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 BBC 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 BBC 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 BBC 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.

With the nickname “Maniac”, William Holman Hunt was surely someone to keep an eye out for, particularly as he thought he’d been given the nickname for all the right reasons. But for Hunt, one of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, played by Rafe Spall, the nickname was more likely to be down to his weird, wild and wonderful ways.

“He thinks it’s because of his dogmatic work ethic, but his friends think otherwise – he’s a bit wild and he’s very intense and he’s portrayed as a very strong Christian,” says Rafe, who is best known for roles in the movies Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz and Wide Sargasso Sea and TV dramas including The Rotters’ Club, The Chatterley Affair and Frankie Howerd – Rather You Than Me, in which he starred alongside David Walliams as Howerd’s partner, Dennis Heymer.

Hunt became successful in the mid-19th century for his religious paintings including The Light Of The World, The Scapegoat, Finding Of The Saviour In The Temple and The Shadow Of Death. But it was his relationship with prostitute Annie Miller that drew him a lot of unwanted attention, driving him to distraction and almost causing him to have a breakdown. It was also this relationship that was the catalyst for him taking a hiatus from the Brotherhood.

Hunt was at odds with himself over this relationship, says Rafe: “His conflict in this drama is the fact that he is a man of God, but he is also obsessed by a prostitute so, to justify this, he gives her lessons in deportment and manners and skills, sort of My Fair Lady style.

“It was a massive love affair. They never married [Hunt later married Fanny Waugh, and then her sister, after his first wife died in childbirth] but it went on for a long time and I’m sure there would have been a big scandal and Hunt would’ve been really embarrassed by the fact that he was in love with a prostitute. But he wanted to change her – he wanted to turn her into something different.”

As with any troublesome affairs of the heart, it was Hunt’s close friends – all members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – who helped him through the dark times.

“They’re inseparable, these three artists and Fred, they’re a Brotherhood – they’re the best of friends and the worst of enemies in the way that they’re fiercely competitive with each other, like a lot of friendship groups, who all do the same job. But Rossetti, Millais and Hunt – they love each other.

“They were a very incestuous group. Much of the source material for the drama is based on fact and what Franny Moyle has done brilliantly with her book is taken their stories and enriched them with genuine human emotion.

Hunt decides he needs to get away from Miller and the Brotherhood and goes on a voyage of self-discovery to the Holy Land, telling the boys ‘when I get back she’ll be much better’.”

It was this hiatus, though, that spelt the end of the relationship.

“I think it changed him in the fact that he went and saw more of the world,” says Rafe. “He went on his own, he wanted to get away from Annie while she was turning into a lady, so he could come back and she’d be the lady he’d always wanted her to be. When he gets back, he finds that it was actually Annie’s grubbiness that he was attracted to and the lady he turned her into, he isn’t interested in any more.

“The thing with Annie Miller,” he continues, “is that she was famous – she was a famous prostitute in real life, people knew who she was. And she went on to marry a Lord. She became a huge society girl.”

Rafe admits that he knew little about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood before taking on this role so the drama has been a real eye-opener for him.

“When you think of Pre-Raphaelite painters you think of girls with red hair and maybe Ophelia. But now I’ve seen a lot of the paintings in the flesh and they’re incredible. They’re so impressive. The detail in them is just immense and I think some of them are really beautiful. I think Rossetti’s paintings are my favourite. Hunt wasn’t one for making pretty pictures; he wanted to tell the truth and he wanted to make things look real, at the expense of being beautiful. He didn’t really care about beauty, he just wanted reality.”

Rafe believes that Tracey Emin and Damian Hirst are the modern-day equivalent of the Brotherhood in the art world and that Hunt, Millais, Rossetti et al were the celebrities of their time, blowing out of the water suggestions that it’s only in the 20th and 21st century that people have become obsessed with celebrity culture: “The age of celebrity isn’t a new thing. The fact is they were really famous and the models they painted were the Kate Moss of their day and they were more famous than Tracey Emin and Damian Hirst – they’re just as radical and just as strange.

“They were the modern painters of the day and the strangest, most out-there modern artists that you can imagine. The reason I’m interested in the drama is to show that young artists have always got drunk, slept with loads of girls and taken drugs – nothing’s new.”

Hunt became one of the most famous painters in British, if not world, history, according to Rafe and was “fiercely ambitious”, a characteristic he greatly admires.

“I can relate to him in the fact that I’m an artist of sorts and I’m ambitious and I really care about what I do and put a lot of effort into it, and the same can be said for Hunt.

“I even get to wear a big beard for the last three episodes and really go for it!” he laughs. “I’ve done lots of really different stuff and I’m very lucky to be able to do that and I’m really grateful to Ben Evans, the producer, for giving me the chance and I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s taken a lot of research and a lot of hard work and it’s a lot of fun.”

In fact, Rafe put so much into his preparation for the role that he took lessons so that his character would look the part when painting on to a canvas. “I went to a life-drawing class and someone came in and showed us how to hold a paintbrush!”

So does Rafe think he could have a future in the art world, following the lessons?

“I think you’ve either got it or you haven’t… and I haven’t!”

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of exciting and innovative artists who threw the buttoned-up Victorian art world into chaos with their revolutionary paintings and promiscuous love lives, but this isn’t scriptwriter Peter Bowker’s first brush with the maverick group of artists.

“When I was growing up, I thought they were the greatest artists that ever lived. I think there’s something quintessentially ‘youthful’ that these three guys are struggling with; their regard for women and what they’re trying to portray strikes me as very testosterone-filled, so there’s no surprise young men like me were interested in them.”

In what looks like a big departure from Occupation, his critically acclaimed drama about the Iraq War, the award-winning writer explains his decision to write a drama about art history.

“When I started to look at some of the extraordinary stories and peculiar details of the source material that Franny (Moyle) had written in her book, it wasn’t long before it became clear that we had the basis of three great, distinct characters in these young men.

“The thing that really interested me was, although Millais is often regarded as the most gifted, it was Rossetti who was very much the leader of the group. Everybody who met him said charisma, charisma, charisma. He was very funny, and in his letters, he’s always begging for money or ‘tin’. I loved his politeness combined with a ‘give me everything you’ve got’ approach. I think we’ve all met or known people like this, women fall for them and men love their company. There was also a kind of Jim Morrison story to him: at the very end of his life he wasn’t thin and beautiful but corrupted and bloated.

“As Millais was a child prodigy, I imagined he would have been singled out and even bullied at school. In spite of these experiences, he has a certain breezy cluelessness combined with a steely ambition, so I re-imagined him with some of the traits of a member of a boy band!”

“With Holman Hunt, the key was his very disturbed sexual passion in conflict with his religious zealousness. You can see it in Hunt’s face: a simultaneous revulsion and fascination with prostitution, and in a way that made him a gift of a character to write.

“The decision to include a fictional narrator was partly there to help articulate how fast the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood grew, both in terms of success and reputation. The character of Fred Walters, a writer on the edge of the group, was an amalgam of a few real contemporaries of the Brotherhood, and I created him in order to tell stories from an outsider perspective.”

Bowker goes on to explain the impact and power of the emerging media of the day and how this fed into the notoriety of the Pre-Raphaelites.

“This period saw great industrial and social change, and I think it was the beginning of the world of art as we recognise it now. These guys exploded at the same time as the phenomenon of daily newspapers, and art was arguably the most popular entertainment of the day: so that would explain how they became in some ways a cause celebre of the Victorians. Here are three young men, working in the most exciting medium of their day, blowing the art world apart. You can’t underestimate their impact: it would have been like when you first heard punk, heard hip-hop or first saw a Damien Hirst piece.

“The other great thing for me as a writer is these characters enable you to shift gear from the comic to the tragic. One minute you’re laughing at someone’s appallingly sexist hypocrisy and the next minute someone is dying of terrible laudanum abuse. In Victorian England, unerringly it’s the women who pay the price. With Lizzie, I don”t think it was the laudanum that killed her, it was Rossetti. Having said that, Annie Miller was an interesting exception: a street prostitute who aspired to a better life, she did snare a Lord in real life.

“The interesting thing about these boys is, in some ways they are the most attractive and articulate characters I’ve ever written, yet also at times woefully out of touch with reality and in their youthful idealism they probably bit off more than they could chew in their manifesto! There’s a great comedy and vicarious excitement to be had by watching their struggle.

[Note: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood defined themselves as a reform movement, and they set out to create art in a more detailed, colourful and complex manner, rejecting the more mechanistic, Classical approach that had been almost universally adopted since the work of Raphael and Michelangelo.]

As to what the audience will get from the drama, Peter says: “I hope they’ll be surprised that art history can be so lively, I hope they will be entertained and enjoy the humour and I hope the drama will also stimulate interest in the art and society of the time.”

Just as Brit Art in the 1990s needed Saatchi the Pre-Raphaelites needed someone to help bring their art into the public consciousness. In Desperate Romantics that man is Fred Walters, an admirer of the group who – despite lacking the cash, confidence or influence of Saatchi – in this telling of the story is instrumental in bringing the Brotherhood’s art to the masses.

A fictional character, Fred Walters is played by Sam Crane, a young actor whose experience already encompasses stage roles at the National Theatre (Some Trace Of Her, DNA), The Royal Court (Kebab) and Shakespeare’s Globe (Othello).

Fresh from filming an energetic bar brawl with Aidan Turner (who plays Dante Gabriel Rossetti), Sam explains the origins of his character Fred: “He’s a composite of several historical characters. The main basis is Fred Stephens, who was one of the original members of the Brotherhood and you see him as a model in a lot of the paintings – in the Millais painting Ferdinand Lured By Ariel, he’s Ferdinand. There’s also a little bit of Walter Deverell in him too because Walter was the person who found Lizzie Siddal, the group’s main model. Finally, William Michael Rossetti’s in there as well, he was the actual diarist of the group as well as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s brother.”

Sam admits that, despite undertaking some background research, the scripts, which initially drew him to the project, were his main source: “I did research into all the different people and I read some of William Rossetti’s diaries. But Fred is a fictional character who exists within the script and it’s very clearly written so I think a lot of the work is done by the writer, Pete Bowker.

“The scripts are very strong, sharply written, funny and quite stylish. I particularly like Fred because he’s full of conflicting desires. He really admires the Brotherhood – he’s totally in awe of them as they’re very glamorous people and he’d love to be like them but knows he doesn’t have the talent or the self-assurance to be that cool.”

Cool or not, Fred provides the group with their main source of inspiration: “He finds them this amazing flame-haired model (Lizzie Siddal) when he’s shopping with his mother – he’s very embarrassed to be there, he’s a bit of a mummy’s boy. Then he catches sight of Lizzie working in the back of a hat shop and knows she’ll be the Brotherhood’s perfect model. So he introduces her to them.

“He also manages to convince John Ruskin, the most influential art critic of the day, to visit the studio and see the artists’ works-in-progress. These two events lead the Brotherhood to make him an honorary member and he becomes their diarist.”

Despite his admiration for the group’s art, Fred has problems with the way they conduct their personal lives. Sam explains: “Fred is a moral person and he gets really frustrated by the group’s occasional fecklessness, ambition and particularly Rossetti’s depravity. That’s the interesting thing about the character, he’s so desperate to be a part of the group and then, when he is, he can’t reconcile his own morality with their behaviour and that tears him up inside. The other problem is that he’s in love with Lizzie, but she’s only interested in the bad boys and he’s not a bad boy. She falls for Rossetti who’s really the worst person for her and Fred knows that, but there’s nothing he can do about it.”

Sam confesses that, in reality, he isn’t an ardent fan of Pre-Raphaelite art, but he has other reasons for admiring the group and for thinking their story has something for a modern audience: “I think some of the work is good, Millais is a talented painter, but he does get a bit chocolate boxy sometimes. I think what’s more interesting about the group is their lives and their aims, they wanted to be revolutionaries and really shake up the system and I think those aims were, in a way, stronger than their work.

“I think audiences will see this story is very similar to a group of up-and-coming contemporary artists, trying to do something different. Their ambition and their drive is really recognisable, as are their various dalliances with alcohol, drugs and sex.”

The analogy of Fred Walters as a kind of predecessor to Saatchi isn’t too wide of the mark. Sam explains how, in Desperate Romantics, his character’s business acumen changed the way the delicate relationship between art and commerce worked.

“Fred makes money by selling stories about the group as a journalist, but then he has this idea of becoming a sort of art dealer or artist’s manager. He realises if the Brotherhood broke away from the Royal Academy, showing their work in a gallery and charging for tickets they could make a lot of money without even having to sell a painting. He recognised the popularity of the group – lots of people were already coming to see their work – and the rise of the middle classes and he thought ‘yeah, people will be prepared to pay to see this’.”

Although Fred isn’t an artist he still gets embroiled in the hot-headed antics of the group as the fight scene Sam’s just filmed proves. It’s one of his favourite scenes: “I quite like the scene we’ve just done where I have a bust-up with Rossetti. It has to be quite technical in a way because they have to plan the camera positions and we have a fight director on hand. But it’s not too tough – he flings me against the bar, I slide along it and he shoves me up against the wall and that’s it really.”

It seems Fred may not relish being a punch bag but Sam certainly enjoys tussling with this complex character.

Samuel Barnett plays John Everett Millais; a child prodigy who joined the Royal Academy of Art aged only 11. Whilst there, he met William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, two of his future Pre-Raphaelite brothers. He developed a controversially realistic style of painting, creating works like – the now iconic and widely reproduced – Ophelia.

His other paintings include The Woodman’s Daughter, Mariana, The Order Of Release, Christ In The House Of His Parents and portraits of Ruskin and Tennyson among others.

However, contemporaries of Millais would have known him as much for his infamous relationship with the wife of art critic John Ruskin, as his paintings.

Samuel Barnett has acted across stage and screen, most recently in BBC Two’s comedy Beautiful People and the stage and film versions of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys. He confesses he was drawn to this project because of the quality of the team behind it, as well as the character of Millais.

“It’s a really funny part, plus my character falls in love with the wife of the biggest art critic of the time, Ruskin, and he gets the girl, which is wonderful! I’d seen some of the drama Ben Evans had produced for BBC Four, Fantabulosa! and Steptoe And Son, his work is of such a high quality. I also knew Franny Moyle, she had executive produced a Wilfred Owen programme I was in and she wrote the book for Desperate Romantics, so the whole thing was a really attractive package.”

Peter Bowker’s writing was also a draw for the actor: “The scripts are really great and I realised, after reading Franny’s book, that Pete has interwoven a lot of quotes from the actual people’s letters and diaries into the script, so skilfully and it reads really well as dialogue. It feels really modern too and we were told to make it sound as conversational as possible – I think we’ve been able to do that.”

Samuel revealed he’s been familiar with the Brotherhoods’ paintings since his youth: “I knew their work because they are my mum’s favourite period of art, so we had calendars and posters when I was growing up. But there was still a lot of research to do for the part, which was difficult because a lot of the books I read were just about the art really, they weren’t about the people. But Franny’s book gave such an insight, I read it really quickly because it’s so well written and all about their personal lives.”

He admits to an eclectic taste in art and a real admiration for Millais’ style of painting: “I like all sorts of art, that’s why I love wandering around The National Gallery. I really admire paintings that look like an actual snapshot – I think that’s just extraordinary.

“That’s what’s so special about Millais: flesh – people’s actual skin – looks real, for example in The Order Of Release and Christ In The House Of His Parents, it’s photographic, it doesn’t matter how close you get to the painting, you don’t see the brushwork. With Millais’ paintings it’s microscopic; when he does hair it’s extraordinary, you can see every strand. His paintings are my favourites – not just because I’m playing him – I think he’s the best artist of the group, technically and also emotionally.”

Despite the fact the drama is set more than 150 years ago Samuel is sure it has something for everyone and will appeal to modern audiences.

“You don’t have to know anything about the period or the artists; it’s a human story and a ’sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll’ story as well: this was the period when supermodels and celebrity was born. The use of the printing press meant everyone, nationally and internationally, could see these guys’ paintings and the models they used, that was a first – art had never had exposure like that before.

“They were the modern artists of their day and looking at their work now you think ‘how can they have been criticised and pooh pooh-ed as young artists with no talent?’ The Royal Academy at that time wanted nice, classical-looking, attractive pictures; they thought the Pre-Raphaelites were almost heretical. The critical response was reactionary because they were doing something new – which is what often happens to our modern artists now.”

Samuel is no stranger to playing historical characters, having played the war poet Wilfred Owen in a BBC One drama-documentary. He admits that such roles offer a particular set of challenges.

“The worry when recreating is one of accuracy – you want to be true to life, but in the end you can’t worry about it too much, because every actor will do a completely different job. Many actors won’t attempt the kind of precision-recreation that Michael Sheen does brilliantly, for example. Equally, it’s easier because these are not contemporary characters, so no one remembers what they were like. At the end of the day it’s just my take on Millais – someone else might do it differently.”

Having started his career in theatre, Samuel has been playing many more roles on screen recently, but he claims he’s not getting much public attention in London.

“In New York I get people coming up to me because The History Boys was such a hit on Broadway and they show the film all the time on cable over there, so people recognise you. Someone approached me on the tube here who was a fan of Beautiful People, she said ‘I thought you were really good… shame you weren’t in it more’ and off she got, I thought ‘thanks very much!’ They say people don’t look at one another on the tube – I know that’s not true!”