Gideon Turner

Gideon Turner

Age: 35, or nearly six years older than the character, Ross Gardiner, whom he is playing in the West End premiere at the Trafalgar Studios 1 of the popular Jeff Baron two-hander, Visiting Mr. Green.

Hometown: Oxford, where he grew up the son of a Jewish biochemist and inventor who is now 82—the same age as Warren Mitchell, Turner's distinguished, instantly empathic co-star in Visiting Mr. Green. One of his teachers at school was the now-renowned, immensely successful novelist, Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials). "He was the only one of the teachers I really clicked with," recalls Turner, whose first-ever acting assignment was in one of Pullman's first plays.

Currently: Navigating the specifics of the opposites-will-ultimately-attract arc of Baron's play, which ran off-Broadway for a year, first with Eli Wallach and then Hal Linden, and has since been produced in 37 countries in 22 languages in over 300 productions. Mitchell has been attached to the play for some time, including an Australian gig opposite his real-life son. Turner came aboard for a U.K. tour that began in January in Plymouth. "The great thing about this play is that it seems to go down very well with all sorts of audiences from different backgrounds," says the actor, pointing by way of proof to friends who brought their nine-year-old twins "and they were enthralled by the show."

He Likes Me, He Really Likes Me: "The thing with Ross is that he's essentially a very caring guy who's put in a situation he doesn't want to be in," says Turner, graphing the psychology of the character. "I don't think he particularly likes Mr. Green right at the beginning; I think Ross hopes that Mr. Green is going to be a lovely old guy and that he can just come in and have a cup of coffee. But the moment he feels Mr. Green's animosity, he thinks, fair enough, and resolves to be there once a week for six months. Ross lives by the rules; he's not going to not turn up. It's as the play goes on that he starts to really care and feel responsible for Mr. Green—he confesses things to Mr. Green that he wishes he could tell his own father about."

Two's Company: Patrick Garland's staging wouldn't work without a palpable bond between its two players, and Turner speaks with evident fondness of his co-star, who he says has had two hip replacements and two strokes, one of which was on tour in Arthur Miller's The Price. "I think Warren had a week off," says Turner, clearly impressed at the octogenarian's vigor. "The thing I really love about this is that it actually goes back to why I love acting and why I loved being at the Drama Centre," where Turner did his drama training. "It's that whole kind of almost American style of acting—of just being with each other and interacting and trying to be as spontaneous as possible." Turner, though fully English, has in fact played Americans twice before: in Things of Dry Hours, the Naomi Wallace play that cast him as a working-class Iowan, and as a guy from New York state in a horror-themed TV series called Dark Realm that was actually shot off the coast of Britain on the Isle of Man. New York, as it happens, is where Turner and his wife, actress Rebecca Callard, got married five weeks before 9/11; the couple have two sons, aged two and four months.