Warning! This article contains spoilers for Abigail. If you’ve yet to watch the movie, and you don’t want to know anything that happens, turn back now!
If we had a nickel for every time a Downton Abbey actor appeared (and got their vampire on) in new bloodsoaked horror-comedy Abigail, we’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird it happened twice…
As anyone who saw the very first trailer knows, Dan Stevens, who rose to fame in the long-running period drama, plays Frank, one of the criminals who kidnaps the ballet-dancing bloodsucker, in the movie. Matthew Goode, who also featured in the later seasons of the series and its movie spin-offs, makes an unexpected cameo at the end, too: as Abigail’s Dracula-esque father Kristof Lazar.
After their driver Dean (the late Angus Cloud) is found dead just a couple of hours into the job, Frank and fellow crooks Joey (Scream‘s Melissa Barrera), Sammy (Kathryn Newton), Rickles (William Catlett), and Peter (Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ Kevin Durand) start panicking about who Abigail’s anonymous pops is. When the youngster discloses that it’s feared, notoriously violent crimelord Lazar, the group immediately make plans to split, but their attempt to bail is cut short when they realize they’re trapped inside the manor house they’ve been instructed to hole up in. As Abigail goes on, it’s revealed that each of the kidnappers has a complicated history with Lazar, building him up to be such an ominous figure that when the cameo comes just before the credits roll, it hits hard.
“I’ve never seen Downton Abbey, it’s a blind spot for me,” Bettinelli-Olpin laughs when GamesRadar+ asks which of the twosome is the big fan, as Gillett confesses: “I watched the first two seasons.
“But I think what you’re scratching at is this idea that like, we cast great fucking actors to be in our silly movies,” he continues. “I think that they ground everything in a way that you need, you need to have amazing dramatic performers to make this tone work right. You have to treat the absurdity of this premise with as much seriousness as you would treat like the most earnest drama, and I think the hack with our tone is casting amazingly talented people that just believably take you along for this ride. Dan and Matthew are just two examples from this cast who we think just absolutely brought the most and the best of themselves to it. The two of them are wildly entertaining and talented actors and they make the movie work with those performances.”
Cleverly toying with all we’ve learnt about Lazar up until that point, Goode’s take on the character is slinky and soft-spoken, complete with a fanged smile that makes him seem even more unpredictable and sinister than the brute Frank and co have been suggesting he is for the last 100 minutes. Fortunately, he lets last remaining survivor Joey leave the manor unscathed, a thank-you for saving Abigail from a turned Frank, but it’s a tense scene that might even allow for a sequel later down the line.
“I think that there’s something also really, really amazing about creating new original things that can then go on to be the franchises of the future,” Bettinelli-Olpin previously told SFX magazine. “Those are the movies that we were born and raised on in so many ways. So creating a new version of that? Sign us up!”
Abigail is in cinemas now. For more, check out our list of the best horror movies of all time, or our guide to the most exciting upcoming horror movies heading our way.
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