Downton Abbey Finale: Cast Reveals On-Set Secrets from Chaos to Culinary Disasters

Nobody knows how to behave any more, sighs Carson the butler, whose grievances include – but are not limited to – Downton Abbey’s silver being polished with a new-fangled cream rather than soap and water.

Elsewhere, ‘downstairs’ people are taking their place in the upstairs drawing room and – whisper it – on the Yorkshire County Show committee too. There’s even talk of letting the Crawley family’s grand London residence, Grantham House, go in favour of… a flat.

‘So this is how the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper,’ says the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) as he looks around a mansion block apartment with his daughter and heir presumptive, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery).

But of course it’s not the end of the world. It’s just social and economic progress wreaking havoc on the one his Lordship, Robert Crawley, and Carson (Jim Carter) grew up in, a place where there were emperors in Berlin and Moscow and even the grandest families travelled everywhere by steamer because flight was still decades away.

And there you have the bittersweet theme of Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, the last instalment of a saga that has bewitched the world for 15 years. It’s about the passing of power from one generation to the next and it marks the end of an era, both for the great house and us, the fans, who have followed the Crawleys’ family dramas since 2010.

There have been six TV series, five Christmas specials and two films before this one, while the phrase ‘What is a weekend?’ (copyright Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, played by Dame Maggie Smith) has passed into everyday conversation.

But now this is it: Julian Fellowes, Downton’s creator, writer and producer, has put the cap back on his pen and it’s carriages at midnight for everyone, after one last film that will leave you as sated as one of Mrs Patmore’s ten-course dinners. (And even Downton’s legendary head cook is finally relinquishing her wooden spoon, telling her protegee,Daisy, ‘It is your time…’)

There are exquisite Chanel-inspired frocks, a cracking day at the races, a splendid ball, a re-creation of a county show and a cheeky suggestion by Julian Fellowes that Noel Coward’s Private Lives was based on Lady Mary’s ill-fated marriage to Henry Talbot. Add in the force of first-wave feminism, an emergent middle class, the toxic shock of society divorce and a bunch of guest stars including Paul Giamatti, Joely Richardson and Dominic West (returning as film star Guy Dexter), and you have toothsome fare indeed.

All of which seems a long way from the beginnings of a show that Dame Penelope Wilton (Lady Merton, formerly Isobel Crawley) thought might run to a couple of series, three at a push. ‘I wish I’d had shares in it,’ she tells me, laughing. ‘Frankly, I could have been very wealthy by now. I was in India doing the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films with Maggie [Smith] when it first aired and her son Chris rang up and said, “Downton – it’s been a great success…” We were quite amazed. Not because we didn’t think it was good, just that people loved it so much from the start.’

Jim Carter remembers reading the part of Carson and knowing it could be a sensational role. ‘I think there was a line saying “Carson enters in his magnificence”, and I thought, “I can give magnificence!”’

Even so he, like Dame Penelope, was clueless as to the juggernaut Downton would become. ‘Nobody could have predicted that. It rolled out very well in England, but America lit the blue touch paper, made it a global success from China to Patagonia – everywhere television was seen.’

Why? ‘I think it’s because it’s uncynical,’ he says. ‘Downton is never going to start with a body in a graveyard; there’s not going to be guns or foul language. It’s about people, all sorts of different people, just trying to make their way in life.’

He still loves it and keeps in touch with some of his fellow downstairs stars. Carson has dinner with cook Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol), Mrs Hughes (head housekeeper and latterly Mrs Carson, played by Phyllis Logan), Daisy the kitchen maid (Sophie McShera) and former footman Mr Barrow (Robert James Collier). ‘It’s just like old times around the kitchen table,’ says Jim Carter. ‘I don’t stand up and serve them, of course, but it’s nice!’

In the film, you get the feeling there’s nothing more the newly retired butler would like than to be presiding over a staff meal. ‘Carson’s in mourning for the world he’s lost,’ agrees Jim. ‘He’s got used to a lot of things over the years, the telephone, electricity, but I think he’s well out of it now, too old to fully adapt to this new age. Anyway, they’ve got a new butler, Mr Parker, and he’s still wearing the livery – it hasn’t all gone jeans and T-shirts. Yet!’

But this final film is so sharply observed, so alive with change, that you can almost see that day coming. It opens in 1930, in London’s theatre land, the city streets slick with rain and the Crawleys in the best seats in the house for the new Noel Coward play, Bitter Sweet. (Later, Coward himself, a knockout portrayal by British-Iranian actor Arty Froushan, will be a guest at Downton.) As always, there’s a dollop of romance and a looming financial crisis, but mostly what follows is a drama about an extended family and its loves, loyalties and rivalries, as relatable as it has been since series one.

This time it’s Lady Mary who is in the biggest pickle, on the front page of the scandal sheets, her divorce from Henry Talbot seeing her ruthlessly excluded from the top drawer of society. But she has learned well from her fearsome grandmother Violet Crawley and doesn’t need to be wearing her estate tweeds for the audience to know she means business, and is the natural heir to Downton, divorced or not.

‘Everyone can see she’s ready, that for Robert it’s time to hang up his hat,’ says Michelle Dockery. Indeed, there’s a scene where Lord Grantham comes calling on Carson, wanting to sit by his fireside, stroke his Labrador and ask his advice on succession. They’re no longer master and servant but two old friends navigating this new world together. Carson says he knows Mary has what it takes, adding gently, ‘and, My Lord, so do you’.

Witness the fact that it’s the forward-thinking Mary who confronts Downton’s money woes. The mere suggestion that grand people might have to cook for themselves leaves Lord Grantham choking on his scrambled eggs. But his daughter goes for the nuclear option of downsizing from Grantham House. By now, thinks Dame Penelope Wilton, the family would have probably opened a safari park on the estate to make the house pay.

That, of course, would have given the dowager countess conniptions since she famously shuddered at the idea of anyone doing anything as common as having a ‘job’. But the Crawley matriarch was never on the cast list for this film, having died at the end of film two, A New Era. In real life Dame Maggie Smith died a year ago and this film is dedicated to her memory. It also includes an arch reference to weekends, just for her.

Dame Penelope remembers acting alongside Dame Maggie as ‘like playing tennis with someone better than you – you had to return the serve very quickly’. The pair were also fans of the word game Bananagrams (a bit like Scrabble) and fought each other during breaks in filming. Jim Carter likes to recall this relaxed, off-duty side too. ‘Maggie and her fictional granddaughters got on so well that, between takes, they were always showing her pictures of cats doing rude things on YouTube. You’d hear her laughing like a drain.’

Both actors have a fund of anecdotes about the other bits of Downton we didn’t see. Dame Penelope remembers the time a dinner scene, which included a fish course, took two days to shoot and stank out the dining room. She recalls having had semi-permanent ‘hat hair’ for all six series too.

Jim Carter tells how one hunt scene at Highclere House (the Hampshire stately home where Downton is filmed) ended shambolically when the hounds smelled a fox and charged off. Friends of Lord and Lady Carnarvon (the real-life occupants of Highclere), all acting as extras, then galloped away in pursuit of the pack. ‘I was left looking at Kevin Doyle, playing Mr Molesley, the footman, saying “Erm, I don’t know what we do now…”’ says Jim.

But much of Downton’s enduring appeal is in its sense of polished perfection, from the menus written in French to the way a chap can swap his flat cap for a homburg to indicate a rise in social station.

In Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, the helter skelter sourced for the Yorkshire Show was a real one from 1906. At the Petersfield Ball, where the world learns of Lady Mary’s divorce disgrace, the diamond dress clips on Michelle Dockery’s ballgown are genuine bling on loan from Mayfair royal jeweller Bentley & Skinner.

This dedication to detail and authenticity flows from Julian Fellowes, who is old enough and well-bred enough to have once participated in the kind of London Season which is the backdrop to this Downton story. He remembers its death and the way grand families had to redefine themselves.

As Lady Mary says to her father when they’re viewing their new flat, ‘Families like ours must keep moving to survive.’

If you can watch the closing moments, in which she stands under the portrait of Violet Crawley, without shedding a tear then you’re probably not a fully invested fan. ‘It feels quite complete,’ says its creator, Julian Fellowes. But he adds: ‘I’m not saying we’ll never see Downton Abbey in any other form – one should never say never…’ Which makes you wonder if he might one day write the tale of how the Crawleys got to where we first met them in 1912 – or where this last poignant chapter, in which the old gives way to the new, takes them next.

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale is in cinemas from 12 September.