Legion star Dan Stevens on acting, religion and leaving Downton Abbey
British actor does not like things being too easy – lucky, then, that Legion, now in its second season, has him feeling he is getting a ‘workout’
Actor Dan Stevens is endlessly curious. Adopted at birth by teachers, he explains that they instilled in him curiosity and a desire to question things. “Perhaps they would suggest more gently than I sometimes interrogate things, but they [encouraged] a questioning mind, [and] a faithful one as well.”
It was his questioning mind that made him leave the juicy role of Matthew Crawley, a character in the popular British historical period drama Downton Abbey who marries his distant cousin Lady Mary, in search of something more challenging.
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Now he is starring in US television channel FX’s popular show Legion, which is in its second season.
“I don’t really fully engage with something unless I’m a little bit scared,” says the 35-year-old actor. “I don’t want to be terrified stock-still, but I don’t love the feeling that something’s too easy.”
It would have been simple, he says, to “walk into a first world war trench drama off the back of Downton but not necessarily straight into something like The Guest [the 2014 thriller in which he played a serial killer]. Those kinds of movies and explorations led to Legion, which is a wonderful amalgamation of a number of things I’ve been working on.”
He says he likes to feel like he is getting a “workout” in some way, and Legion does that in more ways than one. “It’s a continuation of the exploration of different things and trying things in different ways.”
