Stevens rooted in the past
Actor busy after Downton
Dan Stevens owes everything to the past. His recent flush of success, for a start, sprang from times past: It was the role of Matthew Crawley in the costume drama Downton Abbey that turned this boyish 30-year-old Cambridge graduate into one of the soothing faces of comfort television.
But his drive and enthusiasm for acting is rooted in his own past; and specifically the moment when, aged 14, he ventured along to an audition for a school production of Macbeth, and was surprised to find himself cast in the leading role.
The man who cast him was his English master, Jonathan Smith, who wrote novels in the gaps between teaching and directing. At that time, Abacus Publishing had just released his latest, a historical romance called Summer in February, about the artist Sir Alfred Munnings’s tangled love life during his time at a painters’ retreat on the south coast of Cornwall in early 1914.
When Stevens read it, he thought that it might make a good film. Now, 17 years later, he has helped to turn it into a movie that has just opened in the U.K.
“It’s not every teacher you would do that for,” he says. “But Jonathan is quite a special guy. And were it not for the passion that we all felt for the book and for him, then I guess it wouldn’t have got made.”
In a sense, though, he is simply returning a favour. It was Smith who nurtured Stevens’s interests in drama and literature during his time at Tonbridge School in Kent. He also encouraged Stevens to apply for Cambridge University, where he joined the Footlights and was subsequently talent-spotted by Sir Peter Hall, which led to a spell with the director’s own theatre company.
That led to television, and roles in two well-received BBC dramas, The Line of Beauty in 2006 and Sense & Sensibility in 2008. In turn that took Stevens to Downton. He appeared in the drama for three seasons before his shock departure at the end of last year’s Christmas special (poor Matthew perished in a car crash while his wife, Lady Mary, cooed over their newborn son).
From there he took a part in a Broadway play, The Heiress, opposite Jessica Chastain, and a Hollywood kidnap thriller with Liam Neeson called A Walk Among the Tombstones, which will be released next year.
Now he is living in Brooklyn with his wife, Susie, and their two children, Willow, 3, and Aubrey, 1. He is slimmer and less boyish than in the Downton days; his hair is its natural chestnut brown, his deplumped cheeks are pricklish with stubble. The day of the interview it is Aubrey’s first birthday, and Stevens has just finished preparing a picnic for a family lunch in the park.
“Brooklyn’s very familyfriendly where we are,” he says, “but it’s strange to think that we’ve been out here for almost a year. We came last summer when I had the play and then I got a film straight after. So we decided to stick around.”
It all sounds straightforward, although in the deeply odd worlds of film and theatre, these things never run as smoothly as they appear to have done in hindsight. Turning Summer in February into a movie, for example, has been a painstaking eight-year task that began almost as soon as Stevens graduated.
It was only in late 2011, with Downton flying high in the ratings, that the project finally got under way. Filming took place on location in Cornwall in early 2012 before Stevens was needed on the set of Downton.
With its thwarted romance, gold-glowing Cornish landscapes, tweed suits, thick beards and bare bosoms, Summer in February certainly has all the ingredients to be a hit in Britain. But could the film piggyback on Downton’s phenomenal success in North America, too? The show’s third season attracted 24 million viewers, setting a new record for the PBS network. It was even the butt of an affectionate running joke in the superhero blockbuster Iron Man 3.
“I don’t know,” says Stevens, “but it’s the however-many-million-dollar question. A lot of people are trying to discern what made Downton so popular. There’s a very strong anglophile streak here, and a fascination with the Old World and the way things used to work. Some Americans harbour a desire for those years; others are very thankful that the world has moved on.”
As, of course, has he. Stevens swears that he has “no idea” what is planned for Season 4.
“I want to enjoy it like everyone else!” he says, with a laugh. “I saw Laura (Carmichael) and Michelle (Dockery) in New York the other day and they started giving away details, and I had to block my ears before I heard anything too crucial.”
He sees Summer in February as a “pre-Downton project,” and his work since leaving the show has been nothing if not varied. As well as the Neeson thriller and the Broadway show, he played a journalist from The Guardian in The Fifth Estate, a drama about Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks website.
“I’m fascinated by that whole narrative, and the questions around WikiLeaks really thrill me,” he says enthusiastically. “The story doesn’t really have an ending at the moment, and the film acknowledges that very cleverly, I think.”
Assange himself is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who once, in an unguarded moment described the second series of Downton as “f— atrocious.” Stevens admits he playfully reminded Cumberbatch of the verdict on set as often as possible.
“I teased him about it all the time,” he hoots. “It was a terribly easy way to make him feel bad. But, of course, there are no hard feelings between us and it was great getting to work with him.
“I think it was the usual crossed wires thing, but a quote like that is too good for various outlets to ignore.”
Next he will play Captain Flint in a new adaptation of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, which is to be filmed in England later this summer, while continuing to co-edit The Junket, a quarterly online literary magazine he launched with some friends shortly after university.
“I should say that we were all a lot less busy then than we are now,” he adds hastily.
But Stevens’s wife and children are waiting, as is that park in Brooklyn. The weather is hot, he says, and well on its way to sweltering. The next 12 months have much in store, but at least there’s time, for now at least, to stop and enjoy the sandwiches.