What the butler saw
The actor on being mobbed in Washington DC and envying Highclere’s head gardener
Jim Carter talks to Jack Watkins about gardening, American fans and being Downton’s Mr Carson
I can’t abide routine. Carson’s so punctilious and perfect. I’m much more ramshackle than that
LONG before Jim Carter accepted the role of a butler in the ITV series Downton Abbey, his name on a cast list was already a solid guarantee of quality. From the BBC’S The Singing Detective and Cranford to films such as A Month in the Country, The Madness of King George, Brassed Off and Shakespeare in Love, he had a CV to leave most British character actors green with envy.
However, within a year of the first airing of the Julian Fellowesscripted drama in 2010, his portrayal of the crusty, old-fashioned, deeply conservative yet loveably loyal and upstanding Mr Carson had turned him into a global name.
Slightly self-consciously, he says he’s since been publicly recognised on trips to such far-flung lands as New Zealand and India and even when riding a bicycle in Cambodia. ‘It’s been different for us all,’ he reflects. ‘I mean, Maggie Smith, with two Oscars, has never been in anything that made her so recognisable. Films don’t, because you only see them once, whereas with a TV series there’s repetition and, being in someone’s living room, there’s a human intimacy.’
He reckons it was on a trip to the US to publicise the second series at the end of 2011 that the cast first realised that they were part of a phenomenon. ‘I remember us walking down the streets of Manhattan and getting recognised a lot and thinking “that’s weird”.
‘Then we were invited down to the British ambassador’s residence, where all the great and the good, the mottled and the liver-spotted of Washington DC behaved disgracefully. It was like we were the Bay City Rollers. They were pulling at us, wanting selfies. It was so undignified,’ he laughs at the memory.
‘At about 10pm that night we were whisked off in a big shiny limousine for a private tour of the White House because, apparently,
Downton was Michelle Obama’s favourite programme.’ It was America, he says, that ‘lit the blue touch paper that made Downton explode’, to the extent that it was eventually pulling in 120 million viewers worldwide. However, had the opportunity occurred 30 years earlier, Mr Carter admits he wouldn’t have taken such a part for fear of being identified with a single role, as well as generally having avoided appearing in TV series because he felt they were boring. ‘Cranford was a series, of course, but that was only five episodes. When Downton came along, I was just past 60, and it felt like the right time.’
Now, despite his character—‘the glue between upstairs and downstairs’—suffering from palsy, having been written out of the script at the end of the last series in 2015, it was inevitable he would be back for the film version. It has enabled Carson to return alongside Mrs Hughes the housekeeper (played by Phyllis Logan, with whom he agrees he has a great screen rapport), the pair having finally tied the knot before his retirement—his wife in real life, Imelda Staunton, is also in the film, albeit ‘in an upstairs role’.
‘Those scenes with Phyllis were always my favourite because they were more personal. So much of the time Carson was seen on duty, presenting a figure of rectitude, perhaps with an occasional raise of an eyebrow in disapproval. So those very few quiet moments, just two people talking, when you saw a bit behind the masks, were lovely.’
He says there are fewer of those intimate exchanges in the film, which has more showpiece scenes, such as the spectacular sequence when the 100-strong King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery, complete with gun carriages, rolls through the village during the royal visit (Review, page 116).
His most famous role might be as a traditional figure, but Mr Carter, who was awarded the OBE in the New Year’s Honours List, says that, although he shares Carson’s belief in good manners and punctuality, he could never live his life. ‘I can’t abide routine. Carson’s so punctilious and perfect. I’m much more ramshackle than that.’
Far from being typecast as he once feared, he’s played a range of roles since the series ended, working with everyone from Anthony Hopkins to Rob Brydon; in November, he will appear in the thriller The Good Liar with Helen Mirren, Ian Mckellen and his daughter, Bessie Carter.
He admits he has always tended to land parts in period dramas: ‘I think it’s just my face fits well with that sort of stuff. But I’d love to play a really nasty piece of work in something contemporary. I did play a deeply unpleasant policeman in Red Riding. I’d like to play something really quite heavy and modern like that.’
Away from the screen, he retains an interest in the circus and mime, the former having been part of his early career, when he thought of himself as much as an entertainer as an actor, mastering the arts of juggling, unicycling and trapeze walking. ‘I’m not a great theatregoer, but when the London Mime Festival is on in January, I’ll always go and see a few circus-type things. It’s good to see it’s still going and they are so much better than we were.’
He’s also a keen cricket fan and did an enthusiastic stint as chairman of Hampstead Cricket Club, starting up a women’s team. The ground is near his garden, another keen pastime. ‘Gardening is what Imelda and I do together most of all. We’re exuberant gardeners, always lots of colour. I like reading books on the subject and visiting gardens and nurseries.’
Which brings us back to Downton. When filming the series at Highclere Castle, he’d look on enviously as the elderly gardener rode past each day on his squeaky bike. ‘Now, I love glasshouses and cold frames,’ he says. ‘My idea of heaven is an old country-house walled garden where they grew peaches on the hot wall and produced food for the estate.
‘We never explored that side in Downton, which I thought was a shame. So from time to time I used to nip down to the glasshouse and have a chat with the old boy. But that was just as Jim Carter, not Mr Carson.’ Jack Watkins