This week Allen Leech makes a splash as the romantic interest in the acclaimed period drama, Downton Abbey. The Dubliner talks to the RTÉ Guide’s Donal O’Donoghue.
"I know you," said the stranger, stabbing a finger in actor Allen Leech’s direction. "No, don’t tell me. Ah, I have it! You’re that guy Branson from the TV show Upstairs Downstairs!" Leech smiled. By the end of last year the Dubliner was recognised (almost) everywhere as the impeccably groomed and politically charged chauffeur, Tom Branson, from that other period drama, Downtown Abbey. Not since Brideshead Revisited had a TV show cost so much (reportedly £1 million per episode) and delivered so spectacularly. With regular audiences topping eight million, this costume epic set in a posh pile in Edwardian England was one of the biggest TV hits of last year. And Leech, who debuts in episode four this week, made waves as the Irishman with a socialist bent.
I last met Leech in 2005. It was in Dublin, on the eve of the release of the comedy, Man About Dog, in which he played a likeable likely lad. The 25-year-old, then still Alan Leech, was at a career crossroads. In the bag was a promising theatre CV (This Lime-Tree Bower, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Morning After Optimism) and a couple of movies, including Cowboys and Angels; ahead was that virgin territory, The Land of Opportunity. Not long after our meeting he relocated to London (“it was either there or Los Angeles”) to stake his claim in his business that began with school shows (“From the of fourteen or so I wanted to be an actor”) and was refined through Trinity College’s Drama and Theatre Studies course. For the past five years or so he has been living in London. “I suppose it is my home now,” he says tentatively. “Although if my mother is reading this she’ll go mental!”
If Leech’s big international break was the HBO swords-and-sandals series, Rome (he still gets fan mail for his portrayal of Marcus Agrippa in the 2007 drama), Downton Abbey is likely to make him a household face, with a second series about to go into production. Penned by the award-winning writer Julian Fellowes and starring the imperious Maggie Smith as, what else?, an indomitable dowager, Leech had his work cut out to impress in a glittering ensemble that also included Elizabeth McGovern, Jim Carter and Penelope Wilton. “Originally the character was to be from Northern England but when I did my audition they told me to keep my Irish accent,” he says. “Then when they offered it to me I said that I’d like to play it as Northern England because I was afraid that the character would become an Irish stereotype, an IRB Republican type. They told me that they would not go down that road. So while he is political it is on a different level. The main reason I didn’t want to play it Irish was because you’re always trying to broaden what you play.”
In his stage and screen career the Killiney-born actor has played a wide range of roles. “I’m always looking for different roles, something challenging”, he says. “The most challenging? I suppose my last movie, Rewind which is directed by P J Dillon and stars Amy Huberman. I play a character who comes back into Amy’s life after seven years. I carry a lot of secrets about her from a life that she has been trying to escape. So she has to make some choices about whether she wants to keep her past life secret or not. That’s when the game starts.”
He describes Branson as “a complicated character’, a working-class activist with an interest in history, politics and young Lady Sybil. “He plays a servant and yet he has so many bigger ideas about what he wants to do,” says Leech. “The one thing that he really can’t stand and is fighting against he actually is working for. He is obligated to serve his family and work but behind the scenes he’s trying to engineer change through his involvement with the Suffragette movement and others. When he starts working for the family he catches the eye of the youngest daughter, Lady Sybil, and sees a bit of fire in her which attracts him. So he gets her involved in various movements and socialist causes. I have been told that the dramatic build-up in season one will come to fruition in season two.”
On March 14 Leech returns to the London stage in Ecstasy, written and directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker, Mike Leigh. “That play was last directed by Leigh in 1979 and Stephen Rea played the part I’m going to play so it’s very exciting,” he says. Two weeks before that, production begins on the second series of Downton Abbey. “That will take me to the end of November and I think that I’ll need a holiday then.” And what is the romantic status of the actor once voted the Sexiest Man in Ireland? ”I’m single,” he says. So available? “It might be tough to fit it into my hectic schedule but I suppose I am,” he says and laughs.
Donal O’Donoghue
