sequel,. While speaking to ET, Nicol reflects on a decade of playing the cook in charge of the downstairs kitchen staff in the acclaimed British drama and what inspired her return to the stage.

Created by Julian Fellowes, first launched in the U.K. in 2010 before quickly becoming an international sensation, thanks to its captivating stories about the lives upstairs versus downstairs at the Crawley family estate in Yorkshire county in the early 1900s.

Among the cast of characters written by Fellowes was a stern head cook named Mrs. Beryl Patmore. “A rather angry, strict kind of busy woman in the kitchen,” Nicol recalls. “She was never intended to be funny.” Over time, however, the actress notes that Fellowes slowly started to evolve the character around her performance, especially the way she interacted with the young cook Daisy Mason played by Sophie McShera. “I fell in love with her on day one,” Nicol says. “We have the same sense of humor and we got very close, very quickly and he saw that.” And over the six seasons of the series, audiences eventually got to see all her layers. “She’s insecure.

She’s fragile. Sometimes she can be sarcastic and all of that, but that came as a result of seeing the interaction between us,” Nicol continues, adding that because of how well the character has been written, “it’s always nice to go back and be with her again.” In this case, it’s a new sequel,, that picks up nine months after the events of the first film, with Tom Branson (Allen Leech) getting married to Lucy Smith (Tuppence Middleton) before most of the extended Crawley family takes an excursion to the South of France where the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith) has inherited a villa.

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