But is the career he's having now really why he left the green pastures of Julian Fellowes' show for the seemingly greener pastures of Hollywood?
Because he left a hit show at the height of its success, Stevens follows in the footsteps of cautionary tales like David Caruso, whose snubbing of NYPD Blue saw him out in the wilderness of middling movie success until he scurried back to television with CSI: Miami.
Stevens has done better than that, but he'll still carry with him -- at least with me, and I'm sure other Abbey watchers -- the reminder of having bailed on the show at the height of our shipping of his Matthew Crawley and Michelle Dochery's Mary Crawley. (Don't worry, it's not as gross as it sounds. They were distant cousins, if memory serves.) It's probably not a spoiler at this point to say they killed him off in a car accident at the end of season 3, I believe it was, at the actor's request, in a way that always seemed sudden if you're being generous, abrupt if you're not. (The only reason we wouldn't say they Poochie'd him was because he requested it instead of being fired.)
The reason I'm considering this today is that last night I watched Abigail, the perfectly acceptable horror movie from last year in which Stevens stars. There's actually another reason thinking back on Downton Abbey is particularly appropriate with Abigail, but I'll get to that later on.
"Perfectly acceptable" describes Stevens' career in general. Let's look at some of the highlights, or maybe I should say, mid-lights:
The first movie I remember him being in after he left Abbey was The Guest, which is not anyone's idea of a big, "announce yourself to everyone else who doesn't watch Downton Abbey" role. It's a sort of home invasion thriller directed by Adam Wingard, who yes, was a name there for a bit and directed a couple Godzilla movies. But I don't really hear anyone talking about The Guest in any of my cinematic circles.
Also in 2014, among the movies I saw, were The Cobbler and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb. The former, an Adam Sandler vehicle, was sort of a laughingstock, even though it was directed by a director with credibility (Win Win's Tom McCarthy), and I don't think he even had a particularly memorable role in the third Night at the Museum movie, though I don't really remember that movie so it's not surprising I don't remember his role in it.
I saw him in Colossal in 2016 -- don't remember him in that but he wasn't the star -- but probably his first really "big" showcase was as the titular beast in Beauty and the Beast in 2017. And while this is certainly a prominent showcase, it is also, notably, a showcase that does not put his real face on display for all but a very small percentage of the running time.
I suppose the best movie I think he's made since leaving the show was Alex Ross Perry's Her Smell, which ranked in my top ten in 2018. This is not the sort of movie you make, though, if you are leaving a show because you want bigger and better things, because you want to see your name in lights. (More on that thought in a moment.)
His concentrated efforts in the year 2020 may be both the most sustained interesting period since he left the show, and also the most illustrative of where he finds himself at this point. I really liked both Dave Franco's The Rental and especially Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, which was just outside my top ten for the year. However, in both films he's clearly the member of an ensemble, not the star. The same can also be said for Blithe Spirit, but the interesting thing about this film is that it is almost exactly back in the milieu of Downton Abbey -- which could be kind of interpreted as the equivalent of Caruso running back to TV with CSI: Miami.
And TV really is where Stevens found himself the past four years, for the most part, until Abigail and Wingard's second Godzilla movie, both last year.
Look there are some good titles in there. I'm not saying there aren't.
But I think if you leave a show like Stevens left Abbey, when we had come to love him so much and felt like there was so much that could be done with his character that we would enjoy watching, he should expect us to scrutinize his choices, and to wonder if it was all worth it.
Then there's the other possibility: Dan Stevens just doesn't care.
There's the possibility -- and maybe reading just a little bit on the internet could confirm this, though you know how I don't like to do that -- that he just didn't think Downton Abbey was challenging him enough. We know David Caruso thought he could be a movie star. I'm only assuming Dan Stevens had the same goal, and maybe I'm wrong about that. So what seem to me like misses on his part, failures to take off in the way he surely wanted, might just be him trying to choose an interesting array of roles that didn't always require him to be a rich lord dressing in 1920s garb.
I said there was a Downton Abbey element about Abigail that I wanted to come back to.
A big reveal at the end of the movie -- and this only counts as a spoiler if you care about "surprises" in the cast, though this actor is not really big enough to qualify -- is that a Big Bad vampire, who is only referred to previously in hushed tones, is played by Matthew Goode.
And what is the significance of this, you ask?
Well, after Mary Crawley lost her new husband to a crash in one of those newfangled automobiles, she eventually took up with quite an ironic new partner in that regard: a race car driver. This is who she ended the series with, as her happily ever after.
And that race car driver was played, of course, by Matthew Goode.
I'm not sure if Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the directors of Abigail, really cared about this connection or made the choice with any intentionality, though they do have Goode's character and Stevens' character do battle at the end. Whether that was fighting to decide the matter of Mary Crawley once and for all, I do not know.
