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The King's coming... CALL FOR CARSON!
Only one man can save the day when royalty descend on Downton Abbey. In this exclusive preview pf the new film, the cast tell Gabrielle Donnelly of the electrifying tension above and below stairs
The familiar, slightly wistful, tinkling theme tune. The graceful castle rising serenely from the green hills surrounding it. A gleaming silver Bentley nosing up the immaculate drive to Downton Abbey, bearing Lord Grantham’s second daughter Edith, now Edith Pelham, Marchioness of Hexham, her husband Bertie the Marquess, and her daughter Marigold, all home for a visit to see her folks.
‘No maid?’ shouts Edith’s father as he jovially greets them. ‘No valet? No nanny even!’
‘It’s 1927,’ Bertie explains. ‘We’re modern folk.’
And so we’re back in the muchmissed world of Downton Abbey, complete with lavish costumes, glorious sets and a rattling good storyline to boot, involving scurrying servants and kitchen crises below stairs, and the Crawley family and their various tribulations above. There’s t radit ionbound Robert, Earl of Grantham, his forward-looking American wife Cora, their daughters Mary and Edith, and the social circle that revolves around them among the early-20th- century English aristocracy. And presiding over all is the reliably waspish Violet, Dowager Countess. Yes, Dame Maggie Smith is back in the part despite her repeated assertions that she would not do it. ‘Dame Maggie has always played hard to get with us, but we’ve always managed to get her,’ smiles producer Gareth Neame. And of course she’s still firing off those delicious one-liners and still in a state of open warfare with her nemesis, the defiantly middle- class Isobel Crawley, who married Lord Merton at the end of the last series.
It’s been four years since we bade farewell to Downton on our TV screens, the series closing with Edith’s triumphant wedding to Bertie and Carson’s retirement following a diagnosis of what we now call Parkinson’s disease, leading to a new guard establishing itself below stairs. Barely had the final credits rolled on the series, however, when the clamour began for a feature film to fill the gap left in our lives, and at
last here it is – Downton Abbey: the movie will open on 13 September.
Ironically, it was the very success of the television series that almost prevented the film being made at all. After the last series aired, most of the cast were snapped up for other highprofile projects: Hugh Bonneville (Robert) went on to star in the television comedy W1A, among other things; Jim Carter (Carson) played Pope Boniface in the series Knightfall; Joanne Froggatt ( Anna Bates) costarred with Ioan Gruffudd in Liar; and Michelle Dockery ( Lady Mary) has appeared in a number of US TV series, including Godless and Good Behavior. ‘It’s really a question of timing,’ Michelle told me two years ago about the possibility of a film. ‘It’s not easy getting 18 strong cast members together who have all gone on to have other terrific opportunities because of the show. Everyone’s very busy but, fingers crossed, something will happen.’
Her finger- crossing worked. All the old favourites are back – along with the odd new face like Tuppence Middleton and Imelda Staunton – and all, old and new, are visibly delighted to be there. ‘My God, it was like Groundhog Day!’ says Elizabeth McGovern of returning to the set a s Cora. ‘ Nothing had changed at all. Not a blade of grass, not a stick of furniture – we all slotted right back into our old dynamic very easily and it really felt like coming home.’
For Julian Fellowes, the man who created Downton, making a twohour film instead of a ten-hour television series posed different challenges. ‘There are two challenges to writing a film. One is that in the television series there would be a proper story every week for four or five or six characters. Other characters would join in these stories, but this set of characters or that would be the main one for the week, and the following week it would be a different set. But in a film everyone has to have a story, and all the stories have to be resolved at the end, which is a challenge in itself.
‘ The other thing was that we
‘It’s the King – the stakes don’t get any higher’ HUGH BONNEVILLE
needed to have just the one subject that would embrace them all. We didn’t need that in the television series. It would be a love story here, Daisy buying a new hat there and Robert losing all his money – all very separate stories running concurrently. For the film, we needed one big story that would pull everybody in, that would affect everyone from the staff to the family.’
The story he decided on was a visit from King George and Queen Mary – an event that Julian says was far from uncommon in the years after the First World War. ‘It was a time when the King and Queen were facing the task of not only rebuilding the monarchy, but re-establishing the monarchy after a period when a great many of their fellow sovereigns had fallen, obviously in Russia during the Revolution but also in many other places such as Austria and Germany and so on. One of the things King George V and Queen Mary bel ieved was necessary in order for the monarchy to succeed was that it had to be very visible.
‘For instance, even as early as 1912, they made a famous tour of Yorkshire where they stayed at Wentworth Woodhouse and went around the collieries and all that kind of thing. Being public, being on parade, making these visits around the count ry, was very much something they went in for, and t hey d id indeed succeed in re- establishing the crown at the heart of British life.’
For the Crawleys and their staff, the lead-up to the royal visit is electric. ‘Carson’s about to burst!’ says Jim Carter of his character, cajoled out of retirement by Lady Mary in order to help with the impending guests. ‘In, I think, season one or two, he was given a Christmas present, which was a book called The Royal Families Of Europe, and to be allowed to serve the King and Queen is the apex of his ambition. I remember even when I was young, when the Queen came through our town, all the junior school kids were brought out onto the street and given flags to wave – the streets were four deep, it was such an event. And that was in the 1950s. In the 1920s, for fervent royalists like Carson... well, I think he’s the most excited person in the house.’
For the Earl of Grantham it’s a case of excitement mingled with a severe case of nerves. ‘I think it’s fair to say that having any visitors to the house is the seed of new drama,’ says Hugh Bonneville. ‘And when you’ve got the top of the tree coming – the King and Queen and their entourage – well, the stakes don’t get much higher than that. Not to mention the expense. If you look at King Lear, he just expects everyone to drop everything and provide everything and be there for him and his people, and nothing has changed much since his day, so that’s a big dynamic challenge right there.’ A challenge that has the unexpected effect of occasionally lowering the barrier between upstairs and downstairs, says Michael C Fox, who plays footman Andy Parker, ‘ That’s because the people who are coming to the house are of an even higher class than the Crawleys, so the family have a lot to lose if it doesn’t go well because there’s a lot of reputation at stake. There are a few moments in the scenes before the visit where it’s just me and Hugh in our civvy clothes preparing the place, and you see the class go out of the window. We’re both thinking, “Oh, my God, these people are coming in, what are we going to do?”’ The action unfolds over the course of a month in the autumn of 1927, just a couple of years after the TV series ended and a year after t he General Strike of 1926, when for nine days in May the country closed down as workers demanded bet ter wages and improved working conditions. The strike ultimately failed, but afterwards the mood in the country had changed permanently. Julian says that for the film he made a conscious choice to leapfrog that year. ‘ We didn’t think the General Strike would be a useful thing for us. We do actually refer to it in the film, so we don’t pretend it never happened, but we didn’t want it to be the centre of the film. We’ve just bypassed it and gone forward sequentially.’
‘It was an interesting time,’ says
‘Carson is so excited he’s about to burst’ JIM CARTER
Michelle Dockery of the period. ‘ The General Strike’s just happened and the country’s about to sink into the Depression; but this is a story that’s not about historical events, it’s about the people who lived through them, and particularly about the future for Downton. It was an unpredictable t ime for these great establishments.’
‘ Things had changed pol it ical ly,’ adds Phyllis Logan, once again ruling below stairs as Mrs Hughes. ‘ People were becoming more and more aware of what was going on in the government, and they were more able to speak out about it. Before they’d just be deferential to the upper classes, but that’s changing. Most people weren’t actually insurgents, but they certainly weren’t ready to be trampled underfoot.’
For Michelle, returning to the Downton Abbey set after so many years in America was like returning home. ‘ I’d spent six years working on the show, and it had been long enough since I’d been there that I was feeling a bit nostalgic about it. Lady Mary has been such a huge part of my life and I’d really missed playing her, I’d missed her strength and her wit. So it was wonderful being back with her and the rest of the cast – it felt like no time had passed and we were just this family coming back together to have a really fun time. Which it was.’
She reveals that we find Mary in a positive place. She’s happily marr ied to racing d r iver Hen ry Talbot (Matthew Goode) and is mother to a little girl, Caroline, as well as her son George, by her l a te husband Matthew Crawley. ‘She’s finally content, which is quite a relief for me,’ she smiles. ‘But she also feels a great responsibility for Downton now that she has somewhat taken over from her father and is helping to run the estate, although he’s still at the helm. So this royal visit means a great deal to her – she’s the one taking control of it all, and it means a lot to her that everything runs smoothly.’
In a scene that had viewers reaching for the tissues during the trailer, Lady Mary is seen knocking on the door of the cottage where her former butler and mentor, Carson, is living out his retirement, and saying, ‘ I need your help, Carson.’ To which the kindly old but le r, who has helped Mary out of many a hole in the past, replies immediately, ‘I’ll be there in the morning, my Lady. Don’t you worry.’
‘It’s really remarkable just how therapeutic all the gardening Carson has been doing over the last 18 months has been for him,’ says Jim Carter, whose character’s Parkinson’s disease appears to have completely abated in the film. ‘ Because my trembling hands have been miraculously cured. So you see, gardening as a therapy really does work it seems!’
More seriously, he adds that Carson was more than delighted to return to the workforce. ‘Can you imagine being Carson and being retired and living in a cottage? Hopeless! I would surmise that he was rather unhappily retired and was very happy to be put back into harness.’
For his own return to the show, Jim had the pleasure of a new castmate – his real- l i fe wi fe Imelda Staunton, playing a lady- inwaiting to the royal household. ‘ What’s her name?’ he jokes now of the character. ‘ Lady Somebody Posh? Lady Bagpush? No, Bagshaw, I’ve got it now, Lady Bagshaw! We were only filming together on two days, and we didn’t speak to each other across the social divide. We had a scene with the horses, and a dinner party scene where she was on one side of the table while I was serving the opposite side.’
He stops and laughs. ‘I made sure of that,’ he adds. ‘I said, “I’m not serving her a drink – she’ll expect me to keep doing it at home!”’ The Downton Abbey film will be released in cinemas from Friday 13 September.
‘People were deferential, but that’s changing’ PHYLLIS LOGAN