Source: Entertainment Weekly

Lady Mary is causing quite a stir in Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale.

The intelligent noblewoman, played by Michelle Dockery, appears to have everything under control in the new trailer for the third and final Downton Abbey film. However, her status — and future ownership of the titular Yorkshire estate — is called into question when it’s revealed that she and her husband Henry Talbot (Matthew Goode) have gotten divorced.

Mary is confronted about her marital status at a high society event, causing the music to abruptly come to a halt and her fellow attendees to gasp. “I’m very sorry,” she replies. “I shouldn’t’ve come.”

“This really is the night that shook the world,” assistant cook Daisy Parker (Sophie McShera) declares.

Mary and Henry tied the knot in season 6 of Downton Abbey and share a daughter named Caroline. The gentleman was Mary’s second husband; she was previously wed to Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens), who died in a car accident shortly after their son George’s birth.

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It’s currently unclear when exactly the couple went their separate ways, but Henry was noticeably absent from the second Downton Abbey film, 2022’s A New Era.

Thankfully, Mary’s family appears to have rallied around her following the divorce. “Families like ours must keep moving to survive,” she observes, “and all of your support is more important to me than I can say.”

The trailer also marks the return of Paul Giamatti’s character Harold Levinson, who returns with some bad news, and pays tribute the Countess of Grantham Violet Crawley, played by the late Dame Maggie Smith. “If Mama were alive,” Robert Crawley (Hugh Bonneville) muses, “what would she do?”

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly in March, Giamatti teased that his character does “something quite important” that will have lasting implications in the upcoming film.

“I was like, wow, this is random, I have a lot to do with the end of this whole series,” he said at the time. “I do something of real significance — good or bad, I’m not going to say! But, I do something that makes a big difference to how everything ends.”

Directed by Simon Curtis from a script penned by Downton creator Julian Fellowes, The Grand Finale rounds out its cast with performances from Simon Russell Beale, Laura Carmichael, Jim Carter, Raquel Cassidy, Brendan Coyle, Kevin Doyle, Michael Fox, Joanne Froggatt, Harry Hadden-Paton, Robert James-Collier, Allen Leech, Phyllis Logan, Sophie McShera, Lesley Nicol, Alessandro Nivola, Dominic West, Penelope Wilton, Arty Froushan, Joely Richardson, Paul Copley and Douglas Reith.

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