As Downton Abbey winds down with its sixth and final season (premiering January 3 in the U.S.), fans might wonder whether the period drama’s creator, Julian Fellowes, regrets his most controversial plot decision—killing off Matthew during the show’s Christmas special several years back. And surprisingly, Fellowes isn’t remorseful about abruptly murdering off Lady Mary’s true love in a car crash. He is, however, wistful that he wasn’t able to wipe out another character in the off-camera pileup.
During a recent interview, Fellowes discussed planning Matthew’s shocking plot twist. “It was tough really because Jessica [Brown Findlay, who played Sybil,] had said she was going to leave right from the beginning. She said, ‘I’m doing three years, then I’m leaving.’ So that was all worked out,” Fellowes said of Sybil’s death, which occurred shortly after she gave birth to her and Branson’s baby daughter.
“But Dan [Stevens, who played Matthew,] only decided to leave when we were about to start filming, [had] already written five episodes and cast them,” Fellowes explained of his decision for the literally last-minute tragedy. “I couldn’t do more funerals, more memorials.”
If Stevens had given Fellowes more notice about his exit from the series, the Downton mastermind told RadioTimes.com, “I probably would have killed [Matthew and Sybil] together in a car crash.”
Well, when he puts it like that, maybe Matthew’s death wasn’t as tragic as it could have been.
In 2013, Fellowes further explained, “With Jessica, it seemed right to give her a whole episode that was about her death. With Dan, I had hoped that we would have one episode of this fourth season . . . so we could have ended the Christmas episode on a happy note—the baby, everything lovely. And then kill him in the first episode of the next series. But he didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want his death to dominate the Christmas special, so that’s why we killed him at the very, very end.”
Fellowes revealed that fans of the series have since punished him for Matthew’s fate.
“Some of the letters I received . . .” Fellowes continued. “I did feel very guilty as everyone sat down to that one extra mince pie and suddenly, ‘WHAT?’ But I paid.”
The final season of Downton Abbey premieres in the U.S. this January.
