From Downton Abbey to The Gilded Cage
Julian Fellowes talks to Dominic Maxwell about his stage takeover and his new US TV drama set in 1880s Manhattan.
This summer, for the first time in many summers, Julian Fellowes found himself with time on his hands. Having just pulled the plug on Downton Abbey after six years of world-conquering success, he no longer had the pleasurable onus of thinking up hours of fresh permutations for his upstairsdownstairs creations.
What he did have were three big stage shows due to open in the British autumn. None were a pressing concern. School of Rock, the Jack Black comedy Fellowes helped Andrew Lloyd Webber to turn into a musical had already opened on Broadway. His other West End transfer, a reworking of the 1963 musical comedy Half a Sixpence, had become the fastestselling show in the history of the Chichester Festival Theatre. And he’d already polished off the script for a touring musical version of Kenneth Grahame’s children’s classic, The Wind in the Willows. So time to enjoy loafing around his substantial country home.
But you don’t get to be Julian Fellowes, character actor turned grandmaster of middle-class period drama, by chilling out. This is the man who waited all of 10 weeks after Downton’s Christmas Day finale – seven million viewers in Britain; 10 million when it debuted in America – before launching his next Sunday-night period drama, an adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s novel
‘I was OK as an Doctor Thorne. Who might spend his few spare, nonscriptwriting
actor. But I hours popping
think up on our screens in Great Houses with Julian Fellowes.
sometimes you So instead he stayed in
have to character and used his spare time to sort out his papers
recognise you after 15 years of neglect. ‘‘I
are not as do find myself a bad idler,’’ he says. ‘‘I simply don’t
good at the seem to be able to lie down
thing you really on the grass with a Trollope and a glass of wine and while
wanted to do away the afternoon.’’ Unless
as you are at he’s adapting the Trollope, anyway. ‘‘Yes, unless I’m
something adapting the Trollope.’’
else.’ Once the current batch of stage shows have opened, he’ll be working on a couple of films he ‘‘can’t really talk about’’ and a three-part television series he ‘‘can’t really talk about’’. He has started working out the plots for The Gilded Age, a drama he is writing for the American network NBC about old money meeting new money in 1880s Manhattan. ‘‘In a way it’s going to be Downton territory because it’s about people and their servants, but it’s a very different society, and it’s also urban, which Downton wasn’t, so I’m looking forward to it.’’
As a man who found his true metier only in middle age – now 67, he was 52 when he won his Oscar for his first screenplay, Gosford Park – he’s making up for lost time. ‘‘I think I am compulsive. I think I am a workaholic.’’
When he touches on the success of his creations, Fellowes mixes palpable pleasure – and why not? – with an air of English selfdeprecation. He prefaces a mention of the mega-hit Mary Poppins musical with, ‘‘I think it went well, though it seems too daring to say that . . .’’ Then again, he points out with a lucky-old-me chuckle that having two musicals opening in the West End in the same week is ‘‘a record’’. Talking about how it was the right time to end Downton, he mentions also that it won the last British television award it possibly could the other day, a TV Choice award. He’s happy he ended it ‘‘before the downward slide’’.
He knows his work isn’t for everyone. ‘‘The contempt for middle-class drama is now a kind of established truth among the theatrical elite. But that doesn’t help me. Because that’s what I do. I have to not be afraid of doing what I do in the face of that.’’
Fellowes had a respectable acting career after taking English at Cambridge. ‘‘And I wasn’t bad. There were a couple of parts I could do reasonably well. Rather nasty Conservative ministers in camel-hair coats. And silly asses [such as Kilwillie in Monarch of the Glen].
‘‘I was OK as an actor. But I think sometimes you have to recognise you are not as good at the thing you really wanted to do as you are at something else. And if you have any sense you will have a tearful weekend, drink too much, and then get on with the thing you are really good at.’’ – The Times