There’s refined British comedy, and then there’s “Fackham Hall,” a movie that waltzes in wearing period-accurate garb on the outside and immediately trips over the furniture. It’s the delightfully silly romp where aristocrats brood, servants scramble, romance simmers, relatives wed, and the background is working twice as hard as the actors to steal every scene, like “Downton Abbey” politely offering you tea while “Airplane” swaps the sugar for gunpowder. Set between the wars, the film follows starry-eyed servant Eric and rebellious aristocrat Rose as their forbidden attraction detonates inside a household already teetering on the edge of absurdity. The ensemble includes Thomasin McKenzie, Damian Lewis, Katherine Waterston, Tom Felton, and a sprawling cast of blissfully serious performers.
Joining The Discourse in today’s episode are “Fackham Hall” director Jim O’Hanlon and star Thomasin McKenzie, who break down how the team crafted a period comedy where the jokes never stop multiplying, and the sincerity has to be played with absolute conviction.
O’Hanlon admits he fell for the script embarrassingly fast. “I was straight in by about page four or five,” Jim O’Hanlon said. “The first meeting with Eric was out on the streets of London, and the joke was in from the beginning of the little newspaper boy saying that there was a national ink shortage. And then I immediately had this idea of what we should have the sides of the buses represent that. And suddenly I was like, ‘Oh, gosh, I’m having ideas already’ because there was really funny stuff in there. So, yeah, it was immediate.”
To nail the tone, he revisited both the stately inspirations and the anarchic ones. “We looked at the obvious things. We looked at ‘Gosford Park’. We looked at ‘Downton Abbey’. And we looked at ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’, both the original and the remake,” he said. Even his own BBC adaptation of “Emma” proved unexpectedly useful. “The scene in ‘Fackham Hall’ where the awkward silence, you have the little clinkety clink of the cutlery. Because that’s always how you do awkward silence in a period drama, and so we thought, what’s the funny version of that? And what we ended up with was that hilarious thing where it just gets louder and louder and louder, and Lord Davenport can’t be heard.”
Then came the other half of the influence sandwich. “We looked at, obviously, the Zucker Brothers, ‘Airplane’, the ‘Naked Gun’ films,” he said. “And I had done a series that Charlie Brooker wrote called ‘A Touch of Cloth’, a spoof detective drama. A lot of the things I learned on that and really enjoyed doing, like the background action, the unexpected gags, the sumo wrestlers in the back of shot, we took from that as well.”
These visual grace notes weren’t improvised chaos; they were engineered. “It has to be really planned,” O’Hanlon explained. “If you try to do it on the day, you don’t have the materials. You don’t have the right extras. You don’t have the right costumes.” Every scene became a workshop. “It’s going to be a map of Fackham Hall. He points to it. What else is on the map that’s funny? If you look closely, you’ll see a hill called ‘Jonah Hill.’ You’ll see a ‘Phoebe Waller Bridge.’ My personal favorite was World War One Memorial and then ‘World War Two Memorial Coming Soon’ because we’re between the wars.”
His direction to the cast was simple: treat the absurdity like Shakespeare. “I love the scene in ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ where the amp goes to 11. I used to say to my actors, ‘this one goes to ten and a half,’” he said. “The comic exaggeration is in how seriously you take it. Deliver it like you’re delivering the death speech in ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Let the ridiculousness of the lines do the work.”
He always wanted the film to be a theatrical release. “Comedy is a shared experience,” O’Hanlon noted. “You want to be in a big theater with lots of people laughing. And then it’ll have a nice life afterwards where people freeze frame things and go, oh my God, I missed that the fastest tailor in Fackham is called ‘Tailor Swift.’”
Later in the episode, Thomasin McKenzie joins the conversation, explaining how she grounded Rose in sincerity while surrounded by chaos. Her earliest encounter with this kind of comedy was less comforting than inspiring. “My mom showed me a little bit of Monty Python when I was younger,” she said. “And the one I remember most is when that man is having a humongous meal, and at the end, he has one of those mint chocolates, and he explodes. It absolutely traumatized me.”
Her real reference point was far more genteel. “My main reference going into ‘Fackham Hall’ was ‘Downton Abbey’. I based Rose off Sybil,” she said. “But after I was sent the script and talked to Jim, I watched ‘Airplane’ and ‘The Naked Gun’, and that gave me a really great idea of what he was looking for.”
She also revealed the lone moment she improvised that made the final film. “Eric is telling Rose about a recurring dream of his where his penis falls off,” she said, laughing. “And in the moment I just thought, ‘OMG, same, I have that dream!’ I was surprised it made it. The script didn’t need improvising, but that moment felt right.”
McKenzie also previewed several upcoming projects, from Paul Greengrass’ “The Uprising” with Andrew Garfield to a potential Audrey Hepburn biopic opposite Michael Shannon. “For my entire life, she’s been my idol,” she said of Hepburn. “Ever since I saw her in ‘Funny Face’, that was it for me.”
And yes, she’s still manifesting one dream part. “I want to play a fairy,” McKenzie said. “I have a vivid memory of my mom dressing up as a fairy for daycare. It really imprinted itself on my mind. I want to follow in my mom’s footsteps and be a fairy.”
“Fackham Hall” hits theaters on December 5th. Listen to the complete conversations with Jim O’Hanlon and Thomasin McKenzie below:
The Discourse is part of The Playlist Podcast Network, which includes Deep Focus, Bingeworthy, and more. We can be heard on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, and most places where podcasts are found. You can stream the podcast via the embed within the article. Be sure to subscribe and drop us a comment or a rating, as we greatly appreciate it. Thank you for listening.
