David Tennant says the sex in Rivals is meant to show who the characters are, not just to shock, as he discussed the series in a recent podcast interview. The actor, who plays Lord Tony Baddingham, also revealed that one of the show’s most eye-catching sequences was filmed on an actual Concorde.
The comments landed as Rivals continues to draw attention well beyond the United Kingdom, where its first season landed harder than it did in America. Disney streams the adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 1988 novel on Disney+ and Hulu, and Tennant’s interview has given viewers a fresh reason to revisit the series — especially the first episode, which opens with a couple locked in the bathroom of the Concorde.
On the podcast I’m Having an Episode, Tennant said he thought Cooper’s writing is rooted in the British class system and the way money and bloodline shape power. That is the world Rivals keeps returning to, and it is part of why the show’s explicit material has drawn so much notice: Tennant said the sex is there to reveal character, not to feel gratuitous. In his view, the opening scene is built around Rupert Campbell-Black’s freedom, promiscuity and virility, rather than just the mechanics of the moment.
He also walked through the logistics of that Concorde sequence. Tennant said he never flew on the aircraft himself, even though the production filmed on one for the scene. There is a Concorde in a museum in Bristol, he noted, but he did not think the actual bathroom encounter was shot inside the original vintage cabin. The team built the toilet set, which he described as a tiny, pokey space.
That detail helps explain why Rivals has kept finding an audience: it is selling itself as glossy, sexy and explicit, but Tennant is framing the intimacy as part of the storytelling rather than the spectacle. The series already has a second season drawing attention, and Disney’s promotion has pushed it further into the spotlight, but the open question is how much of that same class-and-sex dynamic the next chapter will lean on.
