– Fackham Harder? –
by Jordan Hoffman | Vanity Fair | December 4, 2025
The team behind this delightfully stupid British import on what makes the upper crust so funny, their encounter with Julian Fellowes, and why the ex-prince Andrew should give it a watch.
Fackham Hall looks like a typical period British drama—at least until you say the title quickly, and with a slight cockney accent. (We will wait for you to do this. Get the joke?)
Following in the footsteps of Airplane! or this summer’s successful Naked Gun reboot, the new film starring Thomasin McKenzie, Damian Lewis, Tom Felton, Katherine Waterston, and a great many others in uncomfortable costumes is a gag-a-minute comic tidal wave. There are idiotic puns, pratfalls, finely tuned moments of metahumor, silly musical numbers, and enough instances of released natural gas to power a city. At a time of year when most theatrical releases are desperately serious, an idiotic farce may be just what the butler ordered.
Though Fackham Hall isn’t a direct parody of Downton Abbey, director Jim O’Hanlon (Inside No. 9, Hemlock Grove) and the Dawson brothers, a writing trio consisting of actual brothers Andrew and Steve Dawson as well as Tim Inman, their pal since childhood, are very aware of the phenomenon that they are lampooning. (Jimmy and Patrick Carr are also credited screenwriters.)
It takes a lot of thought and care to make something as preposterous and childish as Fackham Hall. Once O’Hanlon and the Dawsons quit clowning around, our five-way overseas call did its best to answer just why farting Englishmen are so damn funny. The following has been edited for clarity.
Vanity Fair: According to lore, when Ben and Jerry were creating Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, one wanted many smaller chunks of stuff in there, while the other wanted giant chunks of stuff in there. So they compromised by having many chunks of giant stuff. This, I would imagine, mirrors the Fackham Hall writing process, which seems to value intense joke density.
Jim O’Hanlon: More is more, and it’s still not enough.
Steve Dawson: In anything creative there’s a science experiment where you heat water and put salt in and mix it until it is super dense, then you have it cool and add one more grain of salt. Then the whole thing becomes a crystal. You just keep going with jokes—the jokes are the salt in this analogy—and hopefully everything solidifies as one big piece.
Did you have a spreadsheet of “Ah, we need another wordplay zing here, a pratfall there, a visual crack…”?
Andrew Dawson: We do try to keep a balance. Not too many fart jokes together, so you have different things coming at you.
O’Hanlon: We did pull some things out, because even with that density we thought, This is a moment when we might want it to breathe.
Steve Dawson: Jokes only work if you have a very grounded heart to the whole thing, so we wanted to make sure that was threaded through, that we care for the characters and that matters.
Were there moments when you would dare one another? Like, “Oh, this is too stupid, we can’t do that”—and that would push you to follow it further?
Tim Inman: I think there were. We’d put something in, then go, “I think we can do even better.” I counted 37 drafts of this screenplay. We had a mantra on set, which was, “We’re only as good as our weakest joke.” So we’d look for the weakest one, then pull that one up. I’ll be interested to know, did you invest in the love story? That was always our aim: to make a genuine, interesting love story.
Well, you want to shatter the upstairs-downstairs prejudice, and Thomasin McKenzie is lovely—but I wouldn’t say I was moved to tears, if that’s what you are asking.
Andrew Dawson: Heartless!
I don’t get the impression there was a lot of ad-libbing in this film. With the sight gags, for example, you can’t just say, “Oh, we need a panda bear.” You need to plan that out.
O’Hanlon: The panda is a good example, because the whole script was as tight as that. It was hard to riff. Actors came up with some funny lines, some of which stayed in. Tim McMullan, who plays the butler, there’s a great moment when he’s in the back of the shot and he collapses because of a fart, but that caused a kerfuffle because I’d let the stunt coordinator go [for the day]. Also a brilliant moment, which you can barely see, when Tim said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I, as the butler, had a paintbrush and I was touching up these £10 million Canalettos?”
I would imagine there are a lot of gags I didn’t notice the first time.
Andrew Dawson: We grew up on Airplane! and Naked Gun and The Simpsons, where there’s a sign in the background. It’s your third watch before you even notice it.
I did enjoy the classic ’90s Trainspotting poster in what’s basically the dorm room for the servants.
O’Hanlon: You’re on set going, “I want people to see this, but I don’t want to do a big, clunky close-up.” There’s a lovely poster that says “Unionizing Causes Cancer.”
Another great joy is when you can kind of see a setup for a joke, then you have a split second to think, Okay, here it comes, but how are they going to outsmart me? I am happy to say that frequently you did come up with an unpredictable spin. The World War I flashbacks especially.
Steve Dawson: There’s a technique where, if the audience is going to guess it, get to it quickly. If it’s something they’ll never guess, you can take your time. There’s a joy to that.
The polar opposite is when you just smash in out of nowhere with something crude. Like the servant girl “covering” for Thomasin McKenzie by saying, “It’s all right, I said you were battling a tricky dump.”
Steve Dawson: We all watched Downton Abbey and loved to take the piss out of it. There’s this character who is on the side of the daughter of the house, trying to protect her, and they’re closest friends. That joke was born of that—she’s on it enough to know to defend her, but not on it enough to know the right thing to say.
Andrew Dawson: She also has a deliberately working-class vernacular; she mumbles. We were sure to give something to every character.
But it isn’t really a Downton Abbey parody.
Inman: You don’t need to have seen Downton Abbey. If you are aware of what an English country house looks like, and how we used to have butlers, that’s all you need to know.
O’Hanlon: We’re parodying different types of British film—Downton Abbey, Oliver!, Noël Coward songs, and also just English society. I’m in Dublin right now and people are saying, “This is going to play so well here.”
Why is England so funny?
Steve Dawson: No one takes themselves more seriously than the British. We have so much pomp and ceremony in this country, and there is no reason for it. There are rules about when you pass the port, or who you talk to in the first half of a meal. You have to put your knife and fork down at the moment [the queen does].
O’Hanlon: Taking yourself very seriously is really ripe for bursting a balloon. And I was keen to cast serious actors that you could see in a high-budget period drama. A new Downton Abbey could very well have Damian Lewis or Thomasin McKenzie or Katherine Waterston in it. Tom Felton could easily be in those kinds of films or shows. If you watch this with the sound turned down, you would think it was Downton Abbey or Gosford Park or a new E.M. Forster adaptation. And then you suddenly go, “Did I just see a topless muscle-building butler walk through there?”
The production design is pretty legit.
Inman: We shot in two private houses. One [Knowsley Hall] seats the earls of Derby; it’s like its own Fackham Hall. On set, Jim would say, “Right, we’re in Downton. You’re playing this seriously; we’re going for BAFTAs.” Then they start shooting the most madcap stuff.
O’Hanlon: The more lavish and expensive the funnier the gap between that and the craziness. But also, I’m the same as the next man—I love seeing helicopter shots of a sumptuous house with silver service.
Steve Dawson: Our crew had done shows [like Downton] before. The props guys [would advise] on the dining table scenes.
O’Hanlon: Rosalind Ebbutt, our costume designer, did several seasons of Downton Abbey. She was a stickler for the cutlery and the ties, and I was keen for that to be authentic. But there were times when I would say, “I know, Ros, but there’s a panda in the room. I don’t think anyone’s looking at the slightly off-color tie.”
What do you think about Americans’ ongoing fascination with British aristocracy? Royals tourism is an undeniable aspect of the British economy, and it’s not the same in Spain or the Netherlands.
O’Hanlon: Looking at that kind of sumptuousness and ease and wealth—there is a “nose pressed up against the glass” kind of feel, especially in a world where things are uncertain and dark and troubled. People are going, “That was a time when people seemed to know their place.” And because of the way these films and shows often present the characters, everyone seemed to be really happy with it, even the lowly milkmaids. In difficult times, people turn to this kind of a period drama as a sort of nostalgia for a time which was probably pretty horrific, if you were a working person anywhere.
Inman: In a world today where you can ostensibly get whatever you want if you’ve got enough money, being a royal is something you can’t buy. I think that is fascinating for people. People always want the thing they can’t get, right? The thing Elon Musk can’t buy with his billions is a royal title.
What will Prince Andrew think of this movie?
Inman: Well, he’s just Andrew now.
Andrew Dawson: I think getting a ticket to this is top of his priorities at the moment.
Inman: He’s got nothing else to do.
Andrew Dawson: Even within Britain, there’s often a thinking, as ridiculous as it is, like, “The aristocracy, they’re different to the rest of us.” Like they exist in a different set of rules, and we somehow accept it—particularly when you put 100 years between us and Downton.
O’Hanlon: It goes back to fairy tales.
Has Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes seen the movie?
O’Hanlon: Not that we know of, but he did, would you believe, come to Knowsley Hall where we were shooting. We weren’t shooting on weekends and they said, “Lord Fellowes was going on a shooting party.” Plus he is good friends with Sue Johnston, who played Great-Aunt Bonaparte. That shows you the authenticity of the location: It’s still where lords gather for very expensive shooting parties.
Your movie is done with care. I’m sure he’ll like it.
Inman: It’s done with love.
O’Hanlon: And Hugh Bonneville has been replying to Damian Lewis’s Instagram posts with the thinking-man-with-the-monocle emoji.
Andrew Dawson: It was built to appeal to people who love that genre. Someone in our crew mentioned that [kitchen] staff are always chopping herbs, and so we made a joke out of that.
O’Hanlon: I had seen a YouTube interview that said there’s a practical reason—because they’re really easy to reset.
Okay, for Americans: Why is Blackpool funny?
Andrew Dawson: It’s a very famous seaside town where many people go, but it isn’t glamorous. Arcades and penny gambling. Illuminations and donkey rides. But the tower there sort of resembles the Eiffel Tower.
Oh, now I get the joke.
Andrew Dawson: She holds up the picture and you think she’s going to say Paris, but it is Blackpool. Listen: I didn’t know who Robert Goulet was until The Simpsons. Honestly, I didn’t know what the Spanish Inquisition was before Monty Python.
Should this movie be a financial success, is there a Return to Fackham Hall script in the works?
O’Hanlon: Fackham Harder?
Inman: We’d love to do a sequel. We’ve got ideas bubbling.
Read the rest of the original article at Vanity Fair.