AND DOWNTON ABBEY’S JULIAN FELLOWES ON HIS NEW SERIES AND THE BEAUTY OF A SCHEMING WOMAN

BY JULIE MILLER

BY ROBERT VIGLASKY/CARNIVAL FILMS.

For six seasons and one film, Downton Abbey’s greatest character—Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess—lorded over her sprawling family from the periphery, laying in wait with a gimlet eye and fatal barb. But in Julian Fellowes’s new period drama, Belgravia—currently airing on Epix—the Oscar-winning screenwriter and costume-drama master gives his delicious grand dame matriarchs, Harriet Walter and Tamsin Greig, lead billing.

Adapted from his eponymous 2016 novel, Belgravia centers on Anne Trenchard (Greig) and the Countess of Brockenhurst (Walter)—two 19th-century women from different social strata whose lives and legacies are thrust together by unforeseen circumstance in the show’s first episode. Named for a London neighborhood of stately white townhouses that stands in close distance to Buckingham Palace, Belgravia tracks the women’s unlikely alliance as they strive to keep their family names free of scandal.

Speaking to Vanity Fair this week, Fellowes explained why he’s always been more fascinated by the plights of women than men in his period dramas—dating back to 2001’s Gosford Park.

“In any period before the Second World War, there were tremendous limitations on how women were supposed to behave, what they were supposed to do,” said Fellowes. “I think women make interesting characters because it took a clever and ambitious woman to get over those barriers. There were strong and ambitious women, and you find them in Charles Dickens’s novels, and you find them in Anthony Trollope’s novels. They have to think cleverly—and somehow come at the game from a different angle if they’re going to get what they want.”

His favorite female characters in literature include Lady Dedlock, from Dickens’s Bleak House—“extraordinary, such a mixture of good and bad, and so torn with self-loathing yet capable of using her own power”—and Becky Sharp, from William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Fellowes adapted that novel for a 2004 feature in which Reese Witherspoon played Sharp. “She’s young, she’s pretty, but she doesn’t have anything going for her. She’s got no money, she has no real connections. Whatever she’s going to do with her life, she has to do for herself. She schemes and plans and uses people, and does things that are not very honorable in order to get on. But what choice does she have?” he said. ”There’s a wonderful moment when she’s reading about Lady Osborne, who’s described as a wonderfully virtuous woman, and Becky says, ‘A virtuous woman. I could be virtuous on £5,000 a year.’ And Thackeray says, ‘And who knows, but the little woman was right.’ I loved that.”

With Belgravia, Fellowes saw the opportunity to “tell the story of these two women from very different backgrounds with some common cords that yoke them together. At the beginning they are the most unwilling allies. They have various goals in common, but it doesn’t mean that they are friends with each other. And of course we were incredibly lucky to get Harriet Walter and Tamsin Greig to play the parts because they’re very evenly matched. It’s like a boxing match when they’ve been weighed and they’re the same weight.”

When he’s not writing and reading about fascinating women, Fellowes is using his quarantine to watch them. “I’ve done quite a lot of…watching television because, you know, your whole social life, by definition, has vanished and been put to sleep,” he said. All his time at home has led him in a few surprising directions: “I like long series, and I’ve just just gotten up to date with Grey’s Anatomy, which of course saddens me because I hate it when I’ve finished watching them. I loved it. I have to be sort of in control of it, so I have to buy it on DVD. And then I can watch it as much or as little as I like. I need that kind of power over it.” His best binge-watching experiences have been “Mad Men, The West Wing, and The Good Wife: “I just love that whole business of getting involved with these people who, of course, you don’t know,” said Fellowes. “I’m not mad, I don’t think I do know them, but nevertheless, you get sort of swept up in their predicament in a way that a one-off film doesn’t quite give you.”

Fellowes has been quarantining in his manor house in Dorset. The screenwriter, a historical buff, also mentioned that the coronavirus got him thinking about the 1918 Spanish flu—an event he wove into Downton Abbey’s second season.

“That was much more serious,” Fellowes said. “I mean, the Spanish flu killed far more people than COVID-19—millions upon millions of people. In fact, more people died of Spanish flu than died in the First World War. So it was, I suspect, even more frightening than this is. But at the same time, it had much the same effect. Everyone retreated to their houses, and they kind of isolated. But it was kind of similar in that way that it was quite sudden. So for instance, Lloyd George, who was then prime minister, was visiting Manchester—and he suddenly was rushed into bed in a temporary hospital that had been set up in the town hall or wherever it was, with no warning whatsoever. And he was there for something like 10 days until they judged him out of danger.”

Fellowes has been enjoying the comparable peace of his quarantine. “I’m just here with my wife and son, and it’s kind of a bonus in certain ways for decluttering your mind,” said Fellowes—who is staying busy with work on The Gilded Age and a script for a second Downton Abbey movie, a top-secret project about which the screenwriter declined to share details. As prolific as ever, Fellowes developed another project—the historical sports drama The English Game, about the origins of modern football in England—that recently premiered on Netflix.

Asked whether there were any contemporary news stories or characters he found compelling enough to chronicle himself, Fellowes demurred. “I don’t really see my writing as political, and this is such a political era that we’re living in at the moment. We think and talk about politics as much as we did in the 18th century. That’s quite unusual for my generation. I think sometimes I get caught up in domestic stories of murder, or whatever it is, because murder’s always fascinated me. Not serial killing or something like that, or putting a terrorist bomb somewhere. I mean how an ordinary man or woman who went to school and got a job and played with electric trains, or whatever it was, reached a point in their life when murder was the next logical step. The pacing that took them there is something I find absolutely fascinating.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/04/julian-fellowes-downton-abbey-belgravia