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Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the playboy and agent provocateur of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – the Casanova of his time. Engaged for 10 years to shop assistant-turned-model Lizzie Siddal, the woman he eventually married, this didn't stop him sleeping around, much to the chagrin of his friends.

Rossetti is played by Aidan Turner in ±«Óãtv Two's new drama about the Brotherhood, whose other members are John Millais, William Holman Hunt and, in this story, Fred Walters, an amalgam of several other people in the men's lives at the time.

Aidan, who recently starred as vampire Mitchell in ±«Óãtv Three's Being Human, describes Rossetti as an "absolute free spirit. He's a chancer and a womaniser – he's a libertine in every sense of the word.

"Rossetti trained in an art college briefly and left to pursue his life as an artist and met Hunt. Hunt kind of trained him more and he's striving to be as good as the other guys. He's highly ambitious but he has this sort of lethargic attitude a lot of the time and doesn't really like to put in the hard work but wants the results. He's not quite as talented as the others and he knows it in the back of his head, but he tries."

Aidan says all the members of the Brotherhood are completely different – John Millais is the truly talented one, Holman Hunt has intensity like no other and, as for Rossetti, whose works include Girlhood Of Mary, Virgin and Ecce Ancilli Domini, what he lacks in talent he makes up for in confidence.

"Hunt is the first member of the brotherhood that Rossetti meets and they become really close. Next is John Millais, the prodigal child. He's the one true genius of the group – he doesn't even need to work that hard, it just comes naturally to him. And then there's Fred, who idolises Rossetti in a way, he looks up to him so much and tries to be like him and dresses like him. He really yearns for that confidence and cockiness that Rossetti has.

"They're all such different characters, you kind of wonder why they're friends but I guess all friendships are like that. Most of my friends are radically different people. I don't think I really like people like me," he laughs, "I don't have time for them, they're just too close – they do your head in!

"I guess that's just how they worked, though – they bounced off each other."

Rossetti is, undoubtedly, a charmer who gets what he wants – no matter who he hurts along the way. But despite these shortcomings, Aidan hopes he's playing a likeable character.

"That's my big thing in this drama – to make him likeable, because a lot of the time he might come off as petulant. He's a problematic character; he's intensely passionate and wears his heart on his sleeve. He says what he thinks and what he feels, and a lot of the time it's frustration, especially in the first three episodes – he's frustrated that he's not getting to the places that he wants to be and these other guys are, and he just can't understand why – he doesn't want to give in to the fact that it's probably his lack of talent and tact.

"He's one of these people that life seems to go really smoothly for because he just rests on other people's hard work."

Rossetti's long – and ultimately doomed – love affair with Lizzie begins when the Brotherhood look for a model to paint. It's well-documented that the men often engaged in after-hours activities with their models and Lizzie was no exception.

"Hunt, Rossetti and Millais want to find a beautiful red-headed woman and Fred Walters spots Lizzie working in a hat shop one day and tells the rest of them that he's seen this incredible goddess in the hat shop and they go and check her out."

It soon becomes clear that Fred has fallen for Lizzie, too, but, as always, Rossetti gets the girl: "Fred hates the way Rossetti treats her, and rightly so," says Aidan.

"So many people at the time pointed out to Rossetti that you can't treat people like that. He'd constantly just sleep with other women: he had no qualms about stuff like that."

Aidan admits that, while he knew little of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood before taking on the role, he could now probably use the group as his specialist subject were he to be a contestant on Mastermind: "Do you know what, I probably could – I know so much about this guy!" he laughs.

"I'd heard of Rossetti and I recognised some of the Brotherhood paintings but I didn't even study art in secondary school. But that's the great thing about this job – you can completely immerse yourself in a character. There's so much information on these guys – endless amounts of books and a fantastic website which has everything he's ever done, every sketch he's ever made, every painting he's ever painted."

Having spent much of the end of 2008 filming ±«Óãtv Three's hit drama Being Human (which returns for a second series next year), how does playing an historical figure compare with playing Mitchell the vampire?

"I've not played a lot of real-life people who have existed before and I love it," says Aidan. "I approach it in a completely different way – as regards Mitchell I had to make up the story, nobody would ever know, whereas Rossetti's back story obviously existed, so that work was done."

Now that he's played Rossetti, Aidan admits he would love to play more of his heroes but he fears at six foot he's a little too tall for the roles he'd like: "I'd love to play Napoleon but I'm probably too tall. I'm slightly obsessed with him. I'd also love to play Barry McGuigan, the Irish boxer, but I look nothing like him. He's tiny and he's got this funny 'tache and looks very Irish and I don't," he laughs.