唐顿庄园大表哥的颠覆性新角色

“I was not your obvious choice for that kind of role,” Dan Stevens said, discussing his part as a crewcutted homicidal maniac in the forthcoming horror-adventure movie “The Guest.”

“一般来说，人们不会想到让我来演那种角色，”丹·史蒂文斯(Dan Stevens)说。他说的是自己在即将上映的恐怖冒险影片《神秘访客》(The Guest)中扮演的平头杀人狂。

That is true. Last seen by most people lying dead in a ditch in his guise as Matthew Crawley in the waning, traumatizing seconds of the third season of “Downton Abbey,” Mr. Stevens has moved to New York to wreak a different kind of havoc. Handsome, polite, well spoken and exuding prototypical Englishness, he has propelled himself into the next phase of his career with a succession of parts — two of them in movies opening this week — that do not so much play against type as laugh in its face.

的确如此。大部分人最后一次见他是在《唐顿庄园》(Downton Abbey)第三季的一个悲痛时刻，他扮演的马修·克劳利(Matthew Crawley)躺在沟壕里死去。史蒂文斯搬到纽约，造成了另一种大混乱。他英俊潇洒，彬彬有礼，谈吐不凡，散发着典型的英伦气息，但他激励自己进入事业的新阶段，演绎了一系列与上述形象相反的角色，故意颠覆自己的固有形象。他参演的两部电影将于本周上映。

Un-Matthew No. 1: David in “The Guest” (opening Wednesday), a mysterious and charming ex-soldier with a buff physique and a sleepy Southern drawl who insinuates himself into a blameless small-town family and, in the space of a few days, leaves half the neighbors — as well as an elite military hit squad meant to take him down — dead.

不像马修的第一个角色：《神秘访客》（周三[9月17日]上映）中的大卫(David)。当过兵的大卫神秘、迷人，有着健硕的体格，说话慢吞吞地，带着美国南方口音。他轻松地融入小镇上一个无可指摘的家庭，在几天时间里杀死了一半邻居——以及打算干掉他的顶尖杀手小分队。

Un-Matthew No. 2: Kenny in “A Walk Among the Tombstones” (Friday), a squirrelly, strung-out, super-skinny Brooklyn drug dealer who hires a disgraced cop turned private investigator (Liam Neeson, naturally) to find his kidnapped wife.

不像马修的第二个角色：《行过死荫之地》（A Walk Among the Tombstones，周五[9月19日]上映）中的肯尼(Kenny)。肯尼是布鲁克林的一名毒贩，行为古怪，因吸毒而异常消瘦，他雇佣一名曾当过警察但是被撤职的私人侦探（利亚姆·尼森[Liam Neeson]饰）寻找自己被绑架的妻子。

Un-Matthew No. 3: Colin in an episode of “High Maintenance,” an online series of no-budget short films about the adventures of a Brooklyn pot dealer. In his segment, Mr. Stevens plays an amiable stay-at-home dad who lives in a cloud of weed, writer’s block and women’s clothing.

不像马修的第三个角色：在《高昂的代价》(High Maintenance)的其中一集里扮演科林(Colin)。这是一系列低成本网络短片，讲述的是一位布鲁克林毒贩的冒险活动。在史蒂文斯这一集里，他扮演一名和蔼可亲的宅男奶爸、才思枯竭的作家，沉浸在大麻之中，穿女式服装。

Mr. Stevens, 31, would also appear to be playing against type in person. Seeing him on television for so long in fussy period clothes — three-piece suits, tuxedos, white ties and tails and, when things got really daring, pajamas — made it a shock to see him in real life recently over lunch at a Manhattan restaurant. The eyes were the same bright blue, of course, but he was much wirier than he used to be. His hair was shorter, his face was thinner and scruffily bearded, and his clothes were like everyone else’s: denim shirt, denim jeans.

31岁的史蒂文斯在生活中似乎也在扮演跟自己的固有形象不同的角色。长久以来，我们在电视上看到的他都穿着精致的时代剧戏服——三件套西服，无尾礼服，正式礼服，还有非常紧急时穿的睡衣——所以前不久在曼哈顿的一家餐厅共进午餐时，见到现实生活中的他让我觉得很震惊。当然，还是同样的明亮的蓝眼睛，但是比从前瘦了很多。头发短了，脸瘦了，留着参差不齐的胡子，衣服也和其他人一样：斜纹棉布衬衫，牛仔裤。

The restaurant was virtually empty save for a flock of publicists. Mr. Stevens ordered gazpacho after determining that it contained no dairy products, and waved away the bread basket on account of its gluten-ous contents.

除了一群宣传人员，餐厅基本上是空的。史蒂文斯在确定西班牙冷菜汤里不含乳制品后点了一份，得知这里的面包含麸质后就没点面包。

“Under three layers of tweed, you can hide a lot of ills,” he said, so he has made a post-“Downton” effort to take better care of himself. He comes from a tradition whose attitude toward exercise is “If it hurts, stop,” he said, and he hates to seem obsessive too much about his new regime, whatever it is. “You know,” he said sheepishly. “Gym stuff. Run a little bit.”

“穿着三层花呢服装，你能掩盖很多毛病，”他说。所以在退出《唐顿庄园》后，他更加注意体形。他说自己的成长环境对待锻炼的态度是“如果觉得疼，就停下”，他很不喜欢显得过于在意自己的新健身法——不管它是什么。“你知道，”他腼腆地说，“就是去健身房锻炼，跑跑步。”

He smoothly moved on to another topic, the interesting turn his career has taken. “I wasn’t going to step into another period drama straight away, because I didn’t want to,” he said. “Typecasting only comes if you say yes to these things. You can always say no.”

他很自然地转换到另一个话题——他的事业的有趣转变。“我当时没打算立刻去演另一部时代剧，因为我不想那样，”他说，“只有你自己同意，才会总演同一类角色。你永远都可以拒绝。”

There was a year when Mr. Stevens said no to a lot of things. One was “Downton,” where he had had a great run as the resident heartthrob but was ready to move on to bigger things. Before shooting began for the third season, he informed the authorities that he would not be returning for the fourth.

有一年时间，史蒂文斯拒绝了很多邀请。其中一个是《唐顿庄园》，他在其中饰演的万人迷很受欢迎，但是他打算实现更宏大的目标。早在第三季开拍之前，他就通知剧组他不演第四季了。

He then spent months wondering how they would get rid of him. Death by illness was out: Sibyl, his sister-in-law on the program, had already died of eclampsia after giving birth, and his former fiancée, the dreary Lavinia Swire, had succumbed to the Spanish flu. Having Matthew abandon his wife, Lady Mary, and, say, leave the country, would have been out of character for such a nice man.

然后有好几个月时间他都在想，他们会怎么处理掉这个角色。肯定不会是因病去世：剧中他的小姨子西比尔(Sibyl)已经因产后子痫去世，他的前未婚妻、沉闷的拉维尼娅·斯怀尔(Lavinia Swire)因西班牙流感去世。也不能让马修抛弃妻子玛丽小姐(Lady Mary)，比如说出国，因为这样一个好人不会那样做。

In the end, a milk truck drove into his car right after he saw his infant son for the first time. “It was a bit of a shock for everybody,” Mr. Stevens said.

结果，在他初次看到刚出生的儿子之后，一辆运奶卡车撞上了他的汽车。“对所有人来说，这都有点令人震惊，”他说。

What is more, he did not know what he was going to do next. “My wife” — his real-life wife, Susie Harriet — “was pregnant with our second child, and I didn’t know what was going to happen,” he said.

另外，他不知道自己下一步要做什么。他说，“当时我妻子”——他真正的妻子苏茜·哈里特(Susie Harriet)——“怀着我们的第二个孩子，我不知道下面会发生什么”。

Fortunately, Mr. Stevens was offered a lead in “The Heiress” on Broadway, and even more fortunately, the writer and director Scott Frank came one night to see him perform. “He was looking for someone a little unexpected to play a drug trafficker in his movie.” That would be “A Walk Among the Tombstones,” filmed on the streets of Brooklyn, Mr. Stevens noted.

幸运的是，史蒂文斯得到在百老汇舞台剧《女继承人》(The Heiress)中担任主角的机会，更幸运的是，编剧、导演斯科特·弗兰克(Scott Frank)有天晚上来看他的表演。“当时他正在寻找一个有点出人意料的演员来演他电影中的毒贩。”史蒂文斯说，这部电影就是在布鲁克林的街道上拍摄的《行过死荫之地》。

People started sending him scripts. One was for “The Guest.” As it happened, Mr. Stevens had recently seen “You’re Next,” an isolated-house-in-the-woods romp of a slasher movie written by Simon Barrett and directed by Adam Wingard, the same people responsible for “The Guest.” He thought it was over the top and hilarious. “I knew I wanted to meet the crazy people who’d made it,” he said. “The Guest” script, he said, continued in that vein. “I was just laughing hysterically page after page, thinking, ‘This is insane.’ ”

人们开始给他寄剧本。其中是一个是《神秘访客》。史蒂文斯当时刚看完影片《你是下一个》(You’re Next)，它讲了一个发生在树林孤立小屋里的故事，既恐怖又搞笑，编剧是西蒙·巴雷特(Simon Barrett)，导演是亚当·温加德(Adam Wingard)，他们是《神秘访客》的同一个制作班底。史蒂文斯觉得《你是下一个》特别精彩，十分滑稽。“我当时就知道我想认识它疯狂的创作者们，”他说。他说《神秘访客》的剧本跟它一脉相承。“每一页都看得我捧腹大笑，心想‘这太疯狂了’。”

Mr. Wingard said he had been looking for an actor to upend expectations by turning from nice to menacing to flat-out psycho. “I liked his politeness and natural likability,” Mr. Wingard said of Mr. Stevens. “We wanted someone who seemed trustworthy. Your everyday audience member watching the film who was familiar with ‘Downton Abbey’ wouldn’t expect him to take this turn.”

温加德说他当时在寻找一位能颠覆观众预期的演员，他将从好人变成一种威胁，后来证明是彻底的精神变态。“我喜欢他的彬彬有礼与自然可亲，”温加德这样评价史蒂文斯，“我们想找一个外表看上去值得信赖的人。熟悉《唐顿庄园》的普通观众不会想到他会有这样的转变。”

There were two worries. One, Mr. Stevens was hyper-skinny after “A Walk Among the Tombstones,” and it was important that he bulk up to a military-grade physique. Two, Mr. Stevens speaks like someone who should have a “Sir” in front of his name, and there was a worry that he would not get the accent quite right.

有两个顾虑。第一，史蒂文斯在演完《行过死荫之地》之后非常削瘦，他需要变得健硕，符合军人的体形。第二，史蒂文斯讲话的感觉像一位爵士，所以他的口音可能不太像。

Neither was a problem. Through a rigorous program involving martial arts and “more gym stuff,” as Mr. Stevens so eloquently put it, he bulked up enough so that in the scene when he and his chiseled torso emerge from the shower, you can only feel sorry that he died before Lady Mary (and “Downton” viewers) had the chance to appreciate his new body. And he loves doing accents, using a dialect coach and also an online feature in which people record themselves speaking in regional accents.

这两个都不是问题。通过严格的计划，包括武术和“在健身房的更多锻炼”（对此史蒂文斯已经说了很多），他变得非常健硕，电影中有一幕他沐浴出来，肌肉线条分明，让你只会为玛丽小姐（以及《唐顿庄园》的观众）没机会欣赏他的新身材而感到遗憾。他喜欢模仿口音，他跟一位方言教练学习，还观看网上的一个节目——讲各种方言的人把自己的话录下来。

Mr. Stevens came to “High Maintenance” after hearing about it from a friend. Out of the blue, he sent a fan email to its creators, the husband-and-wife team Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair, fellow Brooklynites. They met up, became friends with Mr. Stevens and his wife, and began kicking around ideas for an episode he could star in.

史蒂文斯是从一位朋友那儿听说《高昂的代价》的。他非常意外地给它的创作者、布鲁克林的卡特娅·布里奇菲尔德(Katja Blichfeld)和本·辛克莱(Ben Sinclair)夫妇发了一封电子邮件，说自己是这个节目的粉丝。他们见了面，两家人成了朋友，开始开动脑筋，创作一集能让他主演的节目。

“He told us he was really looking to challenge himself as an actor and play roles that were as different from Matthew Crawley as possible,” Ms. Blichfeld said by telephone.

“他当时告诉我们，他真的想在表演方面挑战自我，想饰演一些跟马修·克劳利尽可能不同的角色，”布里奇菲尔德在电话采访中说。

At the same time, the fashion designer Rachel Comey got in touch, wanting to be involved in the project. “They thought, Dan Stevens and Rachel Comey. How about Dan Stevens in Rachel Comey?” Mr. Stevens said.

与此同时，时装设计师蕾切尔·科米(Rachel Comey)与他们取得联系，想加入这个节目。“他们当时想，丹·史蒂文斯和蕾切尔·科米。那让丹·史蒂文斯穿蕾切尔·科米设计的服装会怎么样呢？”史蒂文斯说。

Ms. Blichfeld continued: “The cross-dressing thing came about because we were hanging out with him, and he has such a nice figure, and it wasn’t hard to imagine him wearing those clothes.”

布里奇菲尔德接着说：“我们和他一起玩的时候产生了让他穿异性服装的想法。他的身材非常好，不难想像他穿那些衣服的样子。”

She added, “He was our biggest celebrity to date, and we were curious about how he would feel about our set experience — our craft services are Trader Joe’s snacks — but he was extremely cool and chatted to all our crew members and hung out after the shoot.”

她补充说，“他是我们节目中到目前为止最大牌的明星，我们很想知道他对我们的片场会有什么样的感觉——我们提供的食物是Trader Joe的快餐——但是他特别友好，跟剧组的所有成员聊天，拍完戏后跟我们一起出去玩。”

Mr. Stevens started acting as a teenager. Adopted by a pair of schoolteachers as an infant and raised in southeast England, he won a scholarship to the well-respected Tonbridge School, where a teacher, Jonathan Smith, began casting him in school plays. He went on to Cambridge, where he belonged to the Footlights acting troupe, did some stand-up comedy that has sadly been lost to the ages (“I rejoice that I was doing stand-up at an age before YouTube,” he said) and immersed himself in his second love, literature.

史蒂文斯十几岁就开始表演。他婴儿时期被一对学校教师收养，在英格兰东南部长大，后来获得受人尊敬的汤布里奇中学的奖学金，那里的老师乔纳森·史密斯(Jonathan Smith)选他在学校话剧里演出。他读剑桥时是脚灯表演剧团(Footlights)的一员，演过一些单口相声，可惜因年代久远已经没有录像资料了（他说“我很高兴自己是在YouTube之前的时代演过脱口秀”），同时也沉迷于他的第二大爱好——文学。

He wrote his thesis on the fin de siècle satire of Oscar Wilde and Will Self. “It was one of those things that seemed like a slightly left-of-field thing to do, and it turned out it was probably a bit too far left of field,” he said. But it stood him in good stead in 2012, when the judges of the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s most important fiction award, heard him opining about literature on the BBC and invited him to be a judge that year.

他的论文是关于奥斯卡·王尔德(Oscar Wilde)和威尔·塞尔夫(Will Self)的颓废派讽刺作品。“它是那种好像有点奇怪的事情，结果证明它可能有点太奇怪了，”他说。但是2012年这给他带来了好处，英国最重要的小说奖曼布克奖的评委们听他在BBC上谈论文学后，邀请他担任那一年的评委。

Hilary Mantel ended up winning for “Bring up the Bodies,” but Mr. Stevens’s championing of Mr. Self’s challenging, brilliant “Umbrella” helped elevate it to the shortlist. With some Cambridge friends, Mr. Stevens edits and contributes pieces to The Junket, an online literary quarterly. He and Ms. Harriet, a jazz singer from South Africa, are raising their two young children in Brooklyn Heights. He is working on some screenplays and has an array of new acting projects coming up, including the third “Night at the Museum” movie, in which he plays a fictional character, Sir Lancelot, who comes to life.

最后，希拉里·曼特尔(Hilary Mantel)凭借《提堂》(Bring up the Bodies)获得了当年的曼布克奖，不过史蒂文斯支持塞尔夫颇具挑战性的精彩小说《雨伞》(Umbrella)，帮助它进入了决选名单。史蒂文斯目前还和剑桥大学的一些朋友一起为在线文学季刊《The Junket》担任编辑和撰稿人。他的妻子哈里特是来自南非的爵士歌手，两人在布鲁克林高地抚育两名幼子。最近他正在看一些剧本；他饰演的更多新角色也即将登上大银幕，包括他在《博物馆奇妙夜3》(Night at the Museum)中饰演的一个复活的虚构人物——兰斯洛特爵士(Sir Lancelot)。

“There’s only so much sitting around saying, ‘I have to do different things,’ ” he said. “You just have to go and do them.”

“你不能一直光说，‘我必须做些不同的事，’”他说，“你必须得去做。”

Still, it will be a long time, if ever, before he puts “Downton” behind him. In some places, the series is still a few seasons behind.

不过，他想把《唐顿庄园》抛在身后可能还需要很长时间，甚至可能永远都甩不掉。在有些地方，这部电视剧还有好几季没播出呢。

“People all over the world are still watching it,” Mr. Stevens said. “I’ll be dealing with some bereaved Japanese in the near future.”

“全世界的人都还在看它，”史蒂文斯说，“在不久的将来日本人将面临失去大表哥的痛苦。”