Rivals: What the Cast of the British Series Looks Like in Real Life

Rivals put in a lot of work to make their cast look very different on the show.

Based on Jilly Cooper‘s novel of the same name, Disney+ and Hulu’s Rivals centers around a feud between two men fighting for control of a television station in 1980s Britain. It stars an ensemble cast including David Tennant, Aidan Turner, Katherine Parkinson, Victoria Smurfit, Alex Hassell, Nafessa Williams, Emily Atack and Danny Dyer.

The first season ended with Rupert (Hassell) and Declan (Turner) winning the rival bid, but Cameron (Williams) is also ultimately confronted by Tony (Tennant) about her deception. After Tony hit Cameron, she hit him back so hard that viewers were left wondering if he was still alive — or if the show was deviating from its source material.

“There’s more of the book. I’m always planning. I’ve laid down bombs throughout,” executive producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins told TV Insider in October 2024 about a major detail that will be addressed again. “At the end of episode 4, when Declan has been interviewing Rupert, he’s got this envelope and we don’t know what’s in this envelope. … We’ve laid down a lot of Easter eggs.”

Treadwell-Collins broke down his approach to adapting the novels, adding, “That’s the muscular story taking you through it all, Tony vs Rupert. And in the book, there’s even more to play. What I’ve always done is talk to Jilly all the way through about where else we would go with the books. We talked about Game of Thrones, we talked about these bigger shows that have big fan love for them but actually bring a whole new audience. What has been wonderful is having Jilly as a really, really clever executive producer who sat on set with us, but also came to the writers’ room a couple of times. Everything we did, we ran past her.”

He continued: “When we decided to do half the book and stopped where we stopped, we also talked to her about where else we would want to go, and so we’ve got her sign in and then other things that we’ve gone, we’re not sure how this would work on television, we’ve even got her brain thinking and buzzing about how else to play things. So for me, Tony and Rupert’s rivalry and the destruction that it causes can go much, much bigger and be more Greek in its devastation.”

Keep scrolling to see what the stars of Rivals look like in real life: