Laura Carmichael, who plays Lady Edith Crawley on the period drama, talks to BuzzFeed News about her character’s impressive growth throughout the show’s five seasons, culminating with the Feb. 8 episode’s shocking and heartbreaking development. WARNING: SPOILERS WITHIN FOR SEASON 5, EPISODE 6!
Lady Edith Crawley (Laura Carmichael) and her daughter, Marigold, on Downton Abbey.
Nick Briggs/Carnival Film & Television Limited 2014 for MASTERPIECE
When Downton Abbey first premiered in the U.S. in 2011, then-17-year-old Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) was arguably the most disliked member of the Crawley family. The middle child of the Lord (Hugh Bonneville) and Lady of Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) had a complex relationship with her older sister Mary (Michelle Dockery), a nasty tone, and came across to viewers as, well, just plain rude.
But Carmichael, who bares few, if any, similarities to the character she's played for five seasons — she's a self-described "shy" girl — has been able to endear audiences to Edith. As the Julian Fellowes-created drama has gone on to span 12 years (thanks to time jumps), Carmichael has imbued Edith with a level of humanity that's allowed viewers to see how some of the character's brutal actions could be justified, which was most important in the Feb. 8 episode.
"She's still snobby and self-important and selfish, but I think you understand why," Carmichael told BuzzFeed News in December, sitting in a restaurant in New York City's crowded Times Square. "[Fellowes has] allowed us into these more private moments with her to see the pain that makes her behave that way. She has grown up." And that was obvious in the sixth episode of Season 5, which saw Edith make the biggest decision of her life, one that's been filled with tragedy after tragedy, and heartbreak after heartbreak.
At the start of the series, Edith was in love with her cousin, whom the family arranged to marry her older sister, Mary, forcing Edith to suppress her feelings. Then he tragically died on the Titanic, leaving Edith to tend to her older sister in mourning. While it seemed Edith later found love with Anthony (Robert Bathurst), he left her at the alter. And it felt like no heartbreak could compare to losing Sybil (Jessica Brown-Findlay), the sister Edith felt closest to, who died during childbirth.
"I always felt, even in her most unsympathetic moments, that I understood why she was doing it. Like the heartbreak of Patrick and the rivalry with Mary — she didn't make great decisions to do these unkind things, but you sort of knew how she got there and I think that's the gift of [Fellowes'] writing," Carmichael said. "I think she would have been the most conventional had the marriage [to Anthony] worked out. But that wasn't her path."
Masterpiece via deborahkerr.tumblr.com
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