Hugh Bonneville has admitted there’s one part of the new Downton Abbey movie he was praying would wind up on the cutting room floor.
The Emmy nominee reprises his role as Robert Crawley in the third and final Downton Abbey film, The Grand Finale, which arrived in cinemas earlier this month.
During a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, the British actor was asked about one part of the movie in which Michelle Dockery’s character refers to something happening at “the weekend”, to which Hugh, as the Earl Of Grantham, responded: “The weekend? I’m glad Mama isn’t alive to hear you say that word.”
The line was a callback to the original Downton Abbey TV series, in which Dame Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess voiced her disdain for the concept of weekends.
However, Hugh admitted to Entertainment Weekly that he wasn’t exactly thrilled about having to deliver the line.
“It’s my least favourite line in the movie, and I was hoping it was gonna be cut,” he admitted.
The Paddington actor was quick to specify that he didn’t have anything against the writing itself, but admitted the pressure to live up to his late co-star’s delivery was not something he was totally confident in.
“How can you quote Maggie? She did it so iconically,” he lamented.
“It was down to me to reference it,” Hugh added.
During a recent interview with HuffPost UK, Hugh shared his memories of working with Dame Maggie on Downton Abbey for more than a decade.
“She came to love it – however curmudgeonly she may have come across in interviews, saying, ‘oh I don’t watch it, I’ve never seen it’. Nonsense – I’m sure she did,” he insisted. ’And she certainly adored being around the girls, her fictional grandchildren.”
“When she was on song, there was nothing finer than to be on set with Maggie Smith,” Hugh continued.
“Her own worst enemy was herself, she’d get very cross if she wasn’t quite hitting the note – and then there’d be one take where she just got it. And that was like watching a boat suddenly start plaining. It takes off onto a different level – there’s a dab of genius in there somewhere that you can’t teach, and you can’t educate and you can’t create, it just comes from somewhere.”
