.jpg)
Julian Ovenden, Tom Cullen, and Gary Carr lend their charm to the fourth season of Downton Abbey.
A morning with the new Downton Abbey love interests: not a bad way to spend a couple of hours. Lord Gillingham and Charles Blake—rivals for the attention of the now-widowed Lady Mary—are in civvies today. Jack Ross, Lady Rose’s elegant Chicago jazz-singer entanglement, isn’t wearing a spiffy tailcoat and white carnation buttonhole. Still, there’s a high probability that London passers-by will stop in their tracks at the sight of three handsome faces who’ve been occupying their TV screens for the whole of _Downton’_s fourth season, which has just started showing stateside. “I do get stared at a lot,” admits Tom Cullen, suffering from jet lag and sporting a new, un–Lord Gillingham–ish beard. Jack Ross, who’s actually London actor-singer-songwriter Gary Carr, and _Downton’_s first black character, observes, “I’m normally oblivious. But when I go to the corner shop sometimes I notice people looking.” Julian Ovenden plays Charles Blake, a government agent with caustic Liberal views about the entitlement of the aristocracy. He professes zero street-recognition: “Maybe that’s because I’m a total slouch in real life.” But you know how it is with these diffident British blokes—all self-deprecating charm, to their fingertips.
The three spent four months of last year on and off the Downton set—but only after going through Julian Fellowes’s upper-class etiquette drill. “My character’s come back from a world war,” says Cullen of playing Gillingham. “His father dies. He’s an inherently sad man, very emotionally cutoff, who’s struggled with a bad roll of the dice. Mary really blows his socks off.” For a boy who grew up in Wales “among hay bales, football, and fights,” it took Cullen four weeks’ prep to acquire the manners of a lord. “On the first day, I kept on saying ‘Thank you’ to the staff serving dinner. It was bizarre, learning to be rude.” Finding the accent wasn’t such a problem. “I pretend to be my English grandmother,” he says with a laugh. “She’s so posh her jaw doesn’t move when she speaks.”
Carr joins the plot when Lady Mary takes her wayward young cousin Lady Rose to the Lotus Club in London, where Jack Ross is appearing as the latest jazz sensation from America. “As a black man in the twenties, he’s already a celebrity. He doesn’t have such a chip on his shoulder. He’s wearing tails and sharp suits. It’s really great.” Rose falls for him. But surely the taboo relationship is doomed? “Nah, sorry.” He grins. “Can’t say!”
As Charles Blake, Ovenden sparks instant mutual antipathy with Lady Mary. “He stays in the house, which is awkward, but they discover things about each other that are perhaps,” he teases, “less different.”
Just how the Downton fates conspire, we’ll see in coming weeks. As for the careers of these multitasking talents, much more is in the pipeline. Cullen will appear with Freida Pinto in Desert Dancer, a movie about dance in Iran, where it is forbidden. Carr is recording and working on launching his humanitarian relief charity, the Beautiful World Project. Ovenden, meanwhile, has a parallel career as an acclaimed tenor. American audiences can obtain a date with him when he sings at Carnegie Hall on a bill with Michael Feinstein—on Valentine’s Day.