Behind the Scenes With the Creator of ‘Downton Abbey’
By ALEX WITCHEL
Pulling into the driveway of Julian Fellowes’s manor house in Dorset, in the west country of England, with its 50 acres of grass rippling and trees swaying, as if a director had just called “Action!” to the scenery (indeed, one massive tree was featured in the film “Emma,” starring Gwyneth Paltrow), I recalled the advice Fellowes once said his father gave him: “If you have the misfortune to be born into a generation which must earn its living, you might as well do something amusing.”
Inside the house (“Two houses, really. This side was built in 1633, this new bit in 1840,” he said) with its double-height foyer lined with family portraits, a dining room with a mile-long banquet table and a morning room where Thomas Hardy is said to have written, you might think it doesn’t get more amusing than this. Fellowes has lived here only nine years. The decades before that were often fraught with anxiety, even despair. He toiled as a midlevel character actor for 30 years with 12 rejected screenplays to his name until, incredibly, at age 52, he won an Academy Award for his first produced screenplay, Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park,” in 2002. But Fellowes, now 62, is the rare sort who, having won a life lottery, did not kick up his heels and make a fool of himself. He has worked like the proverbial dog — or American — for his continued success, and if that means he is more to the manner bought than born, that is fine with him.
He followed his unexpected screenwriting breakthrough with more films — “Vanity Fair,” with Reese Witherspoon, “Young Victoria,” with Emily Blunt, and “The Tourist,” with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, among them. He also wrote the book for the musical-theater adaptation of “Mary Poppins” and the best-selling novel “Snobs.” Most recently, he created and wrote the wildly successful miniseries “Downton Abbey.” The multigenerational family costume drama kicks off during the final days of aristocratic England before the First World War, and stars Hugh Bonneville, Maggie Smith and Elizabeth McGovern. It drew record ratings on British television last season; the rights have been sold in more than 100 countries. It scored big here too, when it ran on PBS’s Masterpiece last winter (the second season will begin on Jan. 8). The show received 11 Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Miniseries or Movie and Outstanding Writing, for Fellowes.
I was ushered into Stafford House, as it is called, amid waves of apologies about lunch being cold, not cooked. A few days earlier, a bird’s nest that was lodged in the kitchen chimney caught fire, disabling the stove and filling the house with black smoke. Fellowes was joined by his wife, Emma, who is 15 years his junior, nearly six feet tall and bursting with energetic goodwill. It’s easy to see how Fellowes, at 39, fell in love at first sight, why he agreed to her wishes to have only one child, a son, Peregrine, now 20, because she herself was an only child, and why he stoically allows Emma’s mother to call him Evelyn, not Julian. It seems she had her heart set on her daughter marrying a man called Evelyn, so Evelyn he is. There are worse things.
We sat at one end of the banquet table. Meg, a border collie, took the chair to Emma’s right. Humbug, a dachshund, was soon in Emma’s lap, his head and upper body submerged beneath her sweater. He stayed there, motionless, as she explained what it means to be a lady in waiting, as she is, to Princess Michael of Kent, representing her at functions or accompanying her to events.
As she spoke, Fellowes ate contentedly. He liked his food, he liked his wife, he liked her stories. He wasn’t as keen on the interview — “It’s like holding in your stomach, you can only do it for a bit at a time” — so first he suggested we walk the grounds. I was directed to a small room off the kitchen, stocked with racks of Wellington boots. After eyeballing my feet, Emma chose a pair that fit perfectly, and off we set.
Fellowes chatted amiably, glad to be in the countryside. Initially, I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t just meet me in London at his Chelsea apartment. “Because it’s overtaken by Emma’s wardrobe,” he’d said. But it became clear during our day together that after a professional lifetime accumulating petty defeats, hurtful setbacks and outright failures, to finally have found a place for himself in such a spectacular setting is enormously meaningful to him. It is a wondrous gift to be a late bloomer, but the decades of fertilizer that nurtured those blossoms remain. The shadow of the B.G. era (Before “Gosford”) reasserts itself regularly. When we stood under the “Emma” tree, he laid his hand on the trunk with a tenderness you might show a child. It is rare to encounter a man his age so plainly defined by gratitude.
Bob Balaban, a producer of “Gosford Park,” recommended Fellowes to Robert Altman to write the screenplay. “Altman asked him to try it, and maybe six weeks later Julian sent the first 75 pages,” Balaban said. “It was clear that he was brilliant and his knowledge of class society, the workings of it, was encyclopedic. This talented writer, moldering away as a relatively unsuccessful actor! That was a brass ring, and he took it. It’s part of the key to his current success, his work ethic. He doesn’t procrastinate. He doesn’t hide. He works like a demon.”
For the first season of “Downton Abbey,” Fellowes created 18 main characters with almost as many story lines. He wrote virtually all of the first season and the entire 11½ hours of the second. The series begins in 1912 with the sinking of the Titanic. The Earl of Grantham (Bonneville) loses his cousin and his cousin’s son; the latter was betrothed to Lady Mary, the eldest of his three daughters, who cannot inherit Downton because she is female. The search is on for a new heir, and a distant male relative is found. Will Mary make life easy for everyone and just marry him? Certainly not.
Very much like Matthew Weiner setting “Mad Men” at the brink of the 1960s, a decade whose social conventions were about to explode, so has Fellowes chosen the calm before the storm of World War I. He creates juicy plotlines peopled with emotionally intricate characters that viewers love to love and love to hate.
Of course, nothing incites the British like success. As the ratings soared, viewers accused Fellowes of plagiarism (the cook who’s going blind sprinkles salt on a dessert instead of sugar, a detail he supposedly lifted from Jo in “Little Women,” who was a bad cook and not going blind). The press claimed he was such a “toff” that guests to his home were banned from wearing blue jeans to lunch. (They are not.) The BBC produced an elaborate spoof of the show, starring Kim Cattrall, that has drawn more than 165,000 views on YouTube.
At the base of the ruckus is Fellowes’s conservative politics. A lifelong Tory, he was appointed by David Cameron in January to the House of Lords, and much has been written about Fellowes’s glamorizing the class system in “Downton.” Paired with that were cries of artistic theft from none other than Jean Marsh, a star and co-creator of the newly revived (and flatly inferior) “Upstairs Downstairs.” It’s like saying that anyone who dares dramatize the Civil War after “Gone With the Wind” is both racist and an imitator.
“I’m seen as a chronicler of the class system, which I don’t think is unfair,” Fellowes said, settled in front of the fire in the drawing room. “It is a whole side of the society here that I find quite intriguing, and happily the audience has come along with me. I think one of the things we got right with ‘Downton’ was that we treat the characters of the servants and the family exactly the same. Some of them are nice, some of them are not nice, some of them are funny, some of them are not, but there is no division between the servants and the family to mark that.”
Of the show’s critics, he said: “You could only represent it to their satisfaction if everyone downstairs was writhing in a state of permanent torment while everyone upstairs was vicious and violent, horrible and dishonest. The idea that both groups were just people trying to bash through their lives is alien to them.”
At the recent British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards, “Downton” won for only directing and sound. Fellowes shrugged. “Of course I love winning things, I can’t tell you how much I enjoy it,” he said. “But I have understood that I’m not going to win them here. It’s rather like with a girl, there is a moment when you’re young when you just have to look into the glass above your basin and say, ‘You are not going to get her; move on.’ I think it’s the same, really.”
It has been a long road to equanimity for Fellowes, who was born in Cairo, the fourth and youngest son of Peregrine, a diplomat. A recurrent bout of tuberculosis derailed his father from becoming an ambassador; he became an executive for Shell instead. “I think he had a lingering sorrow that the career he adored was taken from him,” Fellowes said. “If he had been an invalid all his life, he could have borne it, but the truth is he stayed perfectly healthy and died at 86, so it was all for nothing.”
To have a father so thwarted seems to have made his son work harder. Fellowes graduated from Ampleforth and Cambridge and ran with the upper classes, though he saw himself as something of an outsider, the “bottom of the top,” as he once put it: “I wasn’t handsome, titled or rich. I was always the man who was asked because they were short of boys or because someone had dropped out, and I think that allows you to be a sort of fly on the wall, because nobody’s paying you any attention.” He observed plenty and tried putting that knowledge to work as an actor. While a student at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, he earned money by writing romantic and historical fiction under pseudonyms. After graduating in 1973, he discovered that working-class actors like Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay were the ones getting serious, career-making roles in new plays at the National Theater. His upper-class accent and, he maintains, his conservative beliefs relegated him to West End comedies and revivals, playing butlers and lords: “There was an assumption that if you came from my background, you couldn’t have much to say.”
By 1981, Fellowes gave up on storming the National and moved to Los Angeles, where he spent two years playing minor roles — he was the chauffeur in “Rita Hayworth: The Love Goddess,” starring Lynda Carter — and finally found himself poised for his big break: replacing Hervé Villechaize on “Fantasy Island.”
“They decided that a really good idea would be to replace him with an old English butler,” Fellowes recalled. “So they looked around, it was in pilot season, and discovered there were two pilots with old English butlers. And someone said, ‘Wait a minute, instead of having an old English butler, have a young English valet.’ This idea of course was greeted with shrieks of delight. So the search was on for a young English valet, and I went right up to the top meeting, and then what happened is they decided they’d do better with an old English butler. Of course, if I had known the ways of Hollywood better, I would have seen that was absolutely inevitable.
“But the Hollywood experience was very interesting for me,” he added. “I had friends there, and often they would ask me to read a script. They’d say, ‘I’ve been offered this, what do you think?’ and I got into analyzing scripts and how they work.”
When Fellowes returned to London in 1984, he was cast frequently on television. In 1989 he met Emma, and they married the following year. “One of the things that you’re not really in control of — apart from everything — is your smell,” he said. “Different things in your life make you smell different, and a combination of coming back from Hollywood with a much more directed sense of what I wanted and then meeting Emma and being, I think, a less anxious person in consequence, was not coincidentally when I started to get more interesting work.” He spent nearly five seasons on a sitcom, “The Monarch of the Glen,” and had some small film roles. He also wrote successful adaptations of “Little Lord Fauntleroy” and “The Prince and the Pauper” for the BBC. Then came “Gosford Park.” His anxiety went from “will I ever make it?” to “might I lose everything?”
“I think I’m more fearful of the future now,” he said, sipping his tea. “I always feel that there’s some giant hand about to lean in and snatch it all away from me, saying, ‘That wasn’t meant for you.’ Emma has this completely different quality of living in the present. It’s just been very helpful to me to live with someone who doesn’t think, Oh, my God, what if it all stops tomorrow? Of course it’s absurd to live your life dreading some unspecified disaster.”
Yes, but lifelong habits are hard to break. He nodded. “There is always a ghost of you if things hadn’t worked out,” he said glumly. “This sad figure trying and trying and trying.” He mustered a smile. “Anyway, it did work,” he said. “He’s gone away.”
At least for the moment. In addition to completing the second season of “Downton,” Fellowes wrote a four-part miniseries about the Titanic that was filmed in Budapest. It is to appear on British television next season, for the centenary anniversary.
Watching him now, this intelligent, agreeable man, natty in his tweed jacket and tasseled loafers, relaxing by the fire, I found it hard to imagine the angst he experienced in his youth about his looks. He nodded. “I used to be very much dominated by having no looks, but I’ve now grown into the age when nobody has any looks. So the playing field has been rather leveled off.”
I asked about Gwen, the maid who wanted to be a secretary in the first season of “Downton,” who eventually got her wish in the last episode. That was the good news. The bad news is she’s off the show. That’s certain to upset a number of viewers.
Fellowes looked amused. “We want constant novelty, but we also want everything to stay the same,” he said. “It’s childlike. But if we get it right the show runs. If not, it doesn’t.”
I mentioned how much I loathed Thomas, the evil gay footman. He shook his head. “It’s hard to be gay in 1912,” he said. “It’s illegal. If anyone finds out, you go to prison. So for me, him being gay means you slightly stay your hand. He’s not just horrible. To get any kind of emotional life going, he’s got to take his life in his hands every time. That seems to me to be a sympathetic thing.”
Well, maybe.
He laughed. “I don’t believe that most people wake up and think, How can I be horrible today. In their brain it is a legitimate response to the bad treatment they have received or some bad situation they perceive. It’s rather like when you’re an actor, it’s always a mistake to play the audience’s opinion of your character. If you’re horrible, let them decide without you. I think I’m kind of on everyone’s side.”
When the Earl of Grantham explains his stake in the survival of Downton Abbey, he says, “It is my third parent and my fourth child.” Doubling for Downton is Highclere Castle, where the show is filmed. To see it come into view, set on 1,000 acres in Berkshire, is to truly understand his meaning. It is glorious.
The morning was rainy, and despite it being late June, the wind was sharp. It was just as cold inside the castle as out; every actor in costume donned floor-length down coats between shots.
The rush was on to finish the season’s last two episodes, because Highclere is open to the public during the summer. One episode was being filmed on the main floor; the other, upstairs. (None of the kitchen or servants’ quarters scenes are shot here, because those parts of the house have been modernized; a full set was built in London.)
As Fellowes made his way upstairs and down he was greeted as “Julian,” even though he is technically the Baron Fellowes of West Stafford and should be addressed as Lord Fellowes. “Most of my friends in the business are by definition socialists,” he said. “I don’t ever see any need to be hysterical about the difference. For me the key difference is how to manage an economy and how involved government should be in one’s daily problems. I believe it should be more at arm’s length.”
Near the coffee urn, he was set upon by cast members, so I stole a few minutes with Liz Trubridge. She is the series producer, who in the absence of a show runner, an American invention, is the person who executes each of Fellowes’s scripts with the same care he would.
Or at least that’s her goal. “Julian is very lovely until he doesn’t like something, and then he’s not backward in letting you know,” she said. “He has such a way with words, and he certainly can use them to great effect when he wants to. He’s a historian as well as a writer. We had a scene in which Sybil baked a cake for the first time as a surprise for her mother. We shot the cake on the table with plates, forks and napkins. Julian was very upset about this. He said the upper classes would eat with their fingers.” She sighed. “Apparently it was true.” The show employs a historical adviser who agreed. No forks.
“Even if a majority of people don’t notice or care, we try to get things right,” she said. “It’s a minefield, isn’t it?”
When it was time for lunch, Fellowes and I were driven through torrential rain to a clutch of trailers. Maggie Smith was off that day, so hers was free. We headed inside with Hugh Bonneville, who seemed to have an easy relationship with Fellowes. When I told Bonneville that I had spent the previous day at Fellowes’s house, he inquired dryly, “The burnt one or the other one?”
The two talked about show-business people they knew, one of whom no longer seemed to be working. Instantly, Fellowes’s shadow of melancholy enveloped him. “What became of him?” he asked morosely. “What becomes of us all? You open a restaurant in the provinces somewhere.” He winced.
Bonneville got up to make a pot of tea. How many stars in America would do that, I asked Fellowes, who finally smiled. “Do you want some pudding?” he asked hopefully. Eton Mess was on the menu. I wasn’t sure what that was. “Strawberries, cream and meringue, all mashed up,” the unit publicist interjected. “Hence the mess.”
We drank the good, strong tea as the dessert arrived, and Fellowes’s spirits lifted. The weather seemed to be clearing. But no sooner had we hit the muddy ground than a production assistant held up his arm. “Stand by for rain,” he shouted.
Whatever could he mean, I asked Fellowes, who was already dashing to a nearby car. I looked up and saw it, off in the distance, a great wall of water moving straight toward us. I jumped into the back seat beside him, and as the driver pulled up to the shaky shelter of a makeshift canopy, the rain hit hard. Fellowes ducked back into the castle, just in time.
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