There’s a scene in Downton Abbey: A New Era that underscores how much the characters and times have changed since the franchise’s beginning a dozen years ago.

Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) welcomes a movie crew into Downton Abbey’s hallowed halls—which is already a spiritual affront to her grandmother, the Dowager Countess. When someone jokingly suggests she help with the production, Maggie Smith’s character snipes, “I’d rather earn my living in a mine.” The series opened depicting the hours after the Titanic sinking in 1912, in the days when the Crawleys would have welcomed any working-class visitor by directing them to the service entrance.

Now, though, Mary not only relies on but appreciates these manual labors. She greets the untitled working men, hoisting heavy equipment, as peers. When a film director played by Hugh Dancy refers to her as “Lady Mary,” she waves off her inherited titled and demurs, “Call me Mary.”

In a recent Zoom conversation, Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age creator Julian Fellowes reflects on her evolution—as well as that of the series itself.

“I hope that we have believably taken Mary from a fairly thoughtless aristocrat into a much more practical woman who is connected to the world in which she’s living,” says the screenwriter, who won an Academy Award for writing 2001’s Gosford Park. “We have already seen, in this film particularly, quite a long progress for Mary, from a sort of spoiled petulant snob—which she really was at the beginning—into someone who is much more grown up and capable of her responsibilities.”

Now, after six seasons and two films, following 2019’s first spin-off feature, says Fellowes, “We don’t have any doubt that she will be able to manage this. She’s already making the adjustments that even her parents would find hard—that she can have a perfectly normal friendship with a producer/director from the middle class, without it being awkward or uncomfortable.”

Ahead, the Downton Abbey mastermind reminisces about his long-running period drama, and explains A New Era’s goodbyes and fresh starts.

Vanity Fair: What was it like revisiting these characters?

Julian Fellowes: It’s an extraordinary adventure, really, because I’ve said goodbye to them all about four or five times. And then two years go by and I’m there again. I think we’ve gone from 1912 to 1928, so that’s 16 years. But in real life, it’s taken 13 years [to make the six seasons and two films those span], so there’s not very much difference. I’ve watched these young juveniles turn into leading ladies and leading men.

You mentioned having to say multiple farewells. That was especially the case with Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess character. The TV series ended with a vague goodbye to her. The first film ended with a more dramatic goodbye. Can you talk about conclusively saying goodbye to the Dowager in A New Era?

I knew it would be a very moving moment because the cast, who are part of that moment [onscreen], are all the [original] cast really. They’ve been with us the whole journey. So I was pretty confident of it. And of course I knew Maggie would be marvelous.

In her last breaths, the character still manages to land some great comedic lines. What did Maggie think when she first read the scene?

I don’t know. She was happy to do it. But that mixture of comedy and being moving is something that she’s played really from the beginning. From day one, she’s had moments of being laugh-out-loud, and then she’ll do something that is really very powerful. And in a way, that’s the climax of the whole [thing]—that she should go out on a laugh. I thought she was terrific.

I didn’t realize that the idea of making a movie at Downton, which the Dowager sees as horrifying, would be such rich comedy material. 

I grew up at the end of that, when films were considered—certainly by the British upper classes—fairly working-class entertainment that had taken over from the music hall. The idea that they should take them seriously was completely alien to them. And really it was their children, the next generation of viewers, who changed that. . .But my father and mother used to talk about how they took one of my father’s aunts to a film with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, thinking she would be won over. And in fact, she thought it was absolutely ghastly. So I was really using her as my model.

The Dowager gets this almost royal sendoff by the family. Can you talk about writing that scene?

The key philosophy of these families is that the important unit is the family, and not the individual members of it. That is how they think. If you’re talking to them, they say, “We fought at Waterloo,” as if it was all them. And that is why people can die, and it can be very sad—their own generation misses them. But ultimately, the important thing is the family that survives.

That was the point that I wanted to make—that in a family like the Crawleys, it’s O.K. when key members go, because other key members will evolve. . .[Mary] sees that this new time they’re going into is different. And if they’re going to survive, they’ve got to be different. A lot of those families did survive, but the way through was to use the estates differently. To have a different, more hands-on relationship with their possessions.

It’s clear the times are different in a New Era when we see Mary’s children run downstairs. There is a film crew making a movie with sound on the premises. And there’s a flirtation between Branson and the actor Guy Dexter (Dominic West). Was Guy based on anyone specifically?

It’s quite a rare movie star even now [who] would come out as gay. But people in every society have to find a way, if they can, of living an authentic life in which they can be fulfilled and be happy. One of the interests of writing period drama is that you have these challenges in earlier societies for people who were gay, for women, for the black community, all sorts [of demographics] where obstacles were constantly being placed in their way. And they somehow, if they could, have to find a way round them.

Guy’s way around is to invite Barrow to live with him—as a house manager.

[It’s what] several gay movie stars did [early on]. “This is the person who lives with me and looks after me.” “This is my manager.” “This is my…” this or that, to give them a legitimate reason for being around so constantly. It’s always quite interested me that society has never really demanded reasons why women lived together. Two women could share a house really throughout the 19th century without it raising any curiosity at all in anyone. But two men living together was an altogether different thing.

Occasionally you would get two young actors who would share a house or something, but that could only go on for a while before everyone started asking questions. You had Randolph Scott and Cary Grant living together for a bit, but then the questions in the press started becoming uncomfortable. So they had to split up. With Rock Hudson, there were various men in his employ for different reasons, but who were almost certainly in fact in relationships with him.

As Mrs. Hughes says in the film, “Sometimes people live dishonestly because they want to avoid persecution and loneliness. And are they to be blamed for that?” I feel that, when Thomas says to Mary, “It’s as honest a way of life as I’ve ever been offered,” he knows it’s not perfect. But it's better than anything that’s been on offer before. Dexter is not going to go off and marry [someone as a cover]. Even Rock Hudson's marriage, which lasted for about 25 minutes, was something to hide behind. [Guy] doesn’t want to do that. And I hope we admire him for that.

Barrow’s uplifting ending is well-earned, considering how much the character struggled in early seasons on the franchise. Had you been consciously plotting out a way for Barrow to live a truthful life?

The difficulty is, if you wanted to live a social normal life [as a gay person], society wasn’t prepared to let you do it on their terms. That was a great challenge. Whatever the percentage of our populations are gay—I think it’s about 10%—there’s no reason to believe it was any different in 1928, or in 1828 for that matter. [Per Gallup, as of 2021, 7.1% of U.S. adults self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or something other than heterosexual.] But these different societies had exacted different costs for it.

My parents chose a gay peer as my brother’s godfather, and he was born in 1946, which is less than 20 years [after the events of A New Era]. It was quite wild at the time that they did that. So people were beginning to come round. But these things are a long haul. That’s one of the things I’m always slightly in dispute of: the kind of activism of today is they want it all to happen next week. The fact is these major social rearrangements and realignments take a long time for people to get used to living with authentically. I think that Dexter and Thomas are on that road. And by the time they die, they still won’t be in the thick of it, but it will all be much more accepted than it is at the moment. But they’re part of a progress, a movement that had a long way to go.

When I walked into his movie, I was having a terrible day. About an hour or so in, my worries had vanished. There is a scene where Carson sweats through the South of France looking for a heat-appropriate hat, and I appreciated the low stakes of that moment. We are living through such dark times, and this franchise has almost made an art form out of the low-stakes period-drama escape. 

I do like the idea of the feel-good movie, which is sometimes used pejoratively. But it’s not pejorative for me…I think life is very complicated and dark at the moment. Both European and American society is going through this tremendous kind of cultural warfare and separation, which sadden me. When I was a child, there was a great sense of excitement in America. In that whole Troy Donahue, Sandra Dee era, the world wanted to be American. There was something beguiling about a country so confident of its own merit and its own achievements.

In Britain and Europe generally, at least in my time, we didn’t have America’s confidence, but we did still have a kind of unity…It’s difficult not to feel that we're living in these fragmented times. I like to feel that my shows, or my films, aren’t childish or meant to be sort of frivolous. I hope a lot of the issues they deal with are adult. But they are in a sense leading to happy endings. They are about resolutions. At the end, things get worked out. And that’s completely deliberate. I want people to come, have a great time, have a great dinner afterwards, go home, and feel they’ve had a terrific evening. That’s my ambition.

On that note, are we going to see these characters again?

I don’t really know the answer to that, because it’s the public that tells you if they want to see you again. I feel my duty now is sort of, at the end of every movie in the last couple of years, to structure it so that, if that is the end, then it’s okay. But I wouldn’t necessarily say we'll never be back, because as long as the cast wants to come back every two or three years, and spend eight weeks catching up with each other, and if the public wants that…[trails off]. There’s no natural finite moment to a drama that is based on a family any more than there’s any finite moment with one’s own family.