



Warning: This interview about the the fifth episode of Downton Abbey’s final season contains spoilers.

Downton Abbey fans have watched Lord Grantham’s discomfort come and go in the show’s final season, but few would have been expecting it to culminate in the Great Ulcer Burst of 1925.

In Sunday’s episode, as the war between the Dowager Countess and Isobel raged on in front of a dinner guest, the Minister of Health, Robert (Hugh Bonneville) rose from the table — then projectile-vomited blood across it. Twice.

Related: ‘Downton Abbey’ Recap: Bad Blood



The jolt was intentional, director Michael Engler tells Yahoo TV. “There’s a long theoretical lead up about the changing of the hospital system and what it would mean to the community. The idea of something as sudden and shocking and real as what happens to Robert bringing it all into focus and taking it away from the theoretical into the emotional was a good way of reminding people what was at stake,” he says.

Below, the two-time Emmy nominee (30 Rock, Sex and the City) — who’s currently up for a Directors Guild of America Award for helming the Downton series finale — answers our burning questions.

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What all goes into rehearsing a moment like this?

We had a physician there while we were working it out with the special effects people, the people who make that kind of blood, and the makeup people. Because there would be a certain amount of blood that had built up in his stomach, and that would get a certain color, and then, the second time he vomited up blood, it would be fresh blood, so that would be a different color. You have to examine the difference between how it looks in real life and how it looks on screen, so we did some experiments with that, to make sure that it was the right colors and texture and realistic.

When you shoot something like that, you have to break it up into so many pieces for him to be able to play the moments before, and the moments after, and get the blood in his mouth. So we talked through how we would shoot it. We needed to really know how the blood was going to move, and how it was going to spray, because we needed to know how many people were going to need how many different copies of their costume, so we could reset them. There’s a certain amount of that kind of really technical stuff that you have to figure out in a rehearsal like that.

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I heard Elizabeth McGovern’s Cora getting sprayed wasn’t scripted.

These things you can only control to a certain extent, because in order for it to be real, Hugh has to surrender control to a kind of convulsion. We didn’t expect much at all, if any, to spray on her, and then more did. What was incredible about it was, the first time that it happened we did have a camera on her, and so it really got the reaction of that.



I think it made it even more powerful, because without it being super gory, it just becomes a little bit more visceral. The thing about Downton is, because it is so restrained, when a very unrestrained moment like that happens, it’s the shocking reminder that reality is the same for everybody, when you get right down to it. You see him push it down, and push it down, and push it down, and then, finally it erupts — that’s just a physiological event that’s beyond anybody’s control. Even this man, who’s really the essence of that British stiff upper lip, is subject to the realities of physical, scientific, medical nature.

How many takes did you do on the day of filming?

You need a lot of different reactions, and a lot of different angles, but we managed to keep the coughing up blood part of it to two. Part of that was also so we wouldn’t have to reset everybody’s costume. To reset that whole table — change the linens, the flowers, the plates, and everything — takes about a half an hour.

