‘Downton Abbey: A New Era’ Stars Hugh Dancy and Joanne Froggat on How Hollywood Shakes Up the Sequel
thewrap.comThe Crawley family and their servants have welcomed royalty to the ancestral estate, but in “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” which opens this weekend in theaters, Hollywood is invading.Hugh Dancy joins the franchise for the second film, playing director Jack Barber, who makes Lady Mary a lucrative offer to film a silent film at Downton.
While Kevin Doyle’s character, Mr. Molesley, is no longer a staffer (he’s the school teacher these days), he can’t help but return to catch a glimpse of the stars in action.“I’m playing a movie director who comes to Downton with the hope of making his movie there [who] writes a check to be able to do that,” Dancy told TheWrap. “And then as things start to go awry [he] discovers all these people that are willing and able to help him.
Almost primarily, or at least, certainly at the top of the list is Moseley who has these gifts. He loves the movies. He can lip read.”Mr.
Moseley’s lip reading talents come in handy indeed when the silent film has to become a talking film (“talkies”) as a result of the rapidly changing movie industry of the late 1920s.“It was fascinating, actually, because what we’re doing is we’re kind of tracking what happened in reality back then, which was that transition from silent movies, and then it suddenly became apparent that silent movies weren’t making any money at all, because the talkies are everywhere now and everybody was queuing to see them,” Doyle added. “And so there’s a decision to be made.
Read more on thewrap.com