When season 4 of costume drama “Downton Abbey” makes its debut on PBS’s Masterpiece Sunday, creator and writer Julian Fellowes faces the challenge of convincing the show’s original audience to return—even after losing three beloved cast members last season.
Set in February 1922, six months after Matthew Crawley’s tragic death in season 3′s finale, the show’s new season finds his widow, Lady Mary Crawley, still mired in grief. Chauffeur-turned-aristocrat Tom Branson is similarly bitter, following the death of his wife, Lady Sybil, in childbirth. And the house staff is adjusting to life without the scheming maid Mrs. O’Brien who took a job elsewhere. Meanwhile, Mr. Fellowes, is grappling with viewer complaints that he won’t ever let Lady Edith be happy—she was left at the altar in season 3—and trying to resign himself to the reality that spoilers will inevitably leak from overseas. “Social media has changed everything,” he says.
Mr. Fellowes, 64, began his career as an actor on British television, but got his big screenwriting break in 2001, with the upstairs-downstairs Robert Altman drama “Gosford Park,” for which he won an Oscar. He’s currently preparing a new series, “The Gilded Age,” set in New York during the 1870s. Below, an edited transcript from a recent interview:
You are the only person in the writers’ room for this show. Who do you bounce your ideas off of?
Well, my wife, really. She gets to read [the scripts] first. It only goes off to my agent after it’s been through her. Then it goes off to Gareth [Neame, the show's executive producer] and begins its journey toward the screen.
Where do you write? At home?
I write wherever I am. One of the advantages to still being an actor is that I couldn’t be too picky about where I was working. You know, have gun will travel. I might be sitting in a trailer in Scotland or wherever and I would write.
This season had to be challenging to write, given the loss of so many characters.
Jessica [Brown Findlay, who played Lady Sybil] had always said she was going to leave so that was slightly different. We knew it was coming, so we built a whole episode around her. There’s the whole eclampsia plot [in which Sybil dies during childbirth], which I think was important because it is still a very dangerous condition. We thought, “We’ll kill her in [episode] five, and then we’ve got three to get over it and we will all move on.”
And it was different with Dan Stevens, who played Matthew Crawley?
Dan [Stevens], who I love, he didn’t decide to go until we were just about to start filming. So we’d already cast five episodes, and got the directors and everything else. And we knew that episode five was all about Sybil dying. We couldn’t have another whole episode about death. So I said to him—because our last episode goes out on Christmas night in England—”Would you please let us have Christmas, and we can kill you at the beginning of next year?” He didn’t want to do that.
So how did you get around that?
I realized it meant we could have a time jump, so we could start [season 4] six months later, and then you get into all the interesting stuff of someone coming through widowhood and the loss of someone they thought would be there the rest of their lives. I didn’t want Dan to go. I loved him and I wish he’d stayed with us, but given the fact that he’d gone, I thought that worked for Michelle [Dockery, who plays Lady Mary] and made for an interesting journey, as opposed to them just sitting there being happy and saying “Have you had a good day?”
What about Siobhan Finneran [who plays Mrs. O'Brien]? She announced she was leaving in between seasons.
She’s in another series called “Benidorm,” which I don’t think you get over here, and she has children and lives in the north. I think it was all too much to do all at once. The great thing about a servant leaving is you don’t have to kill them. They just get another job and away they go. But with the family leaving you’ve got this real complication. If you are never going to see them again, the only explanation is they die.
Since she’s not dead, do you think she may make a comeback?
I’d love it if she did. Here [in America] you can get actors for five or seven years. For some shows you have to sign a thing saying you are prepared for that when you go for an audition, when you haven’t even got the part! We just don’t have that. No agent will give you an actor for longer than three years in England.
In your acting career, you’ve played a lot of minor supporting characters. Do you think this makes you more empathetic to the peripheral players, wanting to give them more of a story?
Completely! Completely! What used to drive me mad was when I was playing a character who wasn’t one of the leads, one day they would just vanish. You set it all up—you like her, you don’t like him—and then one day, you’re gone. I never understand why they don’t see that if you complete everyone’s story, it makes for better viewing. There’s an arc for everyone. You know [the young assistant cook] Daisy’s arc is just as important as Lady Mary’s but in a different way. I believe the show works because all of the characters have their own trail and we know what they all want and what all of them are like.
Do you worry about spoilers?
Well, some of it is because of the time lag [between when the show airs in England and the U.S.] there are a lot of people who talk. [The actors] are pretty discreet. The difficulty is, we might have a wedding dress costume, and the person sweeping up realizes a dress is being made for Downton, so someone must be getting married. You can’t plug everything, but I trust our cast and crew. I used to get really annoyed by spoilers but there’s nothing we can do about it.
The world of oversharing that we live in now is the opposite of the one portrayed in “Downton Abbey,” with its rigid cultural traditions. Are you nostalgic for a time when people were more discreet?
I think almost every period—I’d exclude the 14th century—has some stuff going for it, and some stuff that seems intolerable. I don’t think our own period is any different. We have examples of injustice and bad government in the world today that are just as terrible as anything that was happening in the 19th century. There was a naive desire in me to kind of present history in a way so everything was getting better, but I don’t really believe the age we live in is the best ever. There’s something about our lack of personal discipline that makes us slightly vulnerable and weak as a society. I think they were tougher, partly because they had to be tougher. Some pain was the lot of every human being alive. It didn’t matter if you were the King of France. We don’t have that.
So we’ve become a bunch of wimps?
We think we can go from cradle to grave without any pain at all. As a generation, we can be rather feeble about toughing it out. Even the people who were working in those households, I don’t think they were all miserable. It was a tough job but if you had a good employer, like anything else, there were worse places to be. It was a hard life—you had to get up early, work very hard. They had a more realistic expectation of life.
Do you think people’s expectations these days are unrealistic?
With marriage, our generation thinks that we should all be incredibly happy all the time. The moment we are not incredibly happy, something’s wrong with the marriage. Well, nothing’s wrong with the marriage! You’ve signed up to live with someone for a half a century, and as long as you still have stuff in common and are still close, it’s fine. But you see people getting divorced and you think “What [else] do you think is waiting out there?” I kind of liked that that generation would have laughed at this idea.
Speaking of happiness, will Lady Edith ever find true love?
People come up to me all the time and say, “Please let Edith be happy!” I think I do believe there are people who are unbelievably lucky and there are people who are unlucky and they don’t always deserve it, but somehow the first group always catches the bus. The second group always just misses it.
How do you balance having a historical backdrop—such as the bit about the Teapot Dome scandal in season 4—while maintaining the focus on all the interpersonal drama?
We had the Marconi scandal, there’s the odd reference to things, to put it in context. But we don’t have the Prime Minister arriving for dinner all the time and all the rest of it, because I am not sure how believable that is. In fact, we do in your last episode feature the Prince of Wales, but they are in the middle of London—that seems perfectly believable, that people like the Crawleys would move in that type of circle. So there I felt it was OK, but you have to ration that, or every time they open the door, in walks Mussolini or the Czar. We have them reacting to the news—the German emperor abdicating or whatever—but they are reading it in the paper like everyone else, which seems to me more believable.
Tell me about “The Gilded Age,” a new drama you’re working on, set in New York.
It’s for NBCUniversal and it will happen when “Downton” finishes because I just couldn’t do both at once. I haven’t written it yet, but it’s about the old aristocracy, the Winthrops and the Stuyvesants and the new money of oil and gas and shipping in the 1870s. It will all be fiction—it won’t be real people—but when those families descended on New York, they took over. Although I am sure any Winthrop probably feels superior to a Vanderbilt or an Astor, nevertheless there is a certain element of realpolitik to this and the fact is that they delivered a certain type of American Renaissance, and became princes with their palaces on Fifth Avenue. That more puritan Edith Wharton modest aristocracy of the 18th Century in America was displaced by these princes and robber barons.
But there will be a season 5 for “Downton?”
Yes. I don’t know yet if there is a season 6, but it’s not going to go on forever. It won’t be “Perry Mason.”
In 2011 you were made a peer, and you’re now Lord Fellowes of West Stafford. Has that changed your life in any way?
I was always quite political and my family were very political. I grew up having political arguments during breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was a thrill and very interesting to be in parliament, voting and all that stuff. I admire the present prime minister. I don’t want to get into a whole political slanging match because I think a lot of what went wrong was going wrong all over the world. But the fact is that we were in kind of a mess, so it’s been incredibly interesting to be close to the attempts to rebuild.
Some critics have said that you are somehow using your show as a soapbox to get support for the “Equality Titles Bill”—nicknamed “The Downton Abbey Law”—which would allow aristocratic daughters, such as your wife, to inherit a title.
The newspapers invented for me this great campaign. That all came out of one thing: my wife [Emma Kitchener-Fellowes] would have been the heir to the Kitchener title if she had been a boy and she is not a boy. Her uncle is now dead and the title is extinct. One journalist said to me “Does it seem to you right that if your wife was a man she would have succeeded, but since she is not a man she does not?” And I said “No. I think it seems ridiculous.”
Has your wife’s situation inspired some of the plotlines for “Downton?”
I don’t know. I think my generation was the first that started to become aware of the anomaly. I don’t think my parents particularly questioned it. You know, there are worse problems in life like not having a place to live—so it doesn’t rank high in life’s troubles. But it still is odd.
Have you thought about what the Crawleys’ descendants would be up to if they were a real family living today?
Certain families woke up to the new reality quicker than others and became businesslike, managing their resources. Many of them are still in their houses, and they are run with good mechanisms and structures. There are places of public entertainment. Some are still private but the estates are run in a businesslike way. My own belief is that the Crawleys would be like one of those families. Particularly the younger generation: Mary is a practical businesswoman. I think there were some families who just sold and sold and sold [land], and eventually it just caved in. But I feel that Mary wouldn’t allow that to happen. My own belief is that they would survive, but they would be living in a back wing—and you could buy a ticket to visit and they would only come out in the winter.
Write to Rachel Dodes at rachel.dodes@wsj.com[1]
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