Julian Fellowes has been saying goodbye to “Downton Abbey” for nearly as long as it has existed. By the fifth season of the series, he’d even grown accustomed to writing more definitive endings, not knowing that there would be a sixth season and three feature films to come.
But 15 years after the world first met Violet Crawley, Lord Grantham, Lady Mary, Mr. Carson, John Bates and everyone else upstairs and downstairs at that beautiful estate, the creators are really, truly closing a chapter and saying farewell with “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale,” which opens in theaters nationwide Friday.
“It is sad,” Fellowes said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “It’s been a huge chunk of my life. And when I die, I think it’ll probably be the only job anyone remembers. But I hope it’s been happy.”
“Downton Abbey,” which was conceived by producer Gareth Neame as a kind of spinoff to “Gosford Park,” was in many ways an improbable hit. In an era of television that celebrated difficult men and antiheroes, here was a warm British period drama about aristocrats and their household staff that became a global phenomenon and, later, a successful film franchise. The first two features, released in 2019 and 2022, grossed more than $287 million at the worldwide box office.
“None of us knew it was going to be a success,” said actor Hugh Bonneville, who plays Lord Grantham. “I remember Gareth saying to me, ‘Let’s face it, it’s not going to run beyond seven episodes, these sorts of shows don’t.’”
But audiences never seemed to tire of the Downton crew. The longer it went on, the more it became part of the furniture.
“It has been this remarkable journey,” Neame said. “We look at the Grantham family, the Crawleys, as a representative of the families that we all live in because we’ve seen them marry and have children and pass away and get money and lose money and become sick and get well again, hopefully. There’s something extremely comforting about that.”
Despite the success of the show, which ended in 2015, a feature film was never a given. From a studio perspective, Neame said, there were very few precedents and the ones that existed were not positive. Money always seemed to be lost. But the bigger headache was the idea that even if they got the greenlight to make a film, they’d have to assemble more than 20 specific actors to do it. And they needed every one.
“We said goodbye when we finished the TV show and didn’t think we’d ever come back,” Bonneville said. “I said, it’s like herding cats, he’ll never get us together again. And, blow me down, he did, not once but three times.”
They were difficult negotiations, Neame said, and much more complicated than anyone might imagine, but there was still such goodwill that they made it work. Especially for this last film, he said, “everyone wanted to give it a proper conclusion and see an ending for all of those characters.”
In the first film, the family prepared for a visit from the king and the queen. In the second, they traveled to the South of France and said goodbye to the Dowager, Maggie Smith’s sharp, beloved matriarch who had been with the show from the beginning and was a large part of the reason it even got made. There were many farewell parties for her on set. Then, two years after the film was released, Smith died at 89.
“She was a fantastic character in the show and she was fantastic character in life,” Fellowes said. “I don’t think I’m likely to have another partnership as I had with her. No, we weren’t best friends. We didn’t take a house by the sea together. But she knew how to play what I wrote and I knew how to write for that character.”
Smith, he said, made something iconic out of that character, which is a writer’s dream. But after the character died, and then the actor, the question remained: What happens to everyone else? The third film brings things back to the home as Lord Grantham prepares to finally hang up his hat and let Lady Mary run things on her own.
“The idea was to give all the fans the knowledge that this is how the camera finally pulls away and we leave Downton to its future,” Neame said.
The title was a slightly grandiose way of announcing their clear intention that this is the last film and the story is ending. Well, at least the story for this cast.
It would be naive in this era of intellectual property to say definitively that there will never be more “Downton Abbey” stories. People regularly ask Fellowes if there might ever be a crossover with his current series, “The Gilded Age.”
“I keep being told that I am to do it, so we’ll have to wait and see if this proves to be true,” Fellowes laughed.
What everyone knows, however, is that this is an end. And they’re at peace with that, however bittersweet it might be.
“If this is where it ends, I’m happy. If there’s no further visit to Downton, we have a beginning, a middle and an end,” Neame said. “It stands for all time and if nothing more ever comes of this, I’m absolutely delighted to have a proper ending to a story and not have a show that fizzled out.”
Besides new audiences are discovering “Downton Abbey” all the time thanks to its availability on streaming services.
“I got a very sweet message today from a 16-year-old who’s obsessed with the show, and she was only 1 when it started,” Bonneville said. “I’m very proud, I think we all are, to be part of something that will resonate and allow people to escape from the horrors of day-to-day life for a long time to come.”
