Having bid farewell to The Crown in a blaze of corgis and crêpe de chine, Imelda Staunton seems to be having period drama withdrawals. The 68-year-old—who’s appeared as lady-in-waiting Maud Bagshaw in both Downton Abbey: The Motion Picture and Downton Abbey: A New Era, and is married to Jim Carter of Carson fame—dropped by BBC Radio 2 this week, and confirmed to host Zoe Ball that, yes, “There will be a final film—there you go.” Ball, in terribly British fashion, apologized if she had prompted Staunton to speak out of NDA-clad turn. The Oscar nominee’s Violet Crawley-esque response? “I don’t care.”
Downton Abbey famously ran for six seasons between 2010 and 2015 (although it should have stopped at three), with Downton Abbey: The Motion Picture released in 2019. If the series proper concluded in 1925, the first movie takes place two years later, in 1927, and revolves around the Crawleys and their staff foiling an assassination plot mounted against King George V. The second film, which premiered in 2022, had a meta twist to it, centering on the shooting of a “moving picture” at the Abbey (with a sojourn to the South of France thrown in for good measure). Focus Features has yet to confirm Staunton’s statement, but rumors are swirling that production will begin as early as this summer, with Paul Giamatti expected to revive his role as Cora’s England-averse American brother, Harold Levinson.
In the meantime, Staunton will be appearing as matchmaker Dolly Levi in the first West End revival of Hello, Dolly since 1984 at the London Palladium. Opening on July 6, the 10-week-run will reunite Imelda with director Dominic Cooke, the mastermind behind the National’s acclaimed 2017 take on Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. The duo’s Hello, Dolly is both highly anticipated and long awaited, having originally been slated to run at the Adelphi in 2020 before COVID-19 scuppered everyone’s plans—and pushed Staunton in the direction of screen work for the foreseeable future. And while another Downton film is all well and good, I, for one, can’t wait to see her treading the boards again. “Well, hello, Imelda, it’s so nice to have you back where you belong…”