Careful with those beans Carson...oh no, you've spilled them! Has Downton's butler lifted the lid on TV's biggest secret?
- Jim Carter, who plays Downton Abbey's butler Carson, discusses finale
- The long awaited final episode is due to be broadcast on Christmas Day
- Mr Carter says the final scene of the show is set on New Year's Eve 1925
- He says the ending is 'low key' and doesn't end on the same tragic note as in 2012, when fans complained that Matthew Crawley was killed
Jim Carter has let slip how the last-ever episode of Downton Abbey will end when it is broadcast on Christmas Day
As Downton Abbey’s formidable butler Carson, he is normally the soul of discretion, guaranteed to keep any confidence.
But the actor who plays him appears to have given away what was supposed to be one of the best kept secrets of the year.
In an exclusive interview with today’s Event magazine, Jim Carter has let slip how the last-ever episode of Downton Abbey will end when it is broadcast on Christmas Day.
Fans of the smash hit ITV drama who would rather not know should stop reading now.
According to Carter, 67, the very last scene is set on New Year’s Eve, 1925, and features the servants gathered in Downton’s Great Hall for a party.
Rather fittingly, many of them are looking forward to a new life outside the house as well as the New Year.
Carter said: ‘We don’t finish on a climactic note. There are no explosions or charabancs going off cliff edges.
‘All the servants are together in the hall. It is New Year’s Eve, it’s candlelit and there are Christmas decorations left over. It is dark and we quietly sing Auld Lang Syne.
‘It is a nice, low-key, rather muted end to the thing. They said it was a wrap and we looked at each other and thought, “Oh, we’ve finished.” ’
The news that the last scene will not have a tragic note is likely to delight fans who complained when Matthew Crawley was killed in the final minutes of the show’s 2012 festive edition. But although the last series will end on a harmonious note, it will also have its fair share of tragedy and heartbreak leading up to that point.
The Mail on Sunday has seen next Sunday’s feature-length opening episode and can confirm the Crawley family and their servants are bracing themselves for an uncertain future.
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Everyone accepts the life they have known is no longer sustainable and perhaps Downton itself has become an anachronism.
The Mail on Sunday also understands that the series will include one funeral, but it is not clear if that will involve a major character.
On a happier note, the series is expected to contain no fewer than three weddings.
In today’s interview, Carter gives his strongest indication yet that his character will finally tie the knot with housekeeper Mrs Hughes, played by Phyllis Logan.
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According to Carter, 67, the very last scene is set on New Year’s Eve, 1925, and features the servants gathered in Downton’s Great Hall for a party
He said: ‘One of the last lines is when I say, “It’s going to be a different life.” Mrs Hughes says, “Yes, but together we’ll manage.” That’s the feeling of it.
‘They [Carson and Mrs Hughes] will be like favoured retainers. I think that’s what happened, really; the old ones who had been there for many years were given a grace-and-favour cottage. They will see out their time on the grounds.’
Carter said the series will provide a fitting ending for all of the characters in the series.
‘It ties up the stories, giving indications of what will happen to the people. I think viewers will be very pleased. They’ll need two hankies.’
Tantalisingly, however, the actor hints that there may be a future for Downton Abbey itself even if some of its best known residents move on.
He said: ‘It’s not the end of Downton Abbey. It’s open as to where people go in the future. Me and Mrs Hughes are inevitably facing retirement, probably, but nothing is absolutely nailed down.
‘We are not closing the house up, we are saying goodbye to the series.’
His comments will lead to fresh speculation about a possible movie spin-off.
Carter, who is married to the actress Imelda Staunton, is adamant that Downton’s global success has not made him a millionaire.
He said: ‘I have made a comfortable living out of it but I live in the same house, drive the same car, we have the same holidays. We are not rich on it.’
'I think people will be very pleased. They’ll need two hankies': A VERY indiscreet Jim Carter serves up the secrets of the last-ever Downton Abbey
COLE MORETON FOR EVENT MAGAZINE
It’s television’s most closely guarded secret: what happens at the very end of the final episode of the world’s favourite costume drama, Downton Abbey, but the actor who plays Carson just can’t keep it to himself. Warning: there won’t be a dry eye in the house...
‘It would be a terrible life. You get one afternoon a week off and you have to ask permission to do anything,' said Jim of the lives of those down in the servants’ quarters
Nobody expected Carson to cry.
‘It was odd really,’ says the man who plays the big, bluff butler with the face of stone in Downton Abbey.
‘Where it came from, I do not know.’
They had just finished filming the last-ever scene of the most popular costume drama of all time when the actor Jim Carter surprised himself by bursting into tears.
Now, as any fan of the show will know, Downton plotlines are television’s most closely guarded secrets, and this is the big one – the period drama equivalent of WikiLeaks, the finale everyone’s desperate to discover: what happens before the credits run on the final episode of the sixth and final series, which hits our screens this week. Is Carter really going to go public with the file stamped Top Secret? It would appear so.
‘We filmed the last scene of the series last. All the servants were together in the servants’ hall,’ he says in the deep, rich voice that has kept the maids and footmen of Downton in line for the past six years.
‘It was New Year’s Eve, it was candle-lit, there were little Christmas decorations left over, it was dark and we were quietly singing Auld Lang Syne.
'That was a nice, low-key, rather muted end to the thing. They said it was a wrap and we all looked at each other and thought, “Oh, we’ve finished.”’
Good heavens, M’Lady! He really has gone and done it.
But hang on – the final scene he is describing is not the one I had heard about, suggesting Downton would bow out with a scene involving Lady Edith at The Ritz. In the first of a string of revelations that will surely leave the Dowager Countess fuming over her breakfast tea, Carter confirms this is not the case at all – hers was just the last scene on the shooting schedule in August.
‘I would hate the formality of it all. The grinding rigidity of living your life to a gong, to the timing of the house. Getting people ready for dinner? Oh God. Invent the buffet, the takeaway or something,' said Jim
The moments that Carter says will actually close the Christmas special – and the whole saga – were in fact recorded a few days earlier, at Ealing Studios, where the downstairs scenes are filmed, not Highclere Castle in Hampshire, which doubles as Downton.
‘We don’t finish on a climactic note,’ Carter says.
‘There are no explosions or charabancs going off cliff edges. It ties up the stories, giving indications of what will happen to the characters but in a way that is very satisfying.
'I think people will be very pleased. They’ll need two hankies.’
The producers, who insist on the highest secrecy, will be considerably less pleased, but it’s too late for them to fire him now.
And those unlikely tears?
‘I felt I should say something to the crew on behalf of the cast,’ explains Carter, a tall, weighty fellow with a craggy face and extraordinarily bushy eyebrows.
At 67, he has become a father figure to the younger actors playing servants in Downton, just as Carson is their leader on screen.
Cast and crew have grown close over the past five years, in which Downton has gone from a relatively low-key ITV show to an international phenomenon broadcast in 220 territories to a worldwide audience of 120 million people.
‘I said, “Guys, I can’t thank you enough.” Then I completely choked up.’
This was totally out of character for both the veteran actor and the formidable butler he plays.
‘Just seeing all these tired faces behind the camera, who have been so important to us, really got to me. Everyone was a mess.
'Big Lee the rigger who carries scaffolding poles around had tears running down his face. I looked around and Phyllis Logan was on the floor, emotionally.’
She plays Mrs ‘Elsie’ Hughes the housekeeper, who will finally get to marry ‘Charles’ Carson.
That’s right! We get to end the series on first-name terms with the show’s unlikeliest lovebirds (‘Elsie’ has never been married before but took the title Mrs because it had the dignity she needed for the job).
‘We have got together like a pair of glaciers moving in towards each other,’ says Carter. ‘It has been the slowest romance ever.’
Downton Abbey has gone from a relatively low-key ITV show to an international phenomenon broadcast in 220 territories to a worldwide audience of 120 million people
Today, Carter is out of costume in a classy blue suit with an open-necked shirt.
He is much more relaxed than his character, and that booming voice even breaks into fruity laughter now and then as we drink coffee at a bar in Notting Hill, London.
He could never have lived in a great house like Downton, he says.
‘I would hate the formality of it all. The grinding rigidity of living your life to a gong, to the timing of the house. Getting people ready for dinner? Oh God. Invent the buffet, the takeaway or something.’
And then he’s off again, with another tantalising titbit – this time, the appearance of a wondrous new contraption in the household: yes, a fridge is installed in this new series, and Earl of Grantham can’t resist straying to find it.
‘He comes down and has a midnight raid. It reminds him of when Nanny used to feed him a snack late at night. It’s quite sweet. We don’t often see them below stairs.’
Hugh Bonneville as the Earl, Michelle Dockery as his daughter Mary and Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess have become world superstars playing the aristocrats whose way of life is threatened in the new series as the financial misery of the Twenties looms.
But audiences have been even more fascinated by how the other half of the house lives, down in the servants’ quarters.
‘It would be a terrible life,’ says Carter. ‘You get one afternoon a week off and you have to ask permission to do anything.
'We have a benign employer in the Earl of Grantham, but if you had a difficult boss you would have a terrible time.
'And the bitching, the gossip and the status power games in a closed world like that would be quite poisonous.’
Playing Carson has brought Jim four Emmy nominations in a row, for outstanding supporting actor in a drama series. It also made him so famous that he gets stopped everywhere he goes (pictured with Hugh Bonneville)
Carson tries to stamp down on all that, and Carter reveals he often exercises an iron-like authority befitting his character.
‘If they see the lead actor mucking about it sets an anarchic example. I try to set a professional tone. Caring. Laced with humour.’
Just how similar are they?
‘Someone asked me that question at an event once and I said there were no similarities. Julian Fellowes said, “Yes there are!” I was quite insulted. I mean, really!’
What does he think the creator of Downton Abbey meant by that?
‘I don’t like routine, but where we are similar is that I am in favour of good manners and politeness. They oil the wheels of society. There is no reason to be unnecessarily rude to people.’
Carson’s painstaking formality is the reason it has taken him for ever to declare his feelings for Mrs Hughes.
‘Series four ended with us daringly holding hands and paddling in the sea. Series five ended with the proposal.’
They were never meant to fall in love. It was the chemistry between the two actors that encouraged Fellowes to write the story, but there was also a practical reason why it took so long.
‘We couldn’t have got together any earlier because it would have thrown up all sorts of questions about where they would live. Housekeepers and butlers didn’t get married.’
Nothing is ever certain in the secretive world of Downton, but it has been said that there will be three weddings in this final series. The proposal last Christmas was beautifully touching.
‘I’m not convinced I can be hearing this right,’ said Mrs Hughes, leaving Carson bereft as he thought he was being turned down.
‘You’re not offended?’ he asked.
‘Oh, Mr Carson,’ she said, ‘I can assure you the very last thing in the world I am at this moment is offended. Of course I’ll marry you, you old booby. I thought you’d never ask.’
‘We have got together like a pair of glaciers moving in towards each other. It has been the slowest romance ever,' said Jim of his onscreen romance with Mrs ‘Elsie’ Hughes played by Phyllis Logan
Down went Carson’s chin into his dress shirt, as this grand old man fought to contain the relief and elation inside himself.
So if we assume it is happening, where will they live?
‘You’re trying to get me to tell you, aren’t you?’ Carter knows he’s not supposed to answer but does anyway.
‘They will be like favoured retainers. I think that’s what happened, really: the old ones who had been there for many years were given a grace-and-favour cottage.
'They will see out their time on the grounds. If Carson wasn’t married he would probably stay up in his room and be fed and watered by them – that was a thing that happened.’
We can all buy hats for the wedding, then, and wear them on the sofa at home. But the actor has done his research and says that if Carson was a real butler from the Twenties, he might not be the sort of man Mrs Hughes would want to marry at all.
‘The real Carson would be a drunken Tartar, probably. A lot of them were drunks. It was a hazard of the job.
'You’d think, “I’ll finish that decanter they had at dinner.” You had the keys to the wine cellar too, so a sober butler was to be much prized. They were all p*** artists.’
Carson practises moderation in all things, however.
‘My favourite scenes are when I am sharing a little sherry with Mrs Hughes. He’s sober, but he’s not teetotal. There is a middle way. In that respect, I am like him.’
In his younger days, Carter was exactly the sort of bohemian Carson would have deplored.
Born in Harrogate, Yorkshire, he went to study law in Brighton but dropped out of university to join an avant-garde theatre troupe.
‘I have never had any ambition. I just wanted to work as an actor and have a nice time, so I have just taken jobs as they come.
'For the first 15 years I was never out of work and never had a holiday, never wanted one.’
He’s just been back to the seaside to film a documentary on a childhood favourite, the Fifties skiffle superstar Lonnie Donegan.
Hugh Bonneville as the Earl, Michelle Dockery as his daughter Mary and Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess (pictured above) have become world superstars playing the aristocrats
‘Everybody at Downton would be appalled by the modern British seaside. The temple of Mammon and gross consumerism would have shocked everybody from that era.
'The acres of flesh on display would have been quite alarming.’
Shakespeare, Cocteau, comedy and working as a juggler and magician were all part of his early career. Then he took a job that changed his life, because he met his future wife.
‘It was January 4, 1982, the read-through for Guys And Dolls at the National Theatre.
'She was wearing a little black-and-white dress. I thought she looked like an escapee from a convent and she thought, “Who’s that old bloke?’’’
She was Imelda Staunton, a 26-year-old rising star. He was 34. They married the following year and their careers blossomed side by side.
‘It’s very difficult for couples in our business if they are unequal. Men in particular find it very difficult to deal with if the woman is way busier.
'I would put Imelda above me in terms of talent, but thankfully we have both worked as much.’
Staunton is best known for playing the wicked Dolores Umbridge in two of the Harry Potter films.
She won a Bafta and got an Oscar nomination for Vera Drake plus a couple of Olivier awards for best actress in the musicals Sweeney Todd and Into The Woods. More gongs will surely follow for her stunning performance playing the lead in Gypsy in the West End at the moment.
'I would put Imelda (Staunton) above me in terms of talent, said Jim of his wife of 32 years
Carter’s films include The Madness Of King George, Shakespeare In Love, The Golden Compass and Tim Burton’s adaptation of Alice In Wonderland.
Before Downton he was in Cracker, The Singing Detective, Midsomer Murders and many other TV shows.
At first he saw Downton as just another job.
‘None of us saw where it would lead. I reap the benefit of all those who have played English butlers before me, from Jeeves to Alfred in Batman, and Anthony Hopkins in The Remains Of The Day.
'There was a nice stage note in the first series: “Carson enters in his magnificence”. I thought, “That’s the way to play him. Mount Rushmore. Solid.’”
Playing Carson has brought him four Emmy nominations in a row, for outstanding supporting actor in a drama series. It also made him so famous that he gets stopped everywhere he goes.
‘I have been acting 45 years and I have never been in this category before.
'The first thing I want to say is that the recognition is benign – I mean, it is all positive,’ he says, but then he gets really grumpy about it.
‘You know, if you’re eating out and someone says, “Oh, I don’t mean to bother you…” But you are doing just that, aren’t you? You’re interrupting a conversation and a meal.’
The way he growls this out is quite alarming.
‘So OK, I will be polite but I am not going to extend this exchange because I am out, being private. So that’s odd.’
Then there’s the loons he encountes on public transport.
‘I was on the Tube the other day and a bloke had his phone out. I said, “Excuse me, are you filming me?” He said, “Yeah, it’s a public place, what are you gonna do about it?” You don’t want that kind of interaction with people. I just walked away. Camera phones are a curse.’
Carter cheers up and chuckles when I tell him Carson is an unlikely sex symbol.
‘Is he? I say to a lot of people, depending on their age, that either their mother or their grandmother loves me.’
The upside of fame has been the ability of the Downton cast to raise money for charity.
‘It’s no exaggeration to say we have been able to make millions.’
Greenpeace, the Special Olympics and children’s hospice charities are close to his heart.
‘The younger Downton actors have thrown themselves into it and that is a force for good’, he says, alluding to an article Michelle Dockery, who plays Lady Mary, wrote in this newspaper about the devastating impact of visiting a Syrian refuges camp.
‘It’s a way of turning this spurious celebrity into something positive. So for that I am grateful. The rest will die away.’
This year has been the most intense of his 32-year marriage, he says, with Downton taking up the first six months and Imelda starring in the West End in the acclaimed musical, Gypsy.
‘I go to work at six in the morning and get home at 8.30 at night. She gets in at 11.30 when I am trying to sleep and have left a note saying, “The plumber didn’t come, can you remember to ring him tomorrow, love?”
'We only see each other on Sundays when we’re knackered. But that’s the rhythm of our lives. I’m not complaining.’
The couple have one daughter, Bessie, who is now at stage school. They live in Hampstead, north London, where he is chairman of the local cricket club.
‘Running Hampstead is more stressful than being in Downton. We’ve got Middlesex coming to play us in a T20 [20-over] game and I’m worried about the weather, have I got enough people to run the barbecue, who’s going to do the car park and ticket sales, has that guy come with the generator I ordered, will the PA arrive on time? That sort of stuff. That is stress.’
‘I have never had any ambition. I just wanted to work as an actor and have a nice time, so I have just taken jobs as they come,' said Jim
Presumably, Carter is now so rich he could afford a butler to help him out?
‘No. That is not true. We haven’t got rich on this at all. Some people have, but the actors haven’t.’
He must be talking about Lord Fellowes, who has acquired a peerage and a fortune worth at least £6.5 million.
‘We have made a comfortable living out of it but we live in the same house, we drive the same car, we have the same holidays. We are not rich on it.’
People will be surprised to hear that. ‘Yeah, they would be.’
He does reveal, though, that he has actually turned down a butler of his own.
‘We went on holiday to a nice hotel and I think the travel agent said who I was or something.
'They offered us an upgraded room with a butler. I said, “I don’t mind the room but the last thing I want is someone hanging around waiting for me to tell them to peel a grape or put my suntan cream on.”’
He looks horrified at the thought. ‘Can you imagine someone lurking by you, waiting to serve you all the time? You’d be like, “Go away. Tidying my socks? Stop it!”’
As the final series of Downton begins, change is coming.
'For the first 15 years I was never out of work and never had a holiday,' said Jim
‘The maids decide they don’t want to live in any more. They want to live in the village and work in shops with shorter hours, go home at night, be allowed to have boyfriends, have more choice.’
There have been reports of redundancies but Carter says they are exaggerations.
‘The way of life is dying. We don’t necessarily, materially, see that on screen.
'You don’t see Carson down on his hands and knees buffing up the fire irons or anything. We still seem quite heavily staffed but the lower echelons are being eased out.
'The shallow end of the servants’ table has been culled.’
He rolls these words around his mouth with a relish that would appal Carson.
‘We have a full compliment of handsome footmen but there is the constant question, “Do we really need an under-butler?’”
There is talk of a Downton movie set a few decades after the current series but he does not expect Carson to live that long.
‘No, he’d be gone by then.’
Despite the impending blow to his income, Carter believes it is the right time for the show to end.
‘You can run these stories into the ground and that would be a shame. It feels like we are all ready to go. But it was emotional, working on the last episode. I was filling up as I read the script, thinking, “Oh my God. This is going to work. Goodbye Daisy. Goodbye Mrs Patmore.”’
Will it ruin Christmas again, like it did in 2012 when Lady Mary’s husband, Matthew Crawley, was killed in a car crash that shocked viewers?
‘No. I don’t think people will be depressed. It will be like saying goodbye to someone you are fond of, seeing them off on a journey. One of the last lines is when I say, “It’s going to be a different life.” Mrs Hughes says, “Yes, but together we’ll manage.” That’s the feeling of it.’
Sounds like Downton will make the nation cry yet again, though, just as it did the cast. Even him. ‘Yeah, probably. Just what you want at Christmas. “Oh, thanks a lot. Auntie Renee’s in bits. Oh God.’”
Downton Abbey was modelled on the classic ITV series Upstairs Downstairs, which closed with the house being packed up and all the servants leaving for ever. This time there will be nothing as final. One last time, Carter gives away more than he should.
‘It’s not the end of Downton Abbey. It’s open as to where people go in their future.
'Me and Mrs Hughes are inevitably facing retirement, probably, but nothing is absolutely nailed down. We are not closing the house up, we are saying goodbye to the series.’
Carter says this in the deep, authoritative but comforting tones that Carson would use to tell the younger members of his staff not to worry.
‘Downton will not end in a depressing way,’ he promises.
‘It will all happen in a way that makes people say, “Oh, how lovely was that?”’
‘Downton Abbey’ returns to ITV1 on Sunday Sept 20 at 9pm. The series is released on Blu-Ray & DVD on November 16
