Being a new Aidan Turner and Being Human fan you could say that I’m a little late to the party. Thanks to some really cool and interesting friends I’ve accumulated via twitter, I was introduced to the show little less than a month ago. Immediately, I was hooked! Loving the wonderful world of Netflix, I watched back to back episodes; Season 1, Season 2 and lastly Season 3, barely blinking. As most of you already know… Aidan Turner playing the role of Mitchell is staked by his best friend, George. *tears* I wanted to know WHY?
Searching the internet I found this interview of Toby Whithouse (the shows creator and writer) by SFX, and it all began to add up. Aidan was moving on to film The Hobbit. Here are a few things Toby told SFX about Aidan’s departure from the show.
“We always knew that we didn’t own Aidan Turner, we had just borrowed him from films,” he told us. “We always knew at some point he was going to go off and become a multi-million pound movie star. Consequently we weren’t in the least surprised when he got cast in The Hobbit. We were just delighted and felt we were incredibly lucky to have had him as long as we had.
“Ultimately this guy’s got movie star written all over him and there’s only so long you can have him in an ensemble of three, which is not to denigrate our great cast. His ascendancy is inevitable. In fact Aidan encouraged us to kill him because he knew that it would give his character a much better, more dramatic ending to finish off. Aidan actively encouraged us to write in that way.
“Aidan was always going to become a movie star, whether that was in The Hobbit or something else. We always knew he was going to leave at some point. So I think I probably started writing him out subconsciously from the moment we conceived of the Box Tunnel 20 – in our show there are always consequences, nothing is ever forgotten. It could have taken another five years for the payoff but ultimately from that moment we were moving him towards an exit, whether that had been in one series or three series time.
“Aidan was cast in the latter half of the filming of series three and the turnaround time means I’m always writing the last few episodes at that point anyway so it was fairly easy to move it. Aidan was encouraging us to give him a good exit. If he’d wanted to stay we’d have found a way to put him into series four, but he was going off to do three movies, he was in New Zealand which isn’t a great commute, and so we knew this was an opportunity to give him a good send-off.”
Whithouse pauses to emphasize the point: “As I say, this was with Aidan’s blessing I can’t underline that enough.
“There was discussion about leaving it open-ended just in case he returned but I think we knew in our heart of hearts that the chances of getting him back were very remote. Besides the nature of Being Human means if one day we did get him back we could do a flashback. I know I’m going to get it in the neck about killing Mitchell off but it was something beyond our control.
“I’m aware that the fans are going to be brokenhearted,” he said. “I did a Q&A with some fans recently and they were asking ‘why are you killing off Aidan’ and I was thinking (a) ‘how do you know that for sure when we’ve only just done it,’ and (b) as ‘if it were our choice to have him go’.”
Jokingly he added: “What is our choice is how he leaves but ultimately if you want to write hate mail to anyone write it to Peter Jackson, all the fault is his…”
I’m still kinda holding a grudge that we will never see Aidan as Mitchell any more, but ultimately I’m completely stoked to see what the talented actor will bring to the big screen as the dwarf Kili in The Hobbit (Dec. 2012).
How do you feel about Aidan’s departure from Being Human? What was your initial reaction? ‘Long Live The King!’
The Aidan Turner Extrelix 