David Tennant, Aidan Turner and the Rivals cast brought the second season of the Jilly Cooper adaptation to the BFI IMAX, with Stanley Tucci among the guests.
David Tennant, the tenth Doctor, led the world premiere of Rivals season two at the BFI IMAX on the South Bank on Tuesday 12 May 2026. He plays the television baron Lord Tony Baddingham.
Born in Bathgate in 1971 and raised in Paisley, the son of a Church of Scotland minister, Tennant decided to act after watching Doctor Who as a boy. He trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and played Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2008.
The series adapts Rivals, Jilly Cooper’s 1988 novel of the Rutshire Chronicles, set in the Cotswolds of the 1980s.
The second season takes the fight between Corinium and Venturer for the Central South West television franchise into a harder phase. Baddingham uses scandal and the people closest to him to hold on to power. The first three of its twelve new episodes began streaming three days after the premiere.
Aidan Turner, Alex Hassell, Danny Dyer, Katherine Parkinson and Bella Maclean joined Tennant, with the creators Dominic Treadwell-Collins, Felicity Blunt and Elliot Hegarty. Stanley Tucci, Blunt’s husband and an Academy Award nominee for The Lovely Bones, was among the guests.