manage your mental health through these things? Especially doing a play, you’re doing that eight shows a week and it's a three-hour production, it’s long and it's going for months and there’s a lot going on.

"So, I feel like it doesn't stick to me, like there's not a tenacity with the characters after I leave the set for it to stay with me, but it does, it actually does stay with you."

For the Hobbit star, leaving a character on set is key to continuing to doing his best on set because he tried early on in his career to live with his roles outside of filming but found it an "exhausting" process.

"I don't think you're in control of those things, you don't choose to live with it but it's there, it's there a lot, and you try to protect yourself as an actor to do the best you can to leave it," he adds.

"I don't think there’s gains bringing stuff home and keeping exploring that energy outside of the set a lot of the time. I think it's exhausting and I think you can run out of the good things really quickly.

"I think I learned that early too — wasting a lot of energy thinking I'm doing a thing by staying in character or keeping a feeling of the thing and it just burns you out a bit and then you can't do the work as well, I find."

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Turner goes on: "I think it's a conscious effort to sort of leave that stuff, especially with this dark subject I think, just’ cause there's no value in bringing it into the car and on the way home, and into your family.

"It doesn't serve anybody, so I think leaving it on set is probably what I did."

Fifteen-Love will be released on Prime Video on Friday, 21 July.

Watch the trailer for Fifteen-Love