How Downton Abbey Could Become The Next Big Film Franchise

Smith’s performance aside, Fellowes managed to juggle two dozen fan-favorites for the film, which can’t be easy when it comes to concocting a focused script. His first goal was to pinpoint an event that would incorporate all the players, which is how he landed on a royal visit to Downton Abbey.

He then considered which characters needed a bit more attention following the end of the sixth and final season in 2016, and decided Leech’s lovable chauffeur-turned-aristocrat was due. Branson, of course, suffered an unimaginable loss when his wife, Lady Sybil Crawley (Jessica Brown Findlay), died in series three, leaving the Irish socialist to navigate the world of his wealthy, pompous in-laws alone. 

“Of the running characters we know and love, the only one who wasn’t fixed up emotionally was Tom Branson,” Fellowes said. “So the answer was to give Tom Branson a love affair, or at least the beginnings of a love affair.” 

“I was delighted,” Leech told HuffPost, “because I felt at the end of series six, there were so many threads of Tom’s story that were left open.”

In the film, Tom not only plays an unexpected hero, stopping the assassination of monarch King George V (Simon Jones), but he falls in love with a mysterious member of the royals’ crew, Lucy Smith (Tuppence Middleton). Lucy happens to be the secret love child of a Crawley relative and the queen’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Bagshaw (Imelda Staunton), and is named heir of her family’s fortune. Like Branson, she’s an outsider placed in a world of nobility, a connection Fellowes aimed to weave.

“They would understand each other in a way that none of the other characters would understand either of them,” Fellowes said.

“Tom has always tried to find someone almost on his level, and it’s very difficult in his life. And the idea of what Lucy brings to this character is someone who is a victim of circumstance as much as Tom is,” Leech added. “I think there’s great potential within their relationship and great potential, if there is another movie, to see what it would be like for these young people to suddenly be thrust into a life where they have to run this massive house.”