Hermione Eyre
2 Dec 2011
Dan Stevens is a bona fide wonderboy - somewhere between Hugh Grant, except wholesome, and Robert Pattinson, except, you know, flesh and blood. Gentlemanly, considerate and ever-so-slightly pasty, he is the perfect national export - as English as a thatched tea towel. Hollywood already has its teeth into him ('They said I could have the part if I lost a stone and a half') and, at 29, he is shaping up as a lovely male lead, a committed family man and a bit of a brain to boot.
He's a discerning cultural critic on Newsnight Review, holding his own against Germaine Greer (who taught him briefly at Cambridge: 'We sat at her feet holding copies of King Lear while she told us how it feels to get old'). He even played his own small part in the Arab Spring: 'A very dear friend of mine from Cambridge is Khalid Abdalla [who was in The Kite Runner and United 93]. He was in Tahrir Square for the duration of the Arab Spring. At that time Twitter was able to get messages out quickest, because media outlets and lines of communication were very limited, so I was sat at home in North London, obsessively following what was going on on Twitter and Al Jazeera, and helping out some contacts and friends of Khalid's in Cairo...'
Soon Dan is telling me how in his youth he was an anti-capitalist. That's right, Middle England's Sunday night period drama comfort-crumpet was a teenage anarchist. 'I had very, very long hair. I was quite active when I was younger and, quite naïvely, I used to go on May Day marches every year and anti-capitalist things, before I really knew what any of that meant. It was a unity thing, all very idealistic…'
This is slightly confusing as he has turned up wearing tweed and talking about his love of
antiquarian books (a third edition of Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers that Tom Stoppard gave him, and a first edition of The Line of Beauty inscribed 'Be My Guest' by the author Alan Hollinghurst; Dan made his name in the novel's BBC adaptation). But his anarchist activity was limited to when he was at Tonbridge School and soon fizzled out. He was no Charlie Gilmour. 'Around 9/11, when I arrived at university, the wind seemed to get taken out of the movement's sails for whatever reason. But it seems like it's come back a little recently. Only now I'm a bit jaded.'
Too jaded to join in, perhaps (and too busy 'Downtonating' as he puts it on Twitter), but he's excited by the fact that global protests are going on. 'This Occupy movement really interests me. It's largely naïve, and it's hijacked by forces that can do no good at all and are quite brainless in some respects, but the core is doing something interesting, which is shifting the debate and moving politics into a different arena.' Does he have strong political feelings? 'Politics as they currently exist, I have no truck with. But something needs to happen and it's sort of happening, so I'm interested in that…' He breaks off. 'Too much coffee, sorry.' He doesn't carry a card for any political party. 'I wouldn't. Because if the people at the top of the party change direction, you're a bit stuck. The distinctions between the parties have become pretty meaningless. New Labour did something incredibly disingenuous by dismantling the party and reassembling it on the right of centre left… Very cynically from the top it has been turned around and muddied. And I don't think Miliband is capable of turning it round in a useful direction.'
He runs his hand through his vaguely floppy hair. He is a bottle blond and his eyes are very blue. 'They decided they had too many brown- haired boys in the Downton cast, so they asked me to dye my hair,' he explains. 'I think I've had more fun these past two years being blond.'
He is one of those young men who talks proudly about 'my family'. He and his wife Susie Harriet have a two-year-old daughter Willow and live in a family-friendly part of North London. Susie was in musical theatre, 'but now she's a mummy. She's very creative, and paints and makes things and, for the moment, it's really wonderful that she can be around Willow. They paint a lot
of dragons.' He finds himself 'reinvesting' in Christmas now he's a father. 'My best memory has to be my daughter's first Christmas,' he says. 'We chucked her in a reindeer suit. I put on a Christmas shirt, downloaded a bit of Nat King Cole.' Last year he cooked Gordon Ramsay's spiced goose and splashed out on one of Heston Blumenthal's Christmas puddings with a whole candied orange inside. 'We bought one on eBay for £40. It was probably the most expensive food item I'd ever bought.'
Is it true that he was bullied on Twitter to lose weight? 'That was utter…' then the star of Downton says the word 'bollocks' (at least I think he does, the sky has fallen open, so it's hard to tell). 'I lost that weight specifically for a part in Vamps.' This is a forthcoming vampire film directed by Amy Heckerling (Clueless), starring Alicia Silverstone and Sigourney Weaver, and featuring a transformed Dan. 'I get my kit off in one scene. I worked really hard and got into training and running. I've let that all go now. I think I put on the extra weight when my wife was pregnant, and we were staying in a lot and I was cooking her nice food. We ate a lot of stews. I guess I was sympathy eating…' he says, smiling.
No wonder he has 14,000 followers on Twitter and a lot of devoted fans: 'some of advancing years, which is great'. He has had a good second series of Downton, ostensibly serving in the trenches but regularly turning up at the Abbey on plot-related leave. 'Being in uniform has done wonders for Matthew,' he says. And as for coming home wounded: 'I was basically just trying to keep up with Bates' - Brendan Coyle as Bates the war-veteran valet was the first series' surprise love interest - 'We all tease him about being a heart-throb. I saw his limp and I thought, "I can compete with that: I'll see your stick and raise you a set of wheels." '
Downton Abbey, the most-watched TV drama in a decade, has arguably saved ITV, and the one-off festive episode is a dead cert for its Christmas Day schedule. Downstairs at the Abbey they'll be making mince pies, upstairs they'll be eating them, and in a fit of goodwill the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith) will con-descend to pull a cracker with a servant, before asking querulously, 'Or have I gone too far?'
But the big question hanging over the Christmas Special is: will they or won't they? Michelle Dockery as the glacial Lady Mary and dashing Dan as Matthew Crawley have been casting longing looks at each other for two series now. Its writer, Julian Fellowes, has managed to carve them a monumental romance out of little more than eye contact and a 'good luck' flopsy bunny. But now that Matthew's fiancée Lavinia has done the decent thing and died, will the thwarted lovers finally get it on? In time for the Queen's Christmas broadcast? Michelle, 29, looks at me sideways through dark, amused eyes. She can't possibly say, of course. 'But Julian's wife Emma [properly, Lady Emma Kitchener-Fellowes] often comes on set, and she'd read all the scripts before anyone else. She said to me: "Just you wait till you see what happens. It's so good, you'll vomit." '
Dan and Michelle have been friends since their time in the National Youth Theatre together and in a previous TV drama, The Turn of the Screw, for the BBC, he played her psychiatrist, she his gurning patient. 'We both know each other's characters so well in this that it's often unspoken, we just react to one another as Mary and Matthew,' says Dan. 'What's fun is that we're never at the same pitch of emotion - it's one of those "I can't quit you" relationships, a bit like… Brokeback Mountain.'
Off-screen, Michelle will be having a pyjama party this Christmas, with her sisters at home in Essex, where she was born and brought up - and spent two years working in a pie and mash shop ('I never tried the eels,' she says with a shudder). Tall and slender as a lily, Michelle cups a mug of mint tea tightly. In person she is just as poised and graceful as Lady Mary, but more watchful, less confident, and her deep, rich voice is much more relaxed. 'I learned so much doing Pygmalion with Peter Hall,' she says of playing Eliza Doolittle. 'That's when I mastered the RP of that period.' How does she get on with her character? 'I love her. I like her toughness, her strength. She's not bothered about being liked. I think that's such an interesting quality in a person, when they have the confidence to not even care.'
Michelle grew up watching 'a lot of incredibly good telly with my dad, like Cracker and Prime Suspect', then trained at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. 'It was like winning the lottery getting a place there.' Soon after graduating she played Ophelia to John Simm's Hamlet in Sheffield. 'I got a rave review from one paper and an absolute stinker from another. You learn that you can't trust reviews, even the good ones. You just have to trust what you do. Because other-wise you'd never get out of bed, would you?'
Her middle sister Jo is also an actress, currently understudying in Backbeat in the West End, while her eldest sister left a job at Yahoo! to teach English in Barcelona. 'We're like best friends,' she says. 'We've never had that rivalry some siblings have.' Last thing at night on Christmas Eve, the three sisters all get into one bed together for a giggle. Michelle lives in Clerkenwell with her boyfriend, who works for David Chipperfield Architects. 'But I've never spent Christmas away from home,' she says softly.
Next year she will be playing Princess Betsy Tverskaya in Joe Wright's Anna Karenina (starring Keira Knightley). 'I'm often cast as these aristocratic girls. In the future it would be interesting to do something closer to myself and my background.' Dan wants to do Chekhov, and is also hoping to co-produce and star in an adaptation of the novel Summer in February, about the Cornish artists' community at Lamorna: 'It's a beautiful book about the love triangle around Alfred Munnings. Lots of passionate sea smashing on cliffs and Cornish light.'
For the moment, though, there are carols to be lipsynched, tipsy footmen to turn a blind
eye to, daughters to disinherit - and servants to be told where to hang the mistletoe, in time for a big romantic denouement underneath it. It's sure to be sickeningly good. ES
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