Dan Stevens On being a straight white male in Hollywood
Hollywood is undergoing a seismic shift, but Dan Stevens has always relished being part of big changes, he tells Guy Kelly
It has been almost five years since Dan Stevens wrecked Christmas day for millions of people, and all he can do is laugh about it.in 2012, you’ll not need reminding, the largest television audience of the festive period tuned in to watch the Downton Abbey Christmas Special expecting a gentle, comforting hour of historically inaccurate period drama. In the end, more than 10 million viewers received a horror story: as Michelle Dockery’s Lady Mary went into early labour and welcomed baby George, her husband, Stevens’s dashing Matthew Crawley, hurtled through the countryside in his duck-egg green AC Six. Midway through an internal monologue about how grateful he was for everything, he met a delivery truck, crashed, and ended up dead in a ditch. Glad tidings, indeed.
“I know, I know. For some I really ruined Christmas that year,” Stevens says, grinning at the memory. “On the day itself, too. What timing! Hopefully I can restore some faith now I’m back.”
Stevens’s decision to leave one of the most popular programmes in the world was an unusual one; he left Britain then, moving to the US with his young family – his jazz singer wife, Susie, and three children, Willow, eight, Aubrey, five, and Eden, one – in pursuit of a big-screen career.
Many of the roles he’s taken in the time since could scarcely have been further from the delicate flower of Matthew Crawley: he was a chiselled serial killer in The Guest; a heroin trafficker in A Walk Among the Tombstones; and most recently the Beast (species unknown) opposite Emma Watson in the highest-grossing film of 2017, Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast remake.
“If it has served to change people’s minds [about me] then fine, but frankly, whether people thought it was a good idea or not to leave Downton is immaterial to me,” he says. “People were always going to be baffled or unsettled. I don’t see my career as steady and linear, I take a playground approach. I’ll play on the monkey bars for a bit, then on the roundabout. It’s about keeping engaged.”
Perched attentively on a London hotel sofa, the trim and bearded Stevens is more often recognised for his character in the FX series Legion than for Downton these days.
“But if I dye my hair blond again and put on white tie, then it would definitely still be Matthew,” he admits.
There must come times, I say, when people just assume you’re, well…
“A lord? Yes, of course they do. They associate me with that show and hear the accent and assume all sorts of things. I find it funny when people make those judgments. I was on the radio this morning with [UK grime artist] Stormzy, and I just watched as people’s reactions to him changed in the room as he spoke, because he’s so articulate and interesting. It’s amusing to see the bubble burst when assumptions about how someone dresses or talks are made.”
Stevens is not a lord, for the record, and has his accent thanks to a boarding school scholarship and Cambridge education. Like Stormzy, he was born in Croydon, though that is where the similarities end. Stevens was adopted at birth by parents who were both schoolteachers. He grew up partly in Wiltshire, Chelmsford and Brecon, Wales, and had a distinctly normal childhood.
With a younger brother who was also adopted from different parents, it was a happy household, full of literature and old movies that helped inspire Stevens’s talent. Over the years, he has never sought to trace his biological parents to see what they did, but he has occasionally wondered if they passed any acting genes on.
“It’s the eternal nature versus nurture thing,” he says. “As far as I know I didn’t have performer parents, but it would be interesting to find out at some stage. I know as much as I need to know [about them] right now.”
Stevens is in London to promote his return to British period costume and festive programming with The Man Who Invented Christmas. He plays a manic Charles Dickens in 1843, when the author’s success had stalled, rendering him a desperate and penniless father of four. Rattling around Victorian London, it charts his creative process during the six weeks he spent writing A Christmas Carol.
“That’s such a universal story that transcends cultures – we certainly read it a lot in my house – but frankly we don’t need another adaptation of A Christmas Carol,” he says. “Instead it’s interesting to look at the teacher as well as the lesson. Dickens’s personal life really suffered in his creativity. We all know people like that, who push themselves very hard at the cost to their marriages and kids, don’t we?”
We do, but Stevens insists he isn’t one of those people. Instead, he and the family are a “travelling circus” who have managed to move together for most of his jobs, so he gets to spend a lot of time being a father.
“We go camping, and my eldest one is at that age where she has more stamina than the rest of us. They have a sense of wonder about the world, and I enjoy nurturing that.”
After more than four years in New York, the clan have decamped to Hollywood, where Legion is filmed.
“It’s a strange town, like nowhere else really,” he says of Los Angeles. “In the early days, everybody’s experience as a young actor is pretty grim, but I’ve grown fond of it over the years.”
The political atmosphere in the US makes it “a very interesting time to be out there… It’s a time of great seismic power changes, big swirls are going on.”
Nowhere more than in Hollywood itself. Stevens arrived in town during an autumn that will forever be remembered for the catalogue of industry figures accused of being historic sexual predators.
“It exists in any work environment, it’s just that it’s more talked about in Hollywood because it’s more gossip-worthy. The culture is everywhere, and it’s about to change. There’s a lot of the old dinosaurs coming home to roost about now…” he says.
“It’s a very interesting time creatively, to be a straight, white male in the storytelling community. What is your responsibility, and what is your role going forward? You have a certain responsibility to history, and we perhaps need a slightly revisionist view of the way things have been told up to this point.”
On the set of The Man Who Invented Christmas, it sounds like nothing but costumed larks. Christopher Plummer (who, incidentally, has taken over and re-shot Kevin Spacey’s next film role after sex abuse allegations made against the House of Cards actor) co-stars as an excellent Scrooge, while bona fide Dickens scholars Simon Callow and Miriam Margolyes kept things in check. Stevens, who studied literature, founded a literary journal and judged the Man Booker Prize, was grateful for the assistance.
Still, some viewers may feel trepidation. The good news is that Dickens did not die in a car crash in 1843, so it’s nothing but cheer from Stevens this Christmas.
He smiles. “It’s all part of the wider rehabilitation process.”
The Man Who Invented Christmas is in
cinemas now
‘Whether people thought it was a good idea to leave Downton is immaterial to me’