Ladies and gentlemen
Hugh Bonneville welcomes fans back to ‘Downton Abbey’
“Downton Abbey” premiered as a limited series period piece sparked by the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Friday, this chronicle of a great English estate’s ups and downs extends to 1928.
“Downton Abbey:
A New Era,” the second film following four seasons on television, is funnier, fleeter and more ambitious than that first feature.
A movie crew has come to use the grand mansion as a setting for a romantic silent film. This unheard-of exploitation of the upper crust is possible only because a sizable fund is needed to repair a very leaky roof.
For Hugh Bonneville’s
Robert Crawley, Downton’s Lord Grantham, it’s a complicated time.
“An invitation to the south of France comes because Violet (Maggie Smith’s dowager countess), Robert Crawley’s mother, has been left a villa in the south of France,” he explained. “A group of us, at the invitation of the current owners, go off to investigate why.
“So there’s a third of the movie where we are offcampus, so to speak. Then we rejoin the household, who are having a movie made at Downton.
“It’s a nice departure, takes the characters out of their comfort zone, if you like, and a whole new strand of the story develops.”
When this all started no one really expected “Downton Abbey” would go global and continue.
“I first heard about it when I was doing a movie called ‘From Time to Time’ with Julian Fellowes (as writer-director) and Maggie Smith, funnily enough,” Bonneville recalled. “I asked what he had up his sleeve and he described the basic outline of ‘Downton.’ About 18 months later he sent me the script. It was a great read; I couldn’t put it down. And that’s pretty much what’s happened to audiences around the world. They want to know what happens next.
“None of us knew it was going to go any further than the first season — and here we are nearly 12 years. It’s been a wonderful adventure.” Bonneville, 58, is a Cambridge grad, a surgeon’s son. Were his parents horrified when he went into acting?
“Well, you can read about that in an excellent forthcoming book called ‘Playing Under the Piano’ by Hugh Bonneville,” he answered, “which comes out at the end of this year.
“They were very supportive, my parents. And keen supporters of the arts who took me, my brother and my sister to the theater a lot. That really got me the bug. But it was never something I was considering as a career until I was at university.”