Interview: Dan Stevens of "Downton Abbey"
AE: Your mother must be very proud of you these days.
DS: She is now. She was then. She loves Downton. My whole family loves Downton. That’s definitely something you can tell your friends about.
AE: Do people recognize you walking down the street now?
DS: A little bit more. With Line of Beauty I’d sort of get recognized on Compton Street in Soho and in certain areas of London you’d get spotted more than in others. With this, it’s in the strangest situations. It is nice. That puts me on a different place on the map, I suppose. Certainly a show like Downton will open a few more doors.
Stevens with actor Hugh Bonneville
AE: Let’s jump to Series Two. The war’s been going on for a while. Where do we pick up with Mathew and what’s his sort of arc this time?
DS: Well….
AE: Tell everything, all the spoilers!
DS: Every detail…. We pick up in the middle of 1916, a couple of years on, in the middle of the Battle of the Somme. And things aren’t going well for the British out at the front and certainly not going well for Mathew. We literally open the series — not giving anything away — first second of the series he’s in a crater in no man’s land. We find Mathew blown off his feet pretty much. And then he’s running across no man’s land, bombs going off and everything.
AE: Is Mathew running away from Downton Abbey as much as he’s being patriotic?
DS: That’s an interesting question. I don’t think you get a sense that he’s running away.
AE: Because there’s a lot for him to avoid back in England.
DS: There certainly is. And actually, it’s interesting you said that because the drama as far as we see it for him as well as the obvious action and trauma of the front, for me the interesting element of his story — certainly in the first half of the series — is that revisiting Downton. And how far has he moved on. How has he changed? How has he grown? Because of the war, because of the natural progression of things, moving on from there. He’s engaged to a girl called Lavinia, which has happened quite quickly before our story picks up again, which causes a few ripples in the Downton camp. So, yes, it’s revisiting Downton, having been away at the front, is an interesting thing to explore dramatically.
AE: The reason many of our readers first started paying attention to the show was because of Thomas the footman. Obviously, gay characters existed back then, but we don’t see them very often. I don’t think we saw you interact with him very much.
DS: Not too much. There was a slightly insulting scene where he tries to teach me how I should serve myself at dinner. Because one of the nice things about the first series was that it wasn’t just upstairs that regarded Matthew as a sort of middle class outsider, downstairs also didn’t believe he was a gentleman and wouldn’t give him the sort of credence he deserved.
Matthew Crawley suffers disrespect from Thomas the footman (Rob James-Collier)
AE: Now Thomas has been off to war as well this time.
DS: Thomas, at the end of Series One, it looks like he thinks he might have wriggled out of active service by joining the medical corps. But of course, just like everyone else, the medical corps were at the front, stretcher-bearing and very much in the thick of things. So he’s in the thick of the action, desperate to wriggle out of it again and runs into Mathew at the front.
So they actually have some more interaction in this series, which is nice.
AE: Is Thomas less of an ass this time?
DS: I suppose he’s the same but different, you know? He’s still wheeling and dealing and trying to wriggle out of certain situations, looking after number one.
To read the entire interview go to: http://www.afterelton.com/people/2012/01/dan-stevens-interview-downton-abbey?page=last
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