Samantha Bond has taken on a workload that would leave most other actors exhausted, starring in a West End musical while shooting the new series of Downton Abbey.
The actress, 52, plays a wealthy victim of conmen Robert Lindsay and Rufus Hound in the new production of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which had its gala opening at The Savoy Theatre.
Next week she will also begin shooting ITV’s hit period drama, in which she plays Lady Rosamund Painswick, and will be ferried between the West End and Highclere Castle in Berkshire daily.
Bond said: “I’ll be Downtoning in the day and doing this by night. I will have a car picking me up after the show and another taking me back at 4pm the next day.
“I find it quite tiring but it’s actually quite fun being one thing during the day and something quite the other at night.
“I actually did the same last year when I was in [West End production] Passion Play last year and Downtoned at the same time.”
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is Bond’s first musical in a career spanning four decades, which she says is because “no one had asked me before”.
Speaking at the show’s afterparty at The Savoy’s ballroom, she added: “There has always been a little girl in me who loved Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. I grew up wanting to be Ginger.”
Lindsay, 64, said he was having great fun playing Lawrence Jameson, a part made famous by Michael Caine in the 1988 movie, but admitted: “If I’m being honest, I had forgotten how gruelling it is doing a musical.”
