Downton Abbey cast has fun with Twitter

When Benedict Cumberbatch, the star of the BBC’s brilliant Sherlock series, offered up his rather uncomplimentary thoughts to Reader’s Digest on the biggest phenomenon since sliced bread, Downton Abbey, taken out of context or not, the initial inclination might have been to fire off a response that you might regret moments after you hit ‘send’. The interview, which was promoting the actor’s upcoming role in Parade’s End, had the Sherlock star criticizing the wildly popular ITV drama for “trading a lot on the sentiment in the last series”.

Thankfully, Downton Abbey stars, Hugh Bonneville, Dan Stevens and Brendan Coyle, decided to take the funny side high road with Benedict by changing their Twitter profile pictures to the front cover of Reader’s Digest, which featured the tagline, Move over, Downton.

While fans of the series were not easily as forgiving, Downton creator/writer, Julian Fellowes, went one step further by suggesting that he would welcome Benedict as part of a future Downton storyline and then added that, “…the popularity of Downton and Ben’s series Sherlock, and, hopefully, Parade’s End are all part of a surge of interest in television drama which can only be good news for all of us”.

Photo source: Radio Times