‘Love? It’s never not worth it’
Callum Turner has impeccable manners. We are in the bedroom of a luxury suite at the Rosewood hotel in London and the only place to sit is the queen-sized bed. It feels inappropriate to suggest a Paula Yates-style bed interview, so I perch awkwardly on a luggage rack. “Nah, come on,” he says, dashing next door to bring in a chair despite my protestations. “Well, I’ll put it here and it’s there if you want it,” he says, and I slide gracelessly off my luggage rack and into the seat.
The actor, former model and one half of the internet’s hottest couple (“I get more Dua Lipa fans asking me for selfies now that we’re together. I didn’t get any before!” he says, laughing) has today walked for an hour and a half to the Style shoot from his home in London, joined by his five-year-old dog, Golo, a beautiful bruiser (“half-lab, half-rott”) who barely leaves his side. “Course, he’s my best friend,” he says, as Golo hops on to the bed and doesn’t move for the next hour.
Turner, 35, wasn’t supposed to be an actor. Despite breakthrough roles in Steven Spielberg’s Masters of the Air, the 2020 period drama Emma alongside Anya Taylor-Joy, and now his first romantic comedy, David Freyne’s Eternity, becoming Hollywood’s next leading man was not the plan.
Turner in Masters of the Air
ALAMY
“Well, here’s what happened,” he begins. “I wanted to be a professional footballer and I played for a very decent semi-professional club, but I didn’t make it to the highest level.” The disappointment was crushing, but Plan B (and C) turned out pretty well. “It’s what I had wanted from the age of six and missing out on being a footballer, that pain drove me. I thought, well, I’ve already failed in that so I’ve got to look for other things. I was like, how can I make money? I wanted to have autonomy over my own existence.”
Modelling was a natural Plan B. Genetically blessed with a Hollywood jawline and the kind of broad shoulders that well-cut T-shirts are made for (he is an ambassador for Louis Vuitton), the London boy landed in a whole new world.
Get to know: watch Callum Turner’s guide to his favourite places in London
“The modelling was never going to be long term, but I got to travel to Paris, Japan, Italy, all over the world and I didn’t really look back. It’s a crazy adventure when you’re 17, 18.” Between jobs he worked at Dover Street Market in London and was “a flyer boy for [the lifestyle brand] Egg”.
By the age of 20, he had caught the acting bug and he approached it with the same regimented determination that he had applied to football in his youth. “It came from my love of film and thinking, what do I want to do with my life and what do I not want to do? And I guess there are lessons to be learnt from other people in my life who didn’t do the things they wanted to do,” he says, trailing off. “With acting, it was about becoming as good and as interested as possible. I would work at acting on my days off, watching films, learning monologues, whatever it was, so that when I could get in a room with people I would be good.”
Silk pyjama top, £1,260, matching pyjama trousers, £1,190, and coat, £2,490, Burberry. Socks (throughout), stylist’s own. Bracelet, £690, and ring, £600, Bunney
BEN WELLER FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES STYLE
Knit jacket, £2,330, jeans, £1,550, and Tambour watch, £18,000, Louis Vuitton
BEN WELLER FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES STYLE
Born in Hammersmith, west London, in 1990, Callum Robilliard Turner — his middle name comes from a friend of his mother’s, the poet and artist David Robilliard, who died from an Aids-related illness two years before Turner was born — grew up on an estate in Chelsea, “a juxtaposition in itself”, he says. “I was an only child of a single mother, but there were always twenty kids that would want to play out, so I could just go and knock on people’s doors and ask them to play football.” (He has previously said that contact with his dad was “loose” growing up.)
He talks fondly about a childhood spent in youth clubs that have since disappeared. “By the time I was in year 11, which would be 15 or 16, I could go to six different youth clubs and now there’s only two left,” he says, recalling boxing and cooking classes at the Brunswick Club in Fulham and hanging out in the kitchen and recording studio at Earls Court Youth Club. “I think there are lots of reasons people are struggling, but if you’re talking about community and places for people to go and spend their time and learn how to be with each other, these guys and girls are teaching kids life skills.”
He credits his mother, Rosemary, who was a club promoter working at the Blitz and Café de Paris in the Eighties and Ministry of Sound and Space in the Nineties, for introducing him to a world beyond his “small village” in central London. “Steve Strange lived with us for a long time. That’s the beautiful thing about what I was able to have. I had this very working-class upbringing on an estate and also this colourful world that I was able to dive into of famous or interesting people. It inspires you — it showed me that there was something else.”
Turner with his dog, Golo. Silk twill shirt, £1,400, jacket, £2,900, matching trousers, £1,100, and belt, £390, Giorgio Armani
BEN WELLER FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES STYLE
Coat, £2,400, Connolly. Slippers (on floor), £345, Thom Sweeney
BEN WELLER FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES STYLE
He is quick to reject the “working-class lad done good” trope: “I think the idea of the class thing is, yes, obviously if you don’t have anyone to help open the door for you it’s going to be harder, but there are great actors who are from incredibly privileged backgrounds. I know lots of people from money that have that [work ethic]. And there’s amazing people from working-class backgrounds that are phenomenal actors and some that aren’t.” His drive is more innate: “I think it’s this insatiable desire to achieve or to be good. And that’s an in-built thing.”
There remains a fierce “tightness” between mother and son. “I want to say it’s unique, but it’s not unique,” he says, pausing thoughtfully, which he does a lot. “It happens to a lot of people, but it’s ours and we’ve been through everything together and go through everything together. I guess there’s a friendship. I inherited a lot of the things she loves, like movies, going for a swim, going to a museum, walking in the park.” He is a cultural sponge and owes much of that to his mother. “She helped me spread my wings and gave me an appetite for travel, to experience things and to go and explore, which is pretty much what I did as soon as I got to 17. I couldn’t wait to leave school, get out of there and see the world.”
Was his fiancée nervous about meeting her? “Of course — she wanted my mum to like her. I was nervous meeting her parents too — I wanted her parents to like me.” We are talking about Dua Lipa, one of the most successful pop stars in the world right now, with seven Brit awards and three Grammys under the belt of her Swarovski-embellished and custom Chanel bodysuits. Turner and Lipa began dating in January 2024, confirming their engagement in June this year, with Lipa saying: “It’s very exciting … This decision to grow old together, to see a life and just, I don’t know, be best friends for ever — it’s a really special feeling.”
With his fiancée, Dua Lipa, at the Met Gala this year
KEVIN MAZUR/MG25/GETTY IMAGES FOR THE MET MUSEUM/VOGUE
A series of Sliding Doors moments meant it almost never was. “We had maybe two, three, four, five near misses over our time where we didn’t meet. Mutual friends and places. There’s one where she went to a party and then I went to a party but I arrived minutes after she left. I arrived at 2 in the morning and she left at 1.45 — she checked her Uber and I checked a photo I’d taken opposite my friend’s house when I arrived. There were loads of things like that and then, when we were both able to, we were both single and whatever, I just thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.”
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This year we vicariously soaked up their hot Euro summer through Lipa’s candid Instagram posts (Turner doesn’t have an account) — sun-kissed PDAs in Palermo, Sicily, and goofing around with snorkels; this is a couple very much living their best lives. And, refreshingly, refusing to be coy about it. “I mean, it is what it is. The truth is I forget all the time. I forget and then I’m reminded in moments where someone asks for a photo or someone screams.”
They met over drinks in LA before a mutual friend’s birthday and the connection was immediate: “We sat next to each other and realised we were reading the same book, which is crazy. It’s called Trust [by Hernán Díaz] and I had just finished the first chapter and I told her and she looked at me and said, ‘I just finished the first chapter too.’ I said, ‘So we’re on the same page,’” he adds, smiling. “In the movie version of it I look up to the sky and I’m like, I hear you. I understand. The signs are loud, don’t worry. And that was really the first [moment].”
Shirt, £195, jacket, £1,095, matching trousers, £425, and tie, £155, Gieves & Hawkes
BEN WELLER FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES STYLE
Shirt, £1,400, and jacket, £2,900, Giorgio Armani. Bracelet, £690, Bunney
BEN WELLER FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES STYLE
Ah yes, movies. We are here to talk about Eternity, a high-concept rom-com set in the afterlife, produced by A24 (Babygirl, Materialists, The Smashing Machine) and co-starring Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen. It’s a glossy and unapologetically sentimental story of Joan (played by Olsen), who, after her death, arrives at “the junction” — where new arrivals have one week to decide where to spend eternity and with whom.
Waiting for Joan is her recently deceased husband of 67 years, Larry (Teller) and — curveball — her first love, Luke (Turner), who has waited decades for Joan at the junction since their relationship was cut short by his untimely death. So begins an unconventional love triangle that plays on the reliable, often mundane version of long-haul marriage versus the promise of an unrealised young love. It’s witty, sweet and gives a wry nod to Hollywood’s golden age, and Turner is its matinee idol.
“It was petrifying. I hated it, coming home every day and being like, ‘God I’m never doing one of these again.’ But it’s fun to try different things,” he says of his first foray into rom-com. “The script was phenomenal and it made me laugh a lot. I knew that Lizzie was going to do it and I was a big fan of her and Miles. I just want to try different things and work with the people that you like the most.”
Also in the pipeline is a film he shot in Cornwall — “more like a poem meets a painting, lots of atmospheric shots and it’s beautiful” — an Apple TV+ show set in space (Neuromancer, based on the cyberpunk book of the same name by William Gibson) and, two weeks after we speak, Turner begins shooting another rom-com, One Night Only with Monica Barbaro (A Complete Unknown) and the director Will Gluck (Anyone But You, Friends with Benefits). “I thought, why not? Let’s just go for it.”
In a cynical world, he’s a radical optimist. When we speak, Lipa is midway through the US leg of her world tour. That must make wedding planning tricky? “Well FaceTime is a wonderful thing. And the other rule is that it’s never not worth it — that’s our slogan. If you can go for two days, just f***ing go. And if you’re tired, it doesn’t matter because you’re going to have a nice time and have a nice memory. I just flew to Boston for two days and I was exhausted but we had a really nice time. We went to an incredible restaurant, Neptune or something — I always forget the name of places. Thank God for her because she remembers everything. Hang on, let me just text her and ask. It was one of the best restaurants I’ve ever been to in my life and I did it with her so I’m glad I went.” It was Neptune Oyster, Lipa verifies.
As Turner heads back out into the city he loves, he tells me his favourite things about London: a season ticket at Chelsea, being served a whisky mac by Margot behind the bar at the Canton Arms, South Lambeth Road (“Whisky, the cheaper the better, and Stone’s ginger wine with orange peel. Unbelievable”), and recently taking up boxing. “I had the urge to learn a new skill and I love sparring. There’s a real buzz, you know, when you’re getting punched in the face.” And not for the first time: “Nah, I used to get punched in the face all the time when I was a kid. I had maybe too much to say and I realised you don’t always have to say the things you want to say.”
His final words make me think Turner might be more comfortable in his rom-com era than he realises: “I think true love is moments, consistency. It can’t be just one grand, sweeping thing. It’s all the little things and big things together, it’s an amalgamation, right? I think that’s what true love is.”
Eternity is in cinemas from December 5
Styling David Bradshaw. Grooming Jody Taylor at Leftside Creative. Set design Josh Stovell. Local production Town Productions. Location Rosewood London