The final curtain
Downton Abbey's last outing is drawing closer...
Rory Mulvey / © 2025 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
- Caroline Frost
Downton Abbey: the Grand Finale is in cinemas from 12 September. Add it to your watchlist
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For Downton Abbey star Michelle Dockery, putting on Lady Mary’s glad rags — and no doubt removing her hat, let’s not forget — for the third, and final, film felt both comforting and bittersweet.
(L to R) Hugh Bonneville stars as Robert Grantham, Elizabeth McGovern as Cora Grantham, Laura Carmichael as Lady Edith and Harry Hadden-Paton as Bertie Hexham in Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale Rory Mulvey / © 2025 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
“As a cast, it always felt like going home,” she tells RT of her experience on the ITV series, which began back in 2010 and turned her from a mostly theatre-working young actor into an Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated star. “We knew we were all part of this huge success, but what I think we all feel really proud of is being a company of actors who just love being together.” For this last outing, she shares, “we relished every minute, knowing there would be the last dining-room scene, the last goodbyes. It felt really poignant.”
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For Julian Fellowes, whose creative writing juices have flowed through every scene of 52 hours of TV and three feature films, it feels right to sign off as the story heads into another decade. “We’ve taken them from 1912, essentially the old world, to 1930, which is really the new, and that seems a good moment to say goodbye,” he tells RT. “I hope the film gives enough of a sense that there is a future for all of them, that they’re all moving forward. I’m very fond of them all.”
Gareth Neame has produced all those hours of period drama, and he is in reflective mood when RT visits the cast and crew on location at Richmond Theatre in south-west London, where Downton’s family and servants are among the audience for a play by a dazzling new playwright, one Noël Coward.
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Neame says, “To have created a show that has been to every country in the world, which not many television shows do, to have been beloved by so many millions of people from different cultures and languages, to have people all around the world feel like they know this family and really care about the characters, to entertain people on that kind of scale, is so thrilling. It’s what we set out to do.”
Authors
Caroline Frost
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