Royals
‘Downton Abbey’ Stars Lesley Nicol and Raquel Cassidy Recall ‘Surreal’ Encounter With Duchess Kate
It’s not every day you get to meet Duchess Kate! Downton Abbey stars Lesley Nicol and Raquel Cassidy got the chance to meet the Duchess of Cambridge when she visited the show’s set and stopped to chat with a few members on the team.
“It was great,” Leslie, who plays Beryl Patmore, recently recalled about the whole experience exclusively to Closer Weekly. “She came in very proper and royal and then you realize within a few minutes she was actually a very big fan and very interested in how it all worked and she was very friendly and very sweet and we spent quite a lot of time with her.”
Not only was it great, but Raquel said meeting the duchess in person was a once in a lifetime experience. “It’s surreal,” she gushed. In the show, Raquel plays Miss Baxter and she’s been on the program since 2013.
When Kate visited the set, Raquel said the young royal was “heavily pregnant at the time with Princess Charlotte” and was very friendly with all of her colleagues.
“She was very graceful, funny and interested and adept,” Raquel admitted about Prince William‘s beautiful wife. “You know how we’ve kind of lost the art of conversation, she absolutely had that. She was going to meet 20 groups of us and she was going to have to show some kind of knowledge, some kind of interest, you know something that you hear that the Queen can do and she’s obviously filling those shoes.”
Even though Raquel didn’t get the sense that Kate was a “massive Baxter fan,” she still had a great time meeting the royal. “I was so overwhelmed,” she said. However, Raquel does regret not curtsying to Kate when they met.
“I didn’t, we were given the choice and we were taught how to but I went with a modest handshake,” Raquel admitted. “And then afterwards I thought, hmm how many times am I going to get to curtesy in my life, maybe I should have.”
Raquel and Lesley’s meeting with Kate is yet another reason why the Duchess of Cambridge is one of our most favorite royals!
