Shortly after the news broke, Bonneville, who plays Robert Crawley, tweeted, “Good to be back. #DowntonAbbey2.” In fact, he’d hinted at the possibility of a sequel during an interview with The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show earlier this year.
“If everybody who is offered a vaccine takes a vaccine, we can make a movie,” he said, per Entertainment Weekly. “We will make a movie. It’s the usual thing, the planets are circling, they’re beginning to get into alignment, but there’s this thing called coronavirus knocking around. Until that is under control in a sensible way, we’re not going to be able to get all those ducks in a row.”
He then reportedly added that “there certainly is the intention to do it, we’d love to do it, we’re desperate to do it,” noting the film would be a “pleasurable release of a movie like the first one is that audiences would enjoy after all this mess we’ve been through.”