Downton Abbey's Hugh Bonneville: "It’s just another show, I'm just doing my job"
Hugh Bonneville (Pic: BBC)
Hugh, who plays Robert, Earl of Grantham, says: “There’s a sense of ownership over it which is delightful, really lovely. It’s clearly got some infectious quality about it which I can’t analyse.
“I don’t want to sound derogatory, but to me it’s just another show. I’m just doing my job. But it clearly has some ingredient X which has captivated people and taken us all by surprise.”
Hugh only realised just how big the BBC1 period drama was, thanks to his nine-year-old son, Felix.
“The point at which I realised Downton was becoming more popular than one could have anticipated, came when I was standing in the school playground.
“Some guy came up to me and said: ‘I don’t like what that Thomas is doing’ – he was 11.”
The current series is set two years in to the First World War. Downton is a convalescent home and Robert is devastated not be to able to take a more active role in the war effort.
Hugh explains: “Having fought in the Boer War Robert is excited at the prospect of rejoining his regiment – then things happen and his expectations are thwarted.
“He gradually feels more and more impotent because he can’t be in the forefront of where he wants to be.”
His authority is also overtaken at home as his mother and wife take over the running of Downton Abbey, reflecting the increasingly greater role of women in the world at large. Hugh says: “We project forward into the 20s with women getting the vote and their roles growing in society. It’s a long, slow process
that many would say we haven’t even
achieved now. I think that’s one of the most significant and dynamic things about the second series.”
Unfortunately his character, the increasingly emasculated Robert, feels otherwise – he becomes so desolate he is tempted by thoughts of an affair with one of the downstairs staff.
Downton fans will be shocked that fine, upstanding Robert could even consider cheating on Cora, but Hugh says that in Downton, “no one is quite what they seem... The goodies have darker shades and the darker characters have lighter shades. Julian Fellowes writes three-dimensional people.”
He doesn’t want to give too much away for fear of spoiling things for viewers, but adds: “It’s safe to say that Robert’s sense of impotence in the war effort makes him start to question his own validity.
“He almost sinks into a depression. All the things he thought about his world have been shattered, or gradually shift beneath his feet and he becomes quite lost.
“What adds to his melancholy is that life will never be the same again. The world
will never be the same again. A whole generation has been wiped out. Any sense of his control over the estate
shifts – and with it his destiny and the destiny of Downton.”
Hugh believes it is too easy to look back on the era through rose-tinted glasses: “For 95% of the population it was a perfectly ghastly time with social injustice and everything else. It was only good for the very well off.
“But in our fictional world of Downton, there is something about that world that seems to be ordered and functional. And all the cogs seem to work, like it or not.”
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