Dancing around the studio to the 80s soundtrack which is providing the background music at this exclusive HELLO! shoot, Victoria Smurfit looks to be having the time of her life. And it's no wonder. The Irish actress is one of the biggest stars in perhaps the most popular television show of the year, Rivals, while she is about to celebrate her first wedding anniversary with husband Steve Jacobs. Life for this effervescent star is good.
"The past year has been great fun," she tells us during this exclusive interview. "It's been chaotically brilliant: there's been a lot of travel, I'm newly married and I couldn't be happier."
The runaway success of Rivals is, she says, down to one thing. "The show is just full of joy. We brought in some fun, which everybody needs in their lives, and I think the younger generation are loving it because they're getting to find out what the 80s look like and secretly want to go back."
And while the stars of the Disney+ show, including Victoria, David Tennant, Danny Dyer and Emily Atack, have been lauded for their comically brilliant performances, the attention to vintage details has also been praised. "The costumes are so extraordinarily authentic: the hair, the makeup, the set decoration were all like being immersed in the 80s. You would open up a drawer and there would be books from that time in there."
© Sanne GualtBased on the 1998 book by Dame Jilly Cooper, Rivals focuses on the raucous, promiscuous and calculating country set in the fictional county of Rutshire. Landing the part of Maud O'Hara, the wife of television presenter Declan – portrayed by Aidan Turner - was a dream come true for the actress, 50, who grew up loving the book.
"I moved to England with my family when I was 14 and my mum was reading all the Jilly books and I remember her just laughing her head off," she recalls. "Reading Jilly's words was my first understanding of what it was like living in England and I was so attached to Maud and [her onscreen daughter] Taggie because they were the Irish characters. I wanted to call my kid Declan!"
Working with such a stellar cast was '100 per cent' as much fun as it looked, with everyone bonding on set. "If I found myself knocked over on the road and my family weren't available, I'd happily call any of them to come pick me up and take me for a glass," she cheerfully explains.
"The tricky things were playing the scenes with Taggie where I am so cruel to her and at the end of every scene, I'd have to give Bella [Maclean, who plays Taggie] the biggest hug in the world. In a funny kind of way, doing the stuff that you don't do in real life is kind of delicious to play. Because it wouldn't occur to me to ever think of my daughters as my rivals."
So close was she to the Rivals cast and crew that, after her adored mother Caroline Smurfit died before shooting began, she entrusted some of her belongings to the show's costume designer Ray Holman, so her memory could continue forever on screen.
"During the filming breaks, I had to clear out my mother's things," she explains. "And I found a whole bunch of '80s belts and jewellery and clothes, and I gave them to Ray for his store because she would love the idea that some of her things are still being worn by someone extraordinary on screen."
In 2019, she and her three children from her first marriage – Evie, 20, Ridley, 17, and Flynn, 16 – moved back to London, where she still lives with her husband Steve Jacobs and her two youngest. Evie has temporarily moved out to attend university and Victoria starts to cry as she talks to HELLO! about her eldest child, who was diagnosed with Stargardt's Macular Dystrophy, which leads to reduced vision, in 2017.
Evie, 20, is now thriving and, incredibly, studies fine art at college in Dublin. "She's amazing, phenomenal," she says. "She's living with her best friend Violet, who she grew up with in Los Angeles. Aged 12, Evie would say: 'Violet, one day you're going to go to Trinity College to be a writer and I'm going to go to art school, and we're going to live together in a house in Dublin.' And guess what? They are doing it. I am so grateful and proud."
The two, she says, 'have a really open way of communicating with each other, because my job as her mum was to remind her that she was not victim of any of this. We all have our thing and this is rubbish, but it will not stop you. I think there's nothing in the world I couldn't say to her and nothing in the world she couldn't say to me. And the same goes for my other two kids."
She and Steve married in the Royal Crescent Hotel in Bath 12 months ago and plan to return there to mark their first anniversary. Their wedding day, she says, was full of love and laughter. "I walked down the aisle to a beautiful Waterboys song," she recalls.
"My dad brought me halfway down the aisle but then I told him to sit down and I nodded to the guy doing the music, and he changed to the Stormtrooopers song from Star Wars. Steve collapsed laughing; I had thought it would either work or totally fail but it set the tone. Because when you get married at this age, you get married for yourself. I wanted it to be fun, because he's so fun, and we spend a lot of time laughing. Our first year of marriage has been just hilarious."
She is looking forward to spending Christmas with all the children and Steve at their home in London. Victoria does all the cooking 'with a glass of champagne in my hand' while the evening's entertainment includes board games.
And after the festive season is over, she is looking forward to starting work on the second series of Rivals, which has just been confirmed. In the meantime, she is writing and developing scripts and seeing what the future brings. "I'm a big fan of never say never - because as my granddad used to say, 'Make a plan and give God a laugh'."
Series 1 of Rivals is available to stream on Disney+
To read the full exclusive interview, pick up the latest issue of HELLO! on sale in the UK on Monday. You can subscribe to HELLO! to get the magazine delivered free to your door every week or purchase the digital edition online via our Apple or Google apps.
