It sounded like a Maxim cover spread: “The Women of ‘Downton Abbey.'”
But the lavish evening event Tuesday that played more like a promotional dinner than a press event presented a handful of stars from the popular PBS series on “Masterpiece” to answer questions about the impending fourth season.
To the actresses playing Lady Mary and Lady Edith, Mrs. Bates, Mrs. Hughes and Daisy were the kind of questions, reporters recognized right away, that shouldn’t be asked of a serialized soap that captivates so many, and probably shouldn’t be answered. And most of them weren’t.
But there was enough coy back and forth to engender enthusiasm for the return to the series Jan. 5. It may have been the third appearance of the “Downton Abbey” cast to the TV critics press tour but it was the first time there for Laura Carmichael, who plays perennially unlucky in love Lady Edith.
It made sense, as “it really is a very different season for Edith this year,” according to producer Gareth Neame. “It’s very exciting and a very active story for Edith this year.”
[Spoilers to follow]
From a brief clip shown for what producers said was the first time, it was clear Lady Edith was dining with her old editor, whom her family convinced her to leave last season.
“Masterpiece” executive producer Rebecca Eaton set the stage for the clip by admitting spoilers: “Matthew is no longer with us. The house is in deep mourning for Matthew, and the season this season will cover the years February 1922 into the spring/summer of 1923. The roaring ’20s are upon us. There are some new characters, some old favorites.”
From the clips, it’s clear that Lady Mary is inconsolable over the sudden death of Matthew; even perhaps considering suicide before Maggie Smith’s Lady Grantham talks her out of it and encourages her to take over the running of Downton in cahoots with the other widower, Tom Branson.
It’s already been announced that Shirley MacLaine will reprise her role as Cora’s American mother, with Paul Giamatti playing her brother. But it seems a string of cousins will come to court Lady Mary.
“She actually has more than one love interest,” says Michelle Dockery, who plays the bereaved Mary. She mentions one in particular, “an old family friend who she’s known since the girls were children, and they haven’t seen him since she was tiny.”
“It’s important for her to eventually move on, so he is a potential love interest,” Dockery says. And slowly, throughout the series, she will be “coming back to real life.”
Even so, she adds, it affects her new motherhood.
“She was never going to be a very maternal mother,” Dockery says. But, she added, Lady Mary, being part of the aristocracy, wouldn’t have seen her child much.
“There’s a nanny and eventually there will be a governess looking after baby George,” Dockery says. “So you don’t see much interaction between the baby and Mary.”
Bonding is further prevented because of her grief, she says. “She looks at him and she sees Matthew,” Dockery says. “So, yeah, it’s a slow process, I think, with motherhood for Mary.”
It is the death of Matthew that brings back Michael Gregson, the editor who had been courting Edith. They go out for “a lovely scene that’s in the first episode,” Carmichael says. But Edith is still writing for him. “It’s kind of a modern woman thing,” Carmichael says. “I like to think of her as the Carrie Bradshaw of the ’20s.”
As for her character’s unlucky love life, Carmichael says that writer Julian Fellowes had a saying: Some people in life are lucky, and some people aren’t.
“And Edith is definitely one of those unlucky people,” she says. “But I mean, I love the Gregson and Edith relationship because he seems so he’s so different from any of the other men in ‘Downton.’ He’s a kind of a working, modern man, a kind of self made man, and exists in a different universe, you know, in London. So their relationship is it’s interesting and, I think, different to any of the others.”
Some started asking about Lady Edith’s dresses, but Eaton joked, “So the question is will Edith actually take her dresses off? I think that’s what they’re asking.”
“My goodness,” said Carmichael.
“You can throw them our way if you do,” said Phyllis Logan, whose Mrs. Hughes doesn’t get to wear fancy gowns.
“Enough,” said Dockery. “This is ‘Downton Abbey,’ not ‘Game of Thrones.'”
Dockery says she was upset when she learned of the demise of Matthew.
“Because I thought, you know, ‘Where can the story go now?’ Dockery says. “We’ve spent all this time having this on on off, will they/won’t they relationship, and then suddenly it was coming to an end. So initially I was concerned about what would happen.”
Dockery said it was sad for her to see the departure of actor Dan Stevens, who played Matthew Crawley, just as it was to see the end of Jessica Brown Findlay, who played the doomed Lady Sybil until her surprising death last season.
Still, she added, such events “opens up opportunity for Julian to write a new chapter and something quite different.”