Friday, December 9, 2011

Dan Stevens || What happened when Dan visited The Lady




An hour (and six minutes) with Downton Dan

Friday 9 December 2011 The Lady

He plays Britain’s newest heart-throb, Downton’s dashing Matthew Crawley. So as we all get excited about the Downton Abbey Christmas Special, here’s what happened when actor Dan Stevens visited The Lady. By Rachel Johnson



Many, many millions of us have already spent many happy hours (13 hours, 44 minutes, to be exact) gazing in wonder on the floppy-haired, chiselled blond Adonis that is Downton Dan, in the smash Julian Fellowes-penned series that made our year. Sunday evenings are not the same already, and I am counting the days until the Downton Abbey two-hour special on Christmas Day with the same feverish anticipation as the little boy in the John Lewis ad.

What? Which one is Downton Dan? I can’t believe you asked that question... Dan Stevens, 29, is the Cambridge-educated, blue-eyed break-out boy star of stage and screen. He plays Matthew Crawley, the one entangled in a will-they-won’t they? storyline with Lady Mary. He is also the heir to the abbey who broke off the engagement, hooked up with Lavinia, went to war, came back crippled, and then regained a ‘tingle’ in his nether regions, only for his fiancée to be wiped out sharpish by Spanish flu. Right? Let’s crack on then. We haven’t long, as I’ll explain.



After spending so many hours slumped on the sofa in his company, you will understand that when I badgered him into doing an interview, I wanted to savour every minute in his physical presence: so the plan was that he’d come tomBedford Street to trigger a collective hot flush and be prepared for his close-up, before we’d totter across the road to the Savoy’s Beaufort Bar and do the shoot and interview. He had a car coming at 6pm. We had exactly one hour for our one-on-one. So this is how it went.

5pm: Gillian appears in the doorway of the Boudoir. ‘Dan Stevens is downstairs,’ she says. Then she blushes. ‘Do you want to fetch him?’ I offer generously. But she has already dashed down to bring him upstairs to the Boudoir (see what I did there?).

He is exquisitely charming to everyone, shakes hands with all the subs, introduces himself to Judy, Claire and Lena, and pats Coco. I then take him through to what I say is ‘make-up’. I should point out that The Lady’s male grooming department consists of our new web team, Katy and Fiona, but Dan is not to know that as they go to work, powdering and brushing him with enthusiasm.

I can’t resist tweeting a picture. Twitter goes mad (the best we are accused of is ‘gilding the lily’!). Then I hustle him out of the building, mainly for his own safety (even married features editor Matt went slightly pink on introduction and was later found staring moodily at pictures of Dan on Google Images).

5.15pm: We hit the Savoy, where a corner nook in a round alcove has been reserved for us. A bottle of cold champagne materialises and little nibbles. As we chink glasses, I have one of those moments that go, ‘Here I am, sitting in the Savoy drinking champers with Matthew Crawley – I mean Dan Stevens – and there are at least 45 minutes of this to go. Life is good.’

I have a list of questions for him, and I try to get through them in the remaining time. I fire off the first one.

5.30pm: How is he finding life, mid-Downton? Is he surprised by its – and his – success? (He has just shown me a sticking plaster that a random female fan handed to him as he left the Tube, on which she’d written ‘in case you break ur back again’).

‘Yes, massively. We knew we were on to a good show, but we’ve all seen good shows before. We’ve all seen period country-house dramas before, but they’ve tended to be written by Jane Austen. The structure of a Jane Austen novel isn’t as suitable to a seven-part Sunday-night series,’ he says, and goes on to explain why the particular combo has proved such a winner: it’s not just the upstairs-downstairs appeal, it’s the period-costume modern script that has found such a huge and avid audience. Obviously, there’s a third series (nation heaves sigh of relief) but what next for Downton Dan, I ask, as we gurgle champagne.

‘I’d love to do more comedy, which is where I started,’ he says, telling me that he worked with Amy Heckerling, the Clueless director, last year.

‘Were you playing against type?’ I ask.

‘Not really,’ he responds (and we must not forget that Stevens first came to national attention playing the actively homosexual Nick Guest in the TV adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, who gets rogered behind a potting shed in a Notting Hill communal garden). ‘I was playing English totty,’ he giggles, ‘but funny English totty, I hope.’ By this stage, the photographer is snapping away at Dan so, as you can imagine, all eyes are on our little corner of the Beaufort Bar.



It is at this point – 5.40pm, to be precise – that I get what I hope is my scoop. We’re talking about the downstairs kitchen scenes, which are not filmed at Highclere, like the rest of Downton, but at Elstree. This is because the old kitchens at the castle are given over to the exhibition housing the 5th Earl of Carnarvon’s Egyptian treasures (he opened Tutankhamun’s tomb).

‘Ah, the curse of Carnarvon,’ I say – the 5th Earl died shortly after disturbing King Tut, allegedly of a curse, at which point Dan tells me that during filming, a number of girls ‘got the curse’.

‘Zoe Boyle, who plays Lavinia Swire, fell while she was getting off a bus and broke her wrist, Laura Carmichael, (Lady Edith), fell at the wrap party and broke her wrist, and Michelle Dockery (Lady Mary), dropped a knife on her foot while we were shooting, and had to go to hospital.’

Yes, I counter, ‘But on the other hand, during filming you told Mr Bates you felt a tingling in your hithertoparalysed nether regions, and a nation rejoiced.’

‘Yeeees,’ says Dan Stevens, clearly slightly weary of the endless references to his manhood on Twitter and in the media.

5.45pm: Dan carries on posing for photographs, a session that includes climbing on a sofa and playing with his tie (he is wearing a sharp Donna Karan suit) and everyone in the Beaufort Bar swoons visibly. When he gets down, I’ve had another glass and, feeling refreshed, can’t resist going back to Lady Mary, who, as we all know, had a spot of bother with a murky Turk in the spare bedroom, a skeleton that keeps threatening to come tumbling out of the closet throughout series one and two.

‘If Matthew discovered that Lady Mary was not, shall we say, virgo intacta, would that change his feelings for her?’

‘That does, er, crop up in the Christmas Special,’ answers Dan to my excitement. ‘I suppose it depends how he found it out. If he read it in the Daily Mail, he’d be very upset. He’s a considered and considerate man. He’s a lawyer and prepared to hear both sides of the argument.’

As time is running out, I think the world should take that as a no. Final question: ‘Do you feel responsible for the mental wellbeing of the nation, given how Downton-dependent we have all become?’

‘Well, everyone was livid at the end of the second series, weren’t they? I think because Julian knew there was this two-hour Christmas Special, which is essentially episode nine...’

At this point, I’m afraid I ask for some more nuts and Dan never gets to finish the sentence, but I do promise him that The Lady will do lots more on Downton next year – almost every week, in fact – and then Dan gets out his phone.




The time is 18.04. ‘I’m looking forward to series three, the 1920s,’ he says, in a rush. ‘I think it’ll be great fun, but the story will be scaled back a bit. It’ll be more like series one, more about the house – though obviously I don’t know, as I don’t imagine Julian’s even written it yet. I think he realises he bit off quite a lot with the Great War.’

He clearly doesn’t want to put his foot in it.

‘Have you adjusted to being so good-looking?’ I ask quickly.

‘I’ve always wanted to be one of those craggy-faced older actors, actually,’ he says, and at 18.06 dashes off into his getaway car, which is waiting to whisk him to join the director and the writer of Downton Abbey, to talk about the series to a paying audience in a church.

I’ve had my precious hour, but the Downton Dan show must go on.

Christmas at Downton Abbey will be available on DVD from 26 December, Universal Playback.

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