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‘Downton Abbey: A New Era’ Cast Weigh In on Likely New Direction With Mary at the Helm

[This story contains mild spoilers to Downton Abbey: A New Era.]

After 2019’s Downton Abbey movie and now its sequel, Downton Abbey: A New Era, there’s the scent of succession in the air as Michelle Dockery’s Lady Mary is being positioned to run the estate, with the blessing of Dame Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess of Grantham.

“It’s clear from the first film and the second film, the torch is being passed on,” Dockery tells The Hollywood Reporter, “and Mary is now running the house and running things, but I don’t know how exactly that would work at that time [in the late 1920s], so I’m interested to see where [writer-creator Julian Fellowes] would take it. I’m interested to see if I would be wearing costumes like Violet, in the sort of younger version of those.”

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Alongside Dockery, Laura Carmichael, who plays her sister Lady Edith, is confident that — should the franchise return for another screen outing — Mary “would be wearing the trousers.” Or, as Allen Leech (Tom Branson) puts it, “She’d take one of those dresses and make the trousers!”

Despite the award-winning PBS series ending after six seasons in 2015, the public support and subsequent box office success for the first Focus Features film naturally led to this second, which sees some of the household taking a trip to the French Riviera to explore the mysterious past of the Dowager Countess, while the rest stay home to supervise a film crew shooting a movie at Downton.

“The story kind of bursts in the south of France,” says Elizabeth McGovern, who plays Lady Grantham. “Something about transplanting these characters to a different country in a more relaxed environment makes things bubble to the surface that had been suppressed.”

For a third film to be a serious proposition, Michelle Dockery admits “a lot of it depends on the appetite out there and if the audience still wants to see more of it.”

The journey of making the sequel was also markedly different, taking place in the pandemic era for the global ensemble. As with many things in the last few years, the first Downton Abbey: A New Era performance took place online with the virtual all-cast read-through. Laura Carmichael estimated there were probably 50 people at that group gathering, and one was indeed Dame Maggie Smith, bringing her best Dowager disdain to zoom. “She didn’t look thrilled,” notes Carmichael politely, while co-star Joanne Froggatt (Anna Bates) recreates the amusing moment Smith slumped her head down on the desk in front mid-call, sighing in exasperation. “And then didn’t she get up at one point and just wander off?” adds Phyllis Logan (Mrs Hughes), “but we could hear her in the background talking to a friend.”

Adding to the chaos were the texts flying around between castmates throughout, until they noticed that someone hadn’t turned off those pesky notifications. “We kept texting Rob [James-Collier, who plays Thomas Barrow] and it kept pinging on his laptop when he was doing his lines,” laughs Froggatt. “We’d purposely iMessage him and he was like ‘I’m sorry I can’t turn it off!’” The two-hour script took about three and a half hours in the read-through, “because there were many moments where people had to unmute themselves,” remembers Kevin Doyle (Mr Molesley).

Allen Leech, who plays Tom Branson, graciously concludes that Smith’s withering looks on that remote call were likely because she just “wanted to be in the room with everybody.”

“She’s never missed a read-through,” adds Dockery. “She’s the one who never brings her sides with her to set, she knows every line, she’s such a professional. She even stole the scenes in zoom.”

And “ay there’s the rub,” as they might have once said above or below stairs, had they encountered Shakespeare, as Smith and her Dowager Countess command attention simply by merely entering a room (or Zoom). But after questioning the 80-year-old’s health at the end of the first film, there must be a succession plan in place — and writer/creator Julian Fellowes has had Dockery’s Lady Mary firmly in view for some time.

Fellowes told THR it’s due to Lady Mary being able to embrace the changing times and traditions of the 20th century. “So in that way, yes, we are pursuing that development,” he says, “and if we did go on further and only the gods know whether we will, then we would take that even further.”

Hugh Dancy could be part of that change, his movie director being responsible for bringing Hollywood to Downton in A New Era, along with Dominic West and Laura Haddock who play leading fictional actors of their day. “The attitude that he has to this family and the institution, and specifically the house, is probably somewhat different to most of the people who have passed through,” says Dancy, recalling a key note he was given from Fellowes, “and he’s not resentful of it, he’s not dismissive of it, but nor is he overawed at all. In fact, he just wants them to get out of the way, so he can get on with his day’s work, and I think that was an interesting and quite helpful driver for the whole story.”

As Doyle points out, the future is open given how the show launched. “Julian and the producers had a three-year plan for the show,” he recalls, “three seasons and that was going to be it, and nobody expected the path that then ensued.”

Logan would happily keep playing Mrs. Hughes for longer (“There’s always a mystery ingredient that you just don’t know what it is,” she says of the franchise’s success), as would Froggatt: “It’s a little bit of magic that you can’t put your finger on and thank goodness Downton’s got it.”

Hugh Bonneville, known as Lord Grantham onscreen here (or Mr. Brown from the Paddington movies; a third is in the works but “not going to happen anytime soon,” he says) respects the loyal support of the Downton audience as to whether there will be further scripts developed. “It’s all going to really depend on whether this film works in the cinemas,” says Bonneville, “if people get out of their armchairs and feel comfortable going to the cinema — and we really hope they do.”

There’s a more muted optimism, however, from Lady Grantham. “Personally, I would hate for us to push it beyond the sell-by-date,” says McGovern. “I feel really proud with this movie that for me it is still special and alive; it’s got a genuine frisson, a genuine energy, a genuine feeling of delight that isn’t just a manufactured repeat of something. And personally, I would like not to push it so far that we’re just sort of spinning wheels. But, that’s just me.”

So, while the seeds for more stories have most definitely been sown, not everyone is embracing the change as it may pertain to their character. “I keep saying to Julian, ‘I am still alive, you know?,'” laughs Bonneville, reflecting on his role as Lady Mary’s father. “This whole idea that Mary is running everything, I actually had to get him to rewrite one bit and just point out that I was still breathing! But the idea of the younger generation taking over, of course, is a constant theme.”

There is a sense of unfinished business, too, for McGovern as Mary’s mother. “I have felt over the years that Cora is not a character that’s been explored very much in the sense of the clash of her American culture and English culture, and all those things that Henry James and Edith Wharton were fascinated by; the two cultures at that time was not explored and I don’t think anybody was particularly interested in doing so, but I think now it’s a little too late.”

Or, perhaps not? “I think we’ve got past that point where ‘enough is enough,’” says Doyle, whose Mr. Molesley gets to flex his creative wings working with Dancy’s Hollywood director in A New Era, “because it’s like every three years or something people are really keen, because it really does feel like a family of actors now — and not just the actors, but the crew coming back as well — and it really does feel a proper reunion.”

“We say goodbye every time — at the end of season six, and then the last film and now this film,” adds Dockery. “Actually, I think this time I was like, ‘See you guys!’ I wasn’t so emotional, because we’ll probably see each other again!”

And with that in mind, the cast of A New Era shares their vision with THR for spinoffs for each of their characters, as Downton Abbey considers its future:

MICHELLE DOCKERY (Lady Mary): Mary isn’t the heir, her son is the heir so I’d quite like to see where the show would go in like 15 years’ time and see the younger generation — Sibby and George and Marigold, their story.

LAURA CARMICHAEL (Lady Edith): We’ll be there without having aged a day… like Death Becomes Her.

DOCKERY: We think that’s what Edith and Mary will be like, eventually!

CARMICHAEL: The stuff when Edith got to go to London and be a journalist felt like my own spin-off because there was nobody else around from the house! I think you could make that a complete world.

ALLEN LEECH (Tom Branson): I would love for Tom to get back into politics. He’s kind of lost that fibre within the story, but I think it’s still within him. So that idea of getting back into politics would be good.

HUGH DANCY (Jack Barber): Not so much for my character but more broadly if there’s a future for the show, the era that they’re heading into — the end of the 1920s is rosy and seems to be this beautiful new world after the first World War and of course what they’re heading into is in fact really bleak in the 1930s and 1940s. Not that I want them to make a third Downton movie that’s incredibly depressing, but one of the things I love about the show it that it’s clearly sentimental, but what it’s not sentimental about is the passing of time and the inevitability of change.

ELIZABETH MCGOVERN (Cora Grantham) [Spoiler alert]: I think it would be interesting possibly to travel to Los Angeles with Thomas Barrow and his actor friend. Los Angeles in that era in the movie business, and a relationship in that era, there’s a couple of things I could imagine.

HUGH BONNEVILLE (Robert Grantham): I can see the Granthams going on a Pacific tour. That would be quite good, on a cruise ship to Tasmania, maybe the South Island of New Zealand. There could be an interesting plot down there.

JOANNE FROGGATT (Anna Bates): We joke about Anna having “Anna Bates Investigates” as a spinoff because I was often investigating something to do with Mr Bates!

PHYLLIS LOGAN (Mrs Hughes): And then I think there could be a travel program, “Cruising with the Carsons.”

FROGGATT: It could be like a Death on the Nile type thing and Anna Bates will come and investigate on “Cruising with the Carsons!”

LOGAN: We could all cross-pollinate and it would all work a treat.

Downton Abbey: A New Era is now in theaters.