The rumor had been buzzing for many weeks. It is now confirmed. The British series Downton Abbey will offer a third (and this time, we promise, the last) epilogue to the cinema. A third film on the vagaries of the aristocratic Crawleys and their servants at the dawn of the 1930s is well in preparation. Actress Imelda Staunton spilled the beans during her appearance on the BBC. “If you want to know, yes there will be a final film,” commented the heroine of The Crown who plays a distant cousin of the Crawleys and does not fear the reprimands of the producers.
The news has not been confirmed by the creator of the saga Julian Fellowes. The Oscar-winning screenwriter of Gosford Park is also working on a third season of his HBO series The Gilded Age, which transposes the Downton Abbey recipe into the New York of the industrial revolution.
Also readOur review of Downton Abbey: a new era: the last of the last?
This return to Downton Abbey is only half surprising. The English tabloids were insistently reporting on his reunion. The Daily Mail even went so far as to claim that a secret seventh season was being filmed and should be ready to air by Christmas 2024.
New burst of episodes or new film? Never mind. Julian Fellowes has always said that if the spectators and the actors were there, he would always be up for a sequel. “We have enough to go on for as long as the public wants us to,” opined producer Gareth Neame.
Also read: Julian Fellowes: “The Gilded Age shows how the American elite made its own rules”
Who would be in this reunion: Hugh Bonneville, Michelle Dockery, Elizabeth McGovern? Mystery for the moment. But fans will have to do without Maggie Smith’s speckled foil repartee. The acerbic Dowager Countess in fact breathed her last, surrounded by her family, at the end of Downton Abbey 2: A New Era, which saw some of the Crawleys and their servants enjoying the sweetness of the French Riviera while their castle became the setting of one of the first talking films of the British seventh art.
This part took place in 1928, bringing the Crawleys closer to the perils of the financial crisis of 1929. If Julian Fellowes were tempted to explore it, he could thus follow the social upheavals born of the crash and the Great Depression. When we know that he designed Downton Abbey as a tribute to a disappearing way of life and caste, this epilogue would make perfect sense.