In the season 5 finale, there was a scandal surrounding Atticus and a prostitute at his stag party. It surprised me how quickly the episode established that he wasn’t, in fact, guilty of anything — his character was never called into question by the audience. Did you expect a bit more controversy about whether he betrayed Rose or not?
MB: If you think about the time period, that’s a big enough problem even if he’s not guilty. Way, way big enough to easily cause enough scandal to mean the wedding can’t happen. And I think that’s an easy thing to forget. It’s like when you’re doing Shakespeare. A very easy thing to forget is that God exists at that time, that the play was written in the context of there being a completely separate power that everything is kind of answerable to. As a modern actor and audience, you don’t watch Shakespeare in that context unless you really kind of remember that you have to in order to understand, because we don’t necessarily believe that.
It’s exactly the same with watching Downton, remembering the constricts of the time. I think as an audience we’ve watched Downton over the past five years and you kind of get comfortable with these characters and start to think of them in a far more modern context. But they’re still so constrained by the logistics and the culture and the expectations of their time, and the behavioural necessities and the responsibilities and all that sort of stuff, the baggage, that we’re still trying to shake off in a number of different ways today!
On his character’s new in-laws: ‘I think the idea is that they’re a bit weird!’
Everybody loves to hate Larry Grey [Lord Merton’s son] and his explosion at the dinner table, but if you’re looking at a cross-section of society at that time, that’s probably the more likely way that people would have responded than how the Crawleys do. I think the idea is that they’re a bit weird, everybody knows they have an eclectic choice of relations, they’re “a house for accepting unusual other halves.” That’s what Larry Grey says. And it’s probably not unlikely that people thought like that about a family like this — that they’re just a bit unusual and eccentric, and we don’t see that as an audience because they’re the family that we’re following.
So something like a guy getting framed with a prostitute — just the fact that those pictures exist? Think about how Atticus’ father responds to the idea of divorce. Just the idea of being associated with another family’s divorce is enough to make him want to call off the wedding. Pictures of your future husband with a prostitute, you’re basically forcing yourself to be a pariah. Stuff like this is astronomical, even without needing to make a bigger thing out of it and keep the audience on tenterhooks as to whether it was him or whether it was a set-up. It’s big enough that Rose may still turn around and not be able to marry him, just because of the way things were.
Fortunately, the wedding did end up happening! Atticus and Rose’s relationship developed quite swiftly on screen but it did come across as very real love. Do you believe that those connections can happen that quickly in real life or do you think it’s more emblematic of how marriages happened in that time period?
MB: I think it was possible, and relatively normal, to move that fast with [engagements and marriages] at that time. I think that’s really important. And I think stuff can naturally move very quickly as well. I got engaged myself within the last year. I got engaged to a girl that I had been with for nine months, and I might have had a different answer previously, but in all honesty, that whole thing about “when you know, you know,” it’s very true. It’s just immediately very obvious, and if it’s very obvious then it suddenly makes sense to do things quickly rather than wait, because there’s just no point in waiting, and I really had a sense of that in mind.
It’s funny, because I shot my first scene for Downton and I had a couple weeks off because everything shoots quite sporadically due to the whole upstairs/downstairs divide, and when I came back I had gotten engaged. And so it was really interesting, the way the storyline develops in Downton is actually pretty close to what happened in my own life. I think I would have played it differently had I not had that experience, and I would have probably been saying something like, “I think things move faster at that time so it’s probably a bit emblematic.”
But I do think, genuinely, that what happens with Rose and Atticus is that it’s essentially two people who meet who are incredibly compatible, they like each other a lot, essentially every box is ticked. And once that’s happened, it’s like, “We might as well get on with it, because it’s going to be far more fun if all of this stuff is taken care of. Then we’re together and we can just get on with living our lives rather than just not being together.” And especially more so at that time, when before you were married you were far more separate than you are these days.
The second that Atticus’ parents come over to Downton, that basically means that marriage is going to happen, because your parents wouldn’t meet unless you’re going to get married. And the first time that they kiss, actually the only time you see them kiss, is after they get engaged. There was this big thing that we were always kind of aware of which was about, kind of, personal contact. There was no hand-holding, you couldn’t get time alone with each other. If a guy and a girl are alone together it’s pretty scandalous, unless they get engaged!
The two-hour Downton Abbey Christmas Special premieres this Thursday, December 25, at 9 p.m. on ITV. Find Matt at @MattJLBarber on Twitter.
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