Dan Stevens on literary love, Charles Dickens

TO SOME, he’ll forever be Matthew Crawley. But in the five years since Downton Abbey, Dan Stevens has forged a new path, including his latest project.

WHILE it’s been five years since Dan Stevens walked away from Downton Abbey at the height of its popularity, his breakthrough role as Matthew Crawley is still the one he’s most associated with.

Despite that, he had no qualms stepping back into period costume for his latest challenge, to play revered author Charles Dickens in The Man Who Invented Christmas.

“I don’t judge things based on the year they’re set,” he told news.com.au. “I’m more interested in the quality of the writing and the character, and it was such a charming script and an interesting take on somebody I loved for a long time.”

A voracious reader, Stevens studied English Literature at the University of Cambridge. He also judged the Man Booker literary prize in 2012, a formidable challenge for which he read 146 books, some of them several times. But his love for Dickens goes back much further.

Because Dickens is regarded as one of “the greats”, his work is often assigned as required reading in schools and has been viewed by generations of kids as a chore. It’s that very perception Stevens wants to conquer with his movie.

“It’s precisely my reason for wanting to take on something this,” he said. “Of course I had to read him at school and of course it did feel like a chore sometimes, but that’s not to say he doesn’t merit looking at time and time again.

The genesis of Scrooge.

“His characters are so richly drawn and he has a love of language. There’s a playful, childish, silly side right up against this very dark, almost depressive, side.

“We were often encouraged to read him aloud at school, we had stagings of A Christmas Carol and I remember reading extracts of Great Expectations as a performance piece. The opening of Great Expectations is truly great literature.

“If these books get put on reading lists, that’s great because people will read it. It’s more I worry about how these things are taught as much as how they’re received.”

Stevens said he had several “very inspiring” English teachers who imbued in him a love for Dickens which allowed him to understand the writer’s humanist side.

A Christmas Carol forms the basis of The Man Who Invented Christmas, a portrait of the tumultuous six weeks in which the novella was written.

“I like the idea of a biopic,” he said. “The cradle-to-the-grave biopic is rarely done well but I like it when it’s a slice of somebody’s life or a specific moment in their career. We’re doing six weeks of Dickens’ life, which is nothing, but it had this profound effect on our culture and you get to understand something about him.”

Forever Matthew.

While he may be in period costume, Steven’s energetic portrayal of Dickens couldn’t be a more different role to the posh and proper Matthew Crawley.

Since leaving Downton, Stevens has carved out a career in pursuit of new challenges, including the left-field comic TV series Legion, where he plays a mutant with psychic powers and an erratic mental state. He was also the male lead in 2017’s highest grossing movie, Beauty and the Beast, though Stevens’ performance as the Beast is primarily rendered through motion-capture and CGI.

Even with all these screen opportunities, Stevens remains connected to his literary loves — he’s the voice of some 30-plus audio books, including The Odyssey.

Asked if he has ever considered writing his own tome he said: “I’m sort of terrified but yes, absolutely. I’m always writing something but it’s not yet a book. God knows [when we’ll see a finished copy]. Let’s get through Legion first and then we’ll see.”

The Man Who Invented Christmas is in cinemas from Thursday, November 30.

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As David Haller in Legion, Stevens embodies a new physicality. Michelle Faye/FX