Laura Carmichael says her Downton Abbey character Lady Edith is a completely different woman than she was when the franchise began 15 years ago.
"For Edith, she was probably the most traditional of the three daughters. Mary [Michelle Dockery] felt like she had to rebel against what was coming to her, in a way, and Sybil [Jessica Brown Findlay] was this free spirit, whereas Edith just kind of wanted to play by the rules and get married and find a suitable husband, but it wasn't her path," Carmichael, 39, told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.
"In that undoing, I think it really was the making of her and she had to find a different purpose in her life, and really discover who she was and her strengths and I think she had been the sort of quiet observer, so it made a lot of sense for her to be a writer and that just led to a lot of adventures and heartache, but she really did find a happy ending."
Edith and Mary are often seen clashing throughout six seasons of the TV show and two movies, although they always manage to pull it together when the family is in trouble.
The third and final film shows Edith counseling Mary and assuring her she will be a proper steward of the titular estate after their father Robert (Hugh Bonneville) steps down and hands over the reigns to his eldest daughter."We see Edith and Mary enjoying each other a lot more when we open there in London. So, it feels like they're in vacation mode and having fun enjoying the London scene. But, obviously, there's scandal, and Mary is dealing with her divorce," Carmichael said.
"So, Edith wants to do whatever she can to make life easier for her. She knows it's going to be incredibly difficult and it not only will break her heart and make her life so difficult, but it will affect all of the family and the staff, who really have to pull together and find a way through," Carmichael added. "It's great to see that in the film, like Mary and Edith have definitely softened a bit to each other. It's heartwarming."
"It's consistently the same, which is what's so beautiful about it, whereas, Edith and Mary as sisters, from the beginning right through to where we are in the final film, have had, actually, huge changes and shifts and a big journey to go on in their relationship," Froggatt, 45, said.
"Having both of those aspects of those two female relationships with Mary is really wonderful, actually, because Anna is her sort of confidante and they're very loyal to each other," she added. "They have this bond of shared experiences together, as I guess we do as a cast, in some ways, as well. They're working together, but they've become great friends alongside of that. So, I always love their friendship."
Froggatt said she is grateful to have had so many juicy story-lines to play over the course of a six-season TV show.
Anna helped dispose of the corpse of a man who died of natural causes in Mary's bed; fell in love with and married valet John Bates (Brendan Coyle), then waited for Bates while he was wrongly locked up for murdering his first wife. She was also raped by a guest to the estate, then arrested for and acquitted of pushing her attacker under a bus.
She and Bates eventually have a son together and appear content to focus on their family and jobs, leaving their dark pasts behind them.
