Rivals star Alex Hassell has opened up about his early career struggles, revealing that he nearly quit acting over a “sense of failure” when it came to landing roles.
The 46-year-old actor, who plays promiscuous ex-Olympian Rupert Campbell-Black in the Disney+ hit Jilly Cooper adaptation, said he had been “devastated” during a decade-long period when he struggled to get his career off the ground.
“I started to feel unsuccessful – I couldn’t get the work I wanted – and I think I became much more bland as a person, and much less exuberant, because I felt like I was doing something wrong,” he told The Telegraph.
“I really thought there was something deficient in me, and I couldn’t understand why,” he continued. “Obviously you go, ‘Well, it’s because I’m s***. I’m not good enough...’”
Hassell said that he was on the verge of leaving the industry because the rejection “hurts too much”.
“That was really hard,” he said. “And then, for whatever reason, things picked up. But that’s why playing Rupert is so complicated: I took that sense of failure with me.”
While Hassell appeared in a number of – often minor – roles in film and TV throughout the 2010s, he has become a regular fixture on TV over the past five years, with prominent parts on the short-lived live-action Netflix series Cowboy Bebop, the fantasy series His Dark Materials, and the Netflix teen dramedy Everything Now.
In the interview, the Essex-born star also spoke about going to therapy, revealing that he had worked to improve his “sense of self-worth”.
“Thankfully, my therapist is really great, and I have an absolutely amazing wife who I know, in all ways, wants me,” he said. “I also have a wider family who I feel very supported by. But you just pick up this s*** from somewhere, don’t you?”
Hassell is married to fellow actor Emma King.
Rivals, which also stars David Tennant, Aidan Turner, and Katherine Parkinson, is about to resume its second season, which was divided into two parts. The first six episodes aired earlier this year, while part two begins on Disney+ on Wednesday (11 November) with three new episodes debuting.
The final three episodes of the season will then be released on a weekly basis.
In a three-star review of season two, part two, The Independent’s Nick Hilton wrote: “Rivals is a high-class soap opera, with slightly racier sex scenes. At times, keeping your eye on the myriad adulteries is like watching a magician manipulate a ball between a set of cups (‘wait,’ I found myself thinking, ‘whose baby is she actually having?’) but that’s true to the world that the late Jilly Cooper created.”
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