The show was a comfort for many during lockdown
LAURA HARDING LOOKS ON AS DOWNTON ABBEY RETURNS TO THE BIG SCREEN FOR A NEW ERA
IS there a better balm for a weary soul than a return trip to Downton Abbey? A fresh visit to the Crawleys feels like slipping into a warm bath or your favourite (1920s-style) slippers.
Like seeing old friends or indulging in the most opulent of cakes.
It is this feeling that the cast of the hit ITV drama hope to bring to cinemas when they return for a second sojourn on the big screen, Downton Abbey: A New Era, three years after the long-awaited debut film, which was a box office smash in 2019.
“Having worked together on and off for the previous decade, while never taking it for granted, we’d slipped into a groove. Once we put the clothes on, you get into a certain rhythm,” says Paddington star Hugh Bonneville, who is back in his role as Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham.
“But of course the pandemic changed that for everyone and so, when we came together to do the read through, and then on the first day on the set, I think we all really realised how fortunate we were within our industry to be working, when so many thousands were not.
“And also, I really appreciated the fact that we were in a show that was much loved, perhaps even more than ever, because we’d had so many messages from around the world, from people saying that they’d re-visited the show during lockdown, and it had been a comfort, and watching the show again reminded them of a simpler time, pre-Brexit, pre-Trump, pre-Covid.
“We all shared a sort of, if not a responsibility, an anticipation that we were doing something that would be giving pleasure to many fans around the world and we wanted to up our game and make it as good as possible, so fingers crossed.”
The new Downton film, once again written by Julian Fellowes, brings the family, as well as the staff keeping things running below stairs, into 1928, at a time of major change.
The Dowager Countess, played by the formidable Dame Maggie Smith, learns that she has been left a villa in the South of France in the will of a man she knew many years ago, so half the family decamp to the Riviera in investigate.
Meanwhile, Hollywood comes to Downton when a film crew want to use the big old house to shoot a silent picture.
While the old guard above and below stairs think nothing could be worse than a bunch of awful actors running round the place (ho ho), Lady Mary, played by
Michelle Dockery, sees the advantage. The roof is leaking and the film will cover the bills.
Soon the house is besieged by a large crew, including a director, played by Hannibal star Hugh Dancy, and two silent filmstars, played by Dominic West and Laura Haddock.
But calamity strikes when the first “talkie” is released, forcing the cast at Downton to find a way to bring their suddenly outdated film into the modern era.
“I hadn’t realised how quickly film moved from the silent films into the talkies,” says Michelle, “and this is loosely based on the true story about this movie called Blackmail, which originally was a silent film and then, when the talkies came out, everybody was going to them.
“Also, I didn’t realise the impact that it might have had on actors at the time, so it’s interesting learning about the beginning of film and being part of that as the character.”
Michelle adds: “I’m always really surprised by what Julian writes and I was quite surprised when I read that Mary becomes involved in the film in ways in which she couldn’t have ever imagined, but it was a nice fit for the character, it was something very new and very fresh.”
While Mary is getting to grips with the world of modern filmmaking, her sister, Lady Edith, played by Laura Carmichael, is exploring the new world of holidaymaking in the South of France, as she joins the rest of the family meeting the current owners of the villa which has been bequeathed to the Dowager Countess.
It marks the first time the world of Downton has travelled overseas, and offered a whole new playground for the cast.
“We were thrilled, obviously,” enthuses Laura, “because we got to spend some time in this beautiful location, but it was also really cool to see that part of the world at this time.
“Edith becomes interested in travelling with them so she can write an article about the fact the rich and famous were starting to have holidays and vacations in the South of France and it had become very fashionable, so you really get to see how the fashion was happening there and how the jazz era was all there in France, so it was great fun.”
“It was a way to have every character open up because they’re in this different environment, and it’s a more relaxed environment and things happen that wouldn’t necessarily happen back at Highclere Castle (the location where Downton Abbey is filmed), so it was a wonderful device,” adds Elizabeth McGovern, who returns as Cora, Lady Crawley.
“Cora shares a secret that she’s been harbouring for a really long time, and Robert is losing his stiff upper lip.
“It’s the kind of thing that often happens to me when I read Julian’s writing – there’s more on the page than first meets the eye, and it takes the whole crew and all the actors coming together for you to realise all the depth that’s actually in this writing, that I don’t even know if he’s aware of when he writes.”
NICOLAS CAGE is an incredibly polite man. “Thank you so much for having me,” he says, sweetly, at the start of our interview.
“Thank you for asking,” he adds, as our chat gets under way. These are the kind of manners you might not expect from an actor whose persona looms as large as Nicolas’s does.
Part of a Hollywood dynasty (his real name is Nicolas Kim Coppola, as in The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola, who is his uncle), he is a man of many contradictions.
An Oscar winner for 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas, he has also starred in hits such as Adaptation, which bagged him a second Oscar nod, Raising Arizona, Face/Off, Con Air, The Rock, National Treasure and Gone In Sixty Seconds.
He has worked with revered directors such as Martin Scorsese and David Lynch, but also starred in some lessthan-stellar projects.
He is the subject of a feverish online fandom and a Cagethemed film festival called Cage-orama, (“Scotland’s first Nicolas Cage film festival”) yet debate has raged how good an actor he really is.
Now 58, it is notable that he has enough humility and self-deprecating good humour to star in a film in which he sends up every element of his outsize public image, The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent.
it he plays a version of himself who is unfulfilled by his career and facing financial ruin, losing out on parts he auditions for in the valet queue at the celeb hotspot Chateau Marmont, and distanced from his teenage daughter, who thinks he is a self-involved narcissist,
In desperate need of cash, he accepts a million dollar offer to travel to Europe to attend a wealthy fan’s birthday party, but things take a wildly unexpected turn when it turns out the fan, played by Pedro Pascal, is actually a drug kingpin and he is recruited by the CIA for an undercover mission.
Most actors, and their outsize egos, would run very far and very fast from a role that portrays them as an out-ofwork has-been, but Nicolas did not, so why not?
“Listen, I did run,” he admits.
“I said ‘no, no, no, no’. And then Tom Gormican [the film’s director] had his fishing line and he reeled me back in with a letter, which was a sensitive letter and it was an intelligent letter, and I knew then that he wasn’t trying to do a kind of Saturday Night Live sketch that was mocking so-called Nick Cage, but he had some genuine interest in the earlier work.
“And one of my mantras is the very thing you’re afraid of – more often than not, as long as you’re not hurting yourself, or someone else – is probably the thing you should move towards, because you may learn something from the experience or grow in some way.
He continues: “I can tell you that this was a deeply humbling experience, but there was no muscle in my body that told me I should play Nick Cage in a movie.”
But while he pushed those hesitations aside, he did bristle against the notion that he would be portrayed as a bad dad. The five-times married star has sons Kal-El, 16, and Weston, 31, from previous relaIn tionships, and in January it was confirmed he was expecting a baby with wife Riko Shibata.
“The big discrepancy in the movie from the real me is that there’s no version of Nick Cage that doesn’t want to spend time with his children. My family always comes first,” Nicolas says passionately.
“I said that to the director and he said, ‘Yeah, but this is a movie and we need this character to evolve. He has to go from being a narcissistic, career-minded actor into a sensitive family man’. So I said, ‘OK, well that’s a good argument, this is a movie, this isn’t really me’.
“The flavour of the film that does speak to the real me is the comedy, I do like to make jokes and to be goofy at home and make my wife laugh, make my boys laugh, and so that element, that sense of humour, I think was spot on.
“But as you say over in the UK, ‘taking the p**s’, that’s really what I was doing, I was setting myself up, I was taking the p**s out of myself, and that is always good mojo.
“You know, you can’t get too high on your own supply. You can’t become self important and turn into a diva. And I think that was humbling for me to do this.”
The film even jokingly allows Nicolas to address the record on his own filmography. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin? “Under-rated.” Gone In Sixty Seconds? “All his own driving.”
“I think it’s nice that John Madden’s movie Corelli’s Mandolin got a little props in Massive Talent. I think that was a movie that had a lot of poignancy and depth, and Penelope [Cruz, his co-star] was just remarkable in it. So I’m glad that came out,” he says earnestly.
“The rest are just more fun references, like references to Gone In Sixty Seconds, references to National Treasure. And references to the gold guns and Face/Off, those all got big laughs and that was nice.”
Lily Sheen, who plays his daughter in the movie, knows a thing or two about being the child of a famous person.
The daughter of Kate Beckinsale and Michael Sheen, she makes her big screen debut with the feature, starring opposite a man she has looked up to all her life,
“I used to do that thing ‘Caging’, when you put pictures of Nicolas Cage on people’s lockers in middle school,” the 23-year-old admits.
“So he had always been this big figure to me, and I was so nervous to meet him. But he blew it out of the water and he’s the loveliest person. He’s so talented, he’s iconic, but still very kind and professional.
“As an actor in my first movie, I had so many questions for him and he was very patient and very helpful, so it was like the luckiest experience I could have had.”
The film set wasn’t actually first time Lily had laid eyes on Nicolas in person, though.
“One time he was on a plane that I was on,” she reveals. “I had horrible plane anxiety at the time and I remember my mum going ‘Well, the plane’s not going to go down, because Nick is on this plane’.
“I remember that and it carried me through.”
Nice manners, good humour and the ability to keep a plane in the air? What a guy.
You can’t become self-important and turn into a diva Nicolas Cage
The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent is in cinemas now