If Harriet Walter looks familiar, that might be because you’ve seen her in Succession. Or The Spanish Princess. Or Call the Midwife, Patrick Melrose, The Crown, London Spy, or Downton Abbey. Which is all to say the lauded British actress (who’s perhaps actually best known for her work with the Royal Shakespeare Company) seems to have a type. Whenever a prestige drama series is looking for a formidable grande dame—sharp, powerful, cunning, often with a wicked sense of humor—Walter seems to be the go-to choice. That doesn’t seem likely to change any time soon.
On April 12, Belgravia, the new series from Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, premieres on EPIX, and Water will be front and center as the imperious Countess of Brockenhurst. The character’s an imposing doyenne of London’s upper crust who finds her fate upended when a buried family secret bubbles up in the most unexpected of ways. (The same night she’ll also appear as a deliciously dark new character—“it’s very different,” is all Walter will say—in the third season of Killing Eve.) Why does Walter seem to pop up in all of T&C’s favorite shows? The actress weighs in here.
You seem to end up in your fair share of dramas about the rich and powerful. What about Belgravia attracted you?
What I like about Julian’s writing is that it’s quite female driven. If you think about Downton, the key figures are women, even downstairs. It isn’t that it’s unbalanced, but the women are very important. He’s interested in social and domestic history which, of its nature, is quite dominated by women. When it came to Belgravia, I suppose my name came to him and I got offered the part. I was the right age, which is strange because there aren’t so many great parts for that age range and it was kind of a gift. I’m getting very lucky. I think it’s one of Julian’s best pieces.
Is there any kind of continuity across his projects? Did working on Downton prepare you for Belgravia?
It’s a different story than Downton, but there are similar things in that we’re talking about a period from about 1800 to 1950 or so, when a snobby social class was observed in a fairly consistent way. There’s a certain clubbiness in the social milieu as if to say “if you’re not one of us, you won’t fit in.” There’s an exclusivity about how you pronounce certain words or use certain knives and forks at the table.
It’s not a terribly attractive aspect of our society, but it was in place for quite a long time and I think what’s appealing to an actor about that is there’s an established code of behavior beneath which you can explore a lot of subtleties. The only thing I recognized from Downton is that the servants have their own gossip circle where the main subject is what was going on upstairs. There’s always somebody in the servants’ quarters with a reason to be resentful; there are little rivalries and disloyalties that spin off into the plot.
What does that mean for the Countess of Brockenhurst?
These people must have been flesh and blood and had hearts beating inside those corsets—so let’s find that. What interests me is that whatever constructs inform our social behavior, we’re still bursting inside with the emotions that all of us have. In this story you go off into the Industrial Revolution and the people getting rich through manufacturing and the way the old and new money clash, and that’s a fascinating point in social history.
It’s also something that, while it’s presented here as historical, is still an issue today.
There might be a kind of yearning for a time when everybody knew their place. Now, people are jostling for recognition—we all need to feel we have a position in our community—and it’s much harder to establish how you achieve that. It used to be that your father was so-and-so, and therefore you were, too. At the moment, we’re learning a lot about how little we understand one another. People seem to enjoy looking back to a time when everybody had a place in a network, and nobody was superfluous.
You’ve appeared in a lot of projects that seem to focus on the foibles of the rich and powerful. Is that purposeful?
I think it’s happenstance that I’ve done a lot of it. I have a background in classical theater, so maybe people think, oh, she can bring humanity to a person in a period costume. But I don’t feel that I have to act differently because I’m wearing a corset; I’m still a human being. The part I don’t like is being called upon to play someone who’s severe or bitchy or nasty. I don’t know why but people seem to think I’m quite good at that.
Those are certainly traits that your Belgravia character could be accused of displaying. What makes her someone you wanted to play?
This woman is in a conventional aristocratic world where the male heir is all important. She and her husband don’t have an heir, so the title will go sideways to his feckless brother and his even more unappealing son. Therefore, there’s an innate tragedy even though they’re from a very confident class; they don’t have an heir because they lost their son, which would be a tragedy for anybody, but there’s the added layer that their whole existence was designed to create continuity and they’re not going to be able to contribute to that.
For them, there’s a personal loss and also a feeling they haven’t done their duty. And when she comes into contact with a woman who reveals something about their shared history, it means that she gets kicked in the gut emotionally, and feelings are awakened that she had shut away. Suddenly, there’s hope at the end of the tunnel. That’s not the way stories usually go.
Adam Rathe is Town & Country's Deputy Features Director, covering arts and culture and a range of other subjects.
