Julian Fellowes talks about Downton Abbey: A New Era
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale
Why did you want to bring Downton Abbey back for a third film?
At the end of the second film, we said goodbye to the beloved Violet. We wanted to make the point that this may be the end of a family member, but it wasn’t the end of the family. I also wanted to show that families like the Crawleys who survived into the modern world, had to redefine themselves, get used to the new way of things and see if they could live with it. Some rather spectacularly could not, but I would like to feel that the Crawleys are one of the surviving families who have come to terms with the modern world.
Where do we find the Crawley family and the staff at the start of the film?
The Crawleys are doing pretty well. Despite the changing times, they are still a great family living in a great house. There is an air of change in their relationships with their servants and with ordinary people living in the village. The two world wars brought about a narrowing of the gap in the human experience and the aristocratic families were facing the wrong way in history after both wars. The film touches upon these changing times. One of the storylines in the film is Mary getting a divorce, and what I hope will surprise audiences is the extent to which divorce was not accepted until much later.
How does Mary’s divorce affect the household?
A divorce was a rather dramatic way of showing a household or a family that they were living in a different world and that things had changed. It just wasn’t acceptable. They would present to the outside world that everyone was frightfully happy and the reality of what was going on behind that façade was concealed. Divorce makes all that very public because before the age of divorce, no one would know anything about the upper classes and that was how they liked it. They didn’t mind being envied, what they didn’t want was to be pitied.
There’s a real sense of the handing over of roles to the next generation in the film. Will they be able to fill the shoes of their predecessors?
Every generation reinvents how these great houses are lived in, and so Andy, who takes over from Carson, will find a different way of being the butler. He will not have a footman to help, and they won’t be coming back. Likewise, the kitchen maids are gone, and Daisy will take over from Mrs Patmore without the help of an army of maids behind her. That whole way of life had to be reinvented. When I was a young man, the ‘London Season’ still existed with debutante balls, and I took part in it all. I loved it, but when it was abolished, it was gone for good. That’s just life. We invent things, we enjoy them for a time, and then they’re over, or we do them differently, and that’s what we’re trying to say about Downton. It will go on, but not in the same way we saw it in 1912. That way of life has gone now, and something different will replace it.
What impact did American sensibilities have in England at that time?
I’ve always believed that the Americans from the 1890s had a big influence on the privileged classes in Britain. Most of the ‘dollar princesses’ came after the Civil War in America when great fortunes had been gained and to have a daughter who was married into the English aristocracy was considered very smart. American women were not taught as the British young women were, which was to sit in silence waiting to be talked to, keeping your opinions to yourself. The Americans didn’t believe in that at all. They had opinions and expressed them in a way that English women didn’t, and so they loosened up society in a way.
Why did you choose to include Noel Coward in the story and what does the character bring to the film?
I discovered that Noel Coward’s play, BITTER SWEET, opened in London in 1930. He captured the mood of the period he was living in perfectly in his plays. He understood who his audience was and knew exactly what they wanted. I felt he was a good expression of the direction the world was heading in. He understood what entertained his audiences, what frightened them and the changes that were coming. I liked his wit and felt he would bring a benevolent modernity to the Crawleys that didn’t threaten them. Coward liked these great houses and the families that lived in them, but it didn’t change the fact that they weren’t modern, and he was. I liked that sense of commentary.
Why was it important to include a social event like Ascot in the film?
When I was in my 20s and 30s Ascot was such a fashionable event in the social calendar, and everyone attended. It was a final expression of the class-layered society where there was a group at the top who were high society. Then, the group underneath wanted to be part of the layer above but never could. Then there was a bottom layer who didn’t much care where they were in society but still attended. What was unusual about Ascot was there was a place for all these different layers of society at this one event. It was an expression of class-led Britain and fun to include in the film because it was the start of society beginning to disintegrate. It also allowed us to show that Lady Mary couldn’t enter the Royal Enclosure because divorce kept her at bay. I wanted to show that as a moment when the upper classes, as a social group, had to accept that it was time to move on from these antiquated behaviours. Mary and Edith, as younger members of the family, have much less trouble addressing this and accepting it than their father.
What first inspired you to create Downton Abbey?
I’d written a film called Gosford Park, which was set around a shooting party in 1932. It included the servants of the house, plus the guests and their servants. The producer, Gareth Neame, asked me if I’d consider writing about that territory for television. Gosford Park is quite a dark film and most of the characters are not happy, but it did very well, and I’m pleased to say I won the Oscar for writing it. However, initially, I didn’t think people would come back once a week to be depressed. I realised that we had to live in a different version of that same world and wanted a group of people who had been born to varied circumstances, more varied below-stairs than above. That allowed me to exercise my prejudices, which are that most people are trying to do their best. I think that gave the series a kind of upward energy as opposed to a downward energy, which served us well.
Did you have any idea that Downton would run for so long and that it would resonate with so many people around the world?
The short answer to that is, of course not. We were making a show at a time when most people thought period drama was dead and there was no real audience for it anymore. Happily, the head of drama at ITV, Peter Fincham, didn’t believe that. He ordered a pilot straight away, and then he commissioned it. We started to assemble the cast, and I think, looking back, the fact that we got our first choices on all of the cast should have been an indicator that we were onto something because it was extraordinary. Maggie Smith had never been in an ongoing series, but once we got Maggie, Hugh Bonneville and Jim Carter, it was clear that we were going to attract a great cast. That was very important to us because it meant that our guest stars were going to be first-class as well. We had one or two early hints that we had made something special when normally the second episode dips in terms of its audience numbers, but we grew ours by a million. From then on, the numbers kept going up and up, and I knew we’d made a jolly good show. The great surprise came four months later when it was shown in America in huge numbers, and they adored it. The American audience changed everything, and suddenly, we were showing all over the world. Now, it feels quite complete. I’m not saying we’ll never see Downton Abbey in any other form – one should never say never, but I think it feels natural and right that we have made the journey with the original concept and the original cast, so I’m rather pleased about that.
Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, is a British writer, actor, director, and peer whose career spans literature, film, television, and theatre. Born on August 17, 1949, in Cairo, Egypt, where his father served as a diplomat, Fellowes was educated at Ampleforth College and Magdalene College, Cambridge, before training at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art.
He began his career as a character actor, appearing in numerous British television series and films throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but it was his pivot to screenwriting that brought him international acclaim. His breakthrough came with Gosford Park (2001), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Fellowes is best known as the creator and writer of Downton Abbey (2010–2015), the globally celebrated period drama that earned him multiple Emmy Awards and cemented his reputation as a master of class-conscious storytelling.
He has also written and directed films such as Separate Lies (2005) and penned screenplays for The Young Victoria (2009) and The Chaperone (2018). In addition to his screen work, Fellowes has authored novels including Snobs and Past Imperfect, and contributed to stage musicals like Mary Poppins and School of Rock. Elevated to the House of Lords in 2011, he continues to blend aristocratic insight with dramatic flair, crafting narratives that explore the tensions between tradition and transformation.
