Over the past decade, Dan Stevens has appeared alongside Harrison Ford, Natalie Portman, Liam Neeson, Richard Gere, John Travolta, Anne Hathaway, and Judi Dench.
He has worked with Martin McDonagh on the Broadway production of Hangmen (“it’s the only Martin McDonagh play I can do unfortunately,” smiles Stevens: “As it’s the only one set in England.”).
He’ll soon voice both Prince Charles and Prince Philip in The Prince, an animated HBO Max series concerning a naughty seven-year-old Prince George.
He’s played an astronaut, narrated Casino Royale, and belted out Howard Ashman tunes.
“That’s part of the project, if there is one, I think,” says Stevens. “Each time I work, I sort of add a bit on, to make it all look a bit weirder and more interesting.”
Still, there’s no getting away from the project that made him a household name.
It’s simply impossible to consider Stevens’s storied career without recalling the fateful Christmas, almost a decade ago, when the unexpected death of his much-loved character Matthew Crawley, left Downton Abbey fans crying into their tins of Quality Street.
Outraged viewers took to social media to denounce Stevens for variously ruining the TV show, Christmas, and western civilisation.
For many years after Downton’s greatest tragedy, the actor found himself apologising to people who approached him on the street.
“Yes,” he jokes. “I’ve stopped doing that now. I just don’t go out on the street at all.”
Speaking to this newspaper in 2014, following his game-changing turn as a sleazy mysterious visitor in Adam Wingard's The Guest, Stevens, who had just relocated to Brooklyn with his wife and children, was looking forward to a very different post-Downton phase.
“It was a big decision,” he said of the screen car crash that killed his character. “It felt like the time to go. But I went off not quite knowing what I was going to do. And now you can see that I have been doing something with myself.”
He has subsequently been as good as his word.
“You know, I think moving over here, I definitely felt the variety and the range available to me opened up,” says the actor, who is currently living and working in Los Angeles. “I think it can be easy to get stuck on one track, if you become known for one thing. And certainly when I was younger, I really actively wanted to avoid that. The actors I’ve always admired most are the shapeshifters who popped in and out of things and you maybe don’t always recognise them. What really drove me was a desire to do that, really. And so every time I get to play in a different space, whether it’s a musical or a German movie, that delights me. I’m still kicking the tyres on this thing and finding new ways to trick with it.”
Across the Atlantic, he misses his home continent, he says, especially the Indian food: “When you find a great Indian restaurant here, that’s a real gem. I miss ancient sites even more. I’m a big fan of just, you know, going to visit Neolithic sites. In fact, when I was shooting The Man Who Invented Christmas in Dublin, I went up to Newgrange. I went to visit this old boy’s house, and he would give you a key to a field. And off you go in the field, on your own, just looking around this sort of 4,000-year-old burial mound. They have epic landscapes over here, and incredible road trips. But they don’t have that. I miss the ancient.”
Stevens is not, by his own estimation, posh. But one can see why he was cast as a big house scion and Sir Lancelot in Night at the Museum. He might, accordingly, have enjoyed many decades treading the boards in a ruff. Instead, he has carefully steered away from the Shakespeare productions and literary adaptations that characterised his early work, and toward critically-acclaimed US indies (Her Smell, Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer), clever horrors (The Guest, Apostle), and the downright otherworldly.
To date, he has played the accursed furball of the title in Disney’s $1.26 billion grossing live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast, the schizophrenic protagonist of Marvel’s Legion, and a power-hungry mandrill in Dreamworks’s Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts.
“I believe you probably have to ask casting directors that question,” he smiles. “I’m just very happy for the work. But, you know, it’s always interesting, if you put a character into a slightly different paradigm, or a slightly different universe. You can really have a lot of fun with those things, whether it’s playing a mutant or whatever. And, as with the Beast, it’s all about finding the human moments that pop through.”
In keeping with the superhuman theme, I’m Your Man casts Stevens as – wait for it – a German love robot. The witty, philosophical rom-com, directed by Maria Schrader who created Netflix series Unorthodox, casts Stevens as Tom, a Rainer Maria Rilke-quoting android hoping to be your perfect romantic partner. But when Alma (Maren Eggert) agrees to live with Tom for three weeks, his rose petal trails and champagne bubble baths leave her completely cold.
“Anytime you have an AI or an Android element in a story, it’s an opportunity to really look at ourselves and our humanity and to consider our own programming,” says Stevens. “That’s the thing that kept coming up in my mind. How we’ve become who we are; what you’re taught by your families, or by your education or by your cultural upbringing. It was fun to use Tom to kind of play with the romantic programming. This idea that a robot is trying to establish what a romantic connection is like. We liked the idea that he’d been sort of fed a bunch of screwball comedies and Cary Grant movies. So his android brain is asking: Okay, what’s the chat-up line from a great romantic comedy? That’s also very human. I can’t say I’ve really approached like many women in a bar and used the chat-up line, but presumably, it’s very often not an original line in that context.”
Stevens is a clever fellow. As a teenager, he boarded on a scholarship at Tonbridge School, where “a lot of school reports . . . said I should stop distracting others’’. An English literature graduate from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the actor was active in both Footlights and the Marlowe Society. He is an editor-at-large for The Junket, an online literary journal which he co-founded in 2011. The following year, he was a Booker Prize judge, an honour that required him to read some 146 novels in seven months and the Downton Abbey costume team to make secret pockets for his Kindle. He is fluent in both French and German, although the precise language of I’m Your Man demanded a bit of practise.
I've always wanted to work in German again. I love the language, I love the country, I love Berlin
“I did a movie there about 13 years ago, playing an English man who spoke German,” he says. “And so I guess, somewhere in the German film industry, somebody remembered. The language Tom has to speak is very complex German. But they wanted an element of the strange and foreign. Maybe there was a version where it’s like, why does he have an Argentinian accent? I have no idea if they were pitching to other German-speaking actors around the world. It was a treat that I was cast. I’ve always wanted to work in German again. I love the language, I love the country, I love Berlin. But, it was an unusual one in that normally, when I’m sent a script, it comes with either a phone call or a letter saying, look, here’s this script, this is what it’s about. And this time, it was: we don’t know what this is about. So I went away, and, you know, dusted off the German dictionary and had a bit of a read, and I was delighted. It is such a sweet, interesting, curious, kind of complex, script. And it seems to me to be very German in the sense that it deals with massive philosophical concepts in a very light and breezy kind of way.”
Stevens certainly knows his way around light and breezy, having shared scenes with Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, and, more recently, Will Ferrell in Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, a project that gave him the best hair of his life.
“Somewhere between George Michael and Princess Diana,” says Stevens. “That’s what we were going for. Working with comedians there’s a sort of an osmosis. You just watch, and great things happen. You learn a lot watching Will Ferrell improvise, and the way that he plays with a character. He’ll have done the work, but in the moment he’ll come up with four or five other versions. The line in the script might be hilarious, but his versions are equally if not more hilarious.”
Given Stevens’s literary background – not to mention the 30 audiobooks he has narrated and his place on the Authors XI (a cricket team composed of prominent British writers) – he’s surely an ideal candidate to move to the other side of the camera.
“It’s not something I’ve ever done single-handedly,” he says. “But living in LA, you get to meet some fantastic writers who are great collaborators or well-versed in coaching an inexperienced writer how to come up with a screenplay. As you know, writing a screenplay is very different to, you know, writing an essay or a short story. But it’s something I’m keen to learn about.”
I'm Your Man is released in cinemas and on Curzon Home from August 13th
