Downton Abbey’s Allen Leech: ‘Maggie Smith loves cat memes’

For Allen Leech, Downton Abbey’s definitive Maggie Smith moment isn’t a withering glance or waspish aside. It comes in the sombre fifth episode of series three, after the death of Jessica Brown Findlay’s Lady Sybil Crawley – the screen wife of Leech’s chauffeur Tom Branson, who marries into the aristocratic Crawley clan.

“It’s when she arrives back at the house after Sybil’s death,” he says without blinking, and fans may recall it well. Returning to the house and seized up with grief, Smith’s dowager countess walks unsteadily down the hall towards the drawing room, where the rest of the family have gathered. But as we look on from behind, her pace slowly stabilises and her posture steels, as sorrow gives way to forbearance.

“I mean, it’s just unfair,” he groans: he’s a boyish 40, with a honeyed Irish accent and a face that defaults to butter-wouldn’t-melt. “She acted the rest of us off the screen without even facing the camera. So that’s always summed Maggie up for me. She can emote with the back of her head in ways I struggle to do with the front of mine.”

Leech lives in Los Angeles with his wife of three years, the American actress Jessica Blair Herman, who’s expecting their second child in the autumn. But he’s in London this week for the premiere of Downton Abbey: A New Era – the second film to have spun off from Julian Fellowes’s venerable series.

Livelier and more polished than its 2019 predecessor (see review, right), it’s a luxurious escapist pick-me-up. But the fun is cut with a bittersweet tang: the ominous doctor’s report revealed at the end of the previous film does not turn out to have been a false alarm, which means we see Smith’s final screen moments as the dowager countess.

Before these scenes were shot, Smith had told the cast and crew she meant them to be the last she’d ever play. Since filming wrapped, however, she’s been cast in two more features: “She’s come out of retirement more times than most boxers,” Leech jokes. Thanks to a production schedule which dovetailed shoots in London, the Home Counties and Provence, Smith’s final scene turned out to be Leech’s first. The mood on set was hushed, but not mawkish – “The thing about Maggie is she’s not big on sentiment,” he says. “On set, she just wants to work.”

Leech also discovered that evening that his 87-year-old co-star was a fiend for memes – online images circulated for comic effect – which she swaps on a private WhatsApp group with Michelle Dockery and Laura Carmichael, aka Ladies Mary and Edith. “She especially loves the cat ones,” Leech says.

Leech was 29 when he was cast in Downton Abbey: a jobbing actor living in north London, he was struggling to find roles and was earning money jet-washing sewers for the council. At his audition, Fellowes asked him on a whim to use his natural Irish accent, “I think because it struck him that it would allow him to bring a bit of a firebrand and a revolutionary into the house.”

And in the end not only that, but swell its transatlantic appeal. “I think Julian also came to realise that, especially out of the UK, Tom could serve as a tour guide for anyone who wasn’t au fait with the British class system.”

Does he think Americans, with their habitually romantic view of all things Irish, found it easier to relate to Tom? “Oh, definitely. I was taken aback by how many more Americans would tell me that I was their favourite character on the show.”

He suspects Tom’s outsider status is what saved his skin when Brown Findlay left the show during its third series, when the time came for the cast’s agents to thrash out their clients’ future fees. (“I like to say that Lady Sybil died of a terrible dose of contract negotiations,” Leech says.)

Does he worry that after playing him for 12 years, Tom will be hard to shake? “Definitely. But the other great thing about Downton was we only filmed for about seven months a year, so it gave me a good chunk of time to do other things.” (These included supporting roles in The Imitation Game and Bohemian Rhapsody.)

As yet, there has been no talk of a third Downton film. “But there was no talk of a second when we were making the last one,” he stresses. “We’re only here today because the audience voted with their feet.” He speculates that Fellowes might be considering moving things on a generation: “Like, bring it forward to the Second World War, or even further.”

That decision will come down to Fellowes alone, however: the cast have long since learnt not to meddle in their 72-year-old overseer’s artistic process, let alone suggest alternative plots.

“The only time that I think there was any pushback was when Laura Carmichael told him she really wanted Gregson to come back,” Leech recalls. (Michael Gregson, played by Charles Edwards was the editor and married lover of Carmichael’s Lady Edith in the third and fourth series, and goes missing in Munich.)

“She just loved that relationship. So she wrote Julian a very impassioned letter making the case for his return. Then, in the next script he sent over, someone announces that Gregson had been killed by the Nazis in the Beer Hall Putsch. So I think that was a great lesson to all of us. Or rather a shot across the bows, to” – with a grin, he switches into a note-perfect fruity Fellowesian purr – “leave it to me.”

‘Downton Abbey: A New Era’ is in cinemas now