‘Downton Abbey’ Cast Dishes The Dirt On The Upcoming Movie

While the Downton Abbey cast is gathering in order to start shooting the new movie, they have also been getting together for private dinners where ideas have been shared about the next chapter for the Crawley family. Though show creator Julian Fellowes will not share the exact plot of the film, even he is willing to tease a few possibilities.

Closer Weekly reports that producer Gareth Neame says he has never stopped thinking about Downton Abbey and the story of the Crawley family, so he is ready to jump back into work. He said that everyone wanted to tell more of the story through the movie.

“When the series drew to a close, it was our dream to bring the millions of global fans a movie. We 100 percent [wanted] to come back in an epic kind of film.”

Neame says that even before the Downton movie was on the table, he was still working on related work.

“I still live and breathe the show every day because they are still licensing it around the world. For me, it hasn’t really gone away.”

Neame says he always believed that there was more story to tell.

Julian Fellowes won’t commit to sharing the exact storyline of the Downton Abbey movie, but he was willing to offer a few hints that come from his own family’s experience. He says that like Robert and Cora, his parents came from different classes.

“My mother hadn’t been presented, she wasn’t a [debutante]. My great aunts thought she had ‘caught’ [my father] and they never changed. They eventually tolerated her because she had been delivered of four healthy sons, so she had done her dynastic duty.”

He says that Cora was born based on the stories of the influx of American debutantes with money marrying men with titles who were in need of an injection of cash.

“We all know about those lovely American debs running down the gangplank into the arms of a marquis, but what was it like 20 years later when they were sitting in some freezing house in Staffordshire longing to be back in Rhode Island? In that sense, Cora Grantham was born.”

But the best detail added by Gareth Neame is that a Downton Abbey movie might not be the end of the road for the tales of the Crawley family. Whether it’s a prequel or a sequel, he says, is hard to know.

“Who knows. There could be spin-offs, a stage musical. Allen[Leech] has his own ideas: Downton Abbey theme park! There’s a ride called the Dowager Countess, it just insults you for an hour.”