Desperate Romantics (BBC2, 9pm).

AFTER spending much of the end of last year playing a vampire in BBC3’s hit drama Being Human, Aidan Turner gets to sink his teeth into another meaty role in BBC2’s drama Desperate Romantics.

This time he’s playing a real-life character, artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the leading members of the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood.

It’s all very different from Mitchell the vampire. “I’ve not played a lot of real-life people who have existed before and I love it,” he says.

“I approach it in a completely different way – as regards Mitchell I had to make up the story, nobody would ever know, whereas Rossetti’s back story obviously existed, so that work was done.”

Rossetti was the playboy and agent provocateur of the Brotherhood – the Casanova of his time. Engaged for ten years to shop assistant-turned-model Lizzie Siddal, the woman he eventually married, this didn’t stop him sleeping around.

Also starring in the six-part drama as the Brotherhood are Samuel Barnett, as John Millais, Rafe Spall, as William Holman Hunt, and, in this story, Sam Crane, as Fred Walters, an amalgam of several other people in the men’s lives at the time.

Turner sees Rossetti as an “absolute free spirit. He’s a chancer and a womaniser – he’s a libertine in every sense of the word”.

“He’s highly ambitious but he has this sort of lethargic attitude a lot of the time and doesn’t really like to put in the hard work but wants the results. He’s not quite as talented as the others and he knows it in the back of his head, but he tries.”

All the members of the Brotherhood are completely different, he says. John Millais is the truly talented one, Holman Hunt has intensity like no other and, as for Rossetti, whose works include Girlhood Of Mary, Virgin and Ecce Ancilli Domini, what he lacks in talent he makes up for in confidence.

“They’re such different characters, you wonder why they’re friends but I guess all friendships are like that. Most of my friends are radically different. I don’t think I really like people like me,” he says.

ROSSETTI may be a charmer who gets what he wants no matter whom he hurts along the way, but Turner hopes he’s playing a likeable character.

“That’s my big thing in this drama – to make him likeable, because a lot of the time he might come off as petulant,”

he explains.

“He’s a problematic character, he’s intensely passionate and wears his heart on his sleeve. He says what he thinks and what he feels, and a lot of the time it’s frustration.

“He’s frustrated he’s not getting to the places he wants to be and these other guys are, and he just can’t understand why. He doesn’t want to give in to the fact that it’s probably his lack of talent and tact.

“He’s one of these people that life seems to go really smoothly for because he just rests on other people’s hard work.”

The actor admits that, while he knew little of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood before taking on the role, he could now probably use the group as his specialist subject were he to be a contestant on Mastermind because he knows so much about them.

“There’s so much information on these guys. Endless amounts of books and a fantastic website which has everything he’s ever done, every sketch he’s ever made, every painting he’s ever painted.”

Having played Rossetti, he’d love to play more of his heroes but he fears that at 6ft he’s too tall for some roles he’d like.

“I’d love to play Napoleon, but I’m probably too tall. I’m slightly obsessed with him. I’d also love to play Barry McGuigan, the Irish boxer, but I look nothing like him. He’s tiny and he’s got this funny ‘tache and looks very Irish, and I don’t.”