What The Butler Saw

The actor on being mobbed in Washington DC and envying Highclere’s head gardener

LONG before Jim Carter accepted the role of a butler in the ITV series Downton Abbey, his name on a cast list was already a solid guarantee of quality. From the BBC’s The Singing Detective and Cranford to films such as A Month in the Country, The Madness of King George, Brassed Off and Shakespeare in Love, he had a CV to leave most British character actors green with envy.

However, within a year of the first airing of the Julian Fellowesscripted drama in 2010, his portrayal of the crusty, old-fashioned, deeply conservative yet loveably loyal and upstanding Mr Carson had turned him into a global name.

Slightly self-consciously, he says he’s since been publicly recognised on trips to such far-flung lands as New Zealand and India and even when riding a bicycle in Cambodia. ‘It’s been different for us all,’ he reflects. ‘I mean, Maggie Smith, with two Oscars, has never been in anything that made her so recognisable. Films don’t, because you only see them once, whereas with a TV series there’s repetition and, being in someone’s living room, there’s a human intimacy.’

He reckons it was on a trip to the US to publicise the second series at the end of 2011 that the cast first realised that they were part of a phenomenon. ‘I remember us walking down the streets of Manhattan and getting recognised a lot and thinking “that’s weird”.

‘Then we were invited down to the British ambassador’s residence, where all the great and the good, the mottled and the liver-spotted of Washington DC behaved disgracefully. It was like we were the Bay City Rollers. They were pulling at us, wanting selfies. It was so undignified,’ he laughs at the memory.