How ‘Rivals’ Helped David Tennant Fall for Romance

This interview includes spoilers for “Rivals” through the first half of Season 2.

David Tennant has played many dastardly men: A real-life serial killer (in “Des”), a predator who can control people’s minds (in “Jessica Jones”) and, most recently, a merciless media exec in “Rivals,” which returns to Hulu on Wednesday.

“The thing with all these characters,” Tennant said in a recent video call, “is that none of them are regarding themselves as villains.” He said his “Rivals” character, Tony Baddingham, “is just pursuing his super objectives very clearly, and very ruthlessly.”

Those objectives are to claw his way to the very top of his various circles in Thatcher’s Britain. Professionally, it’s television broadcasting. Socially, it’s the well-heeled and well-liquored countryside set first introduced in the “Rutshire Chronicles,” Jilly Cooper’s best-selling romance series, the basis of “Rivals.”

Like the novels, “Rivals” offers lots of raunch and lots of horse-riding but also a sharp-eyed look at British class. Tony did not inherit a country pile like his wife, Monica (Claire Rushbrook), or his media business bête noire Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell).

“He has a very keen sense of injustice about how the world is structured and how unfair that is, and the glass ceiling of class,” Tennant said.

Overseas “Rivals” runs on Disney+, and it has been the No. 1 show on the platform in multiple countries and has inspired gushing coverage in Britain. When viewers last saw Tony midway through the second season — spoilers start now — Monica had just died in a car accident after discovering one of his many affairs. The new episodes open with a guest at her funeral saying fearfully that now that Tony has “lost his conscience, he can do what he likes.”

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