Ivana Lowell was visiting family in Ireland at Leixlip Castle, the then home of her cousin Desmond Guinness—a great-great-great-great-grandson of brewery founder Arthur Guinness—when inspiration struck. An episode of Downton Abbey “was kind of on in the background,” she remembers. “But we’re talkers and we’re drinkers.” She laughs. “I was looking around, and I just thought, Oh my God. Our family would make such a good TV series. It’s got everything: drama and money and beer. And best of all, it’s all true.”
So Lowell got to work writing a treatment. As a daughter of Lady Caroline Blackwood, the eldest child of brewery heir Maureen Guinness and Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, the Fourth Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, she grew up hearing the lore surrounding the family’s rags-to-extreme-riches story. “My mother was a great storyteller and writer,” she tells VF of Caroline, who was known for her ethereal beauty—and for rejecting her aristocratic roots in favor of a bohemian lifestyle, as well as relationships with artistic men. “My grandmother was [also] a great storyteller.”
Maureen was one of three beautiful sisters known in the 1920s as the golden Guinness girls. Their father, Ernest Guinness, was a son of Edward Guinness, the First Earl of Iveagh, and is depicted in the show Lowell helped dream up, which would eventually be called House of Guinness. The series premieres Thursday on Netflix.
“There were various myths about how Arthur created the beer. I actually had him burning the hops,” says Lowell—one possible explanation for how the black stout first achieved its distinctive quality. “Then he inherited one pound from the Archbishop of Kelsey, whom he worked for [as a porter], and with that pound, he started his own brewery in Celbridge. It went on to become the big brewery that’s now in St. James’s Gate in Dublin.”
Several years later, writer Steven Knight agreed to be the show’s brewmaster. The Peaky Blinders creator had been working on a World War II drama, Rogue Heroes, with the production company that was handling Lowell’s treatment. Knowing of his personal interest in beer—Knight, who also cocreated Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, once ran his own brewery called Freedom Beer Company—they approached him about creating a show.
“I discovered in doing research that the characters almost spoke for themselves,” Knight tells VF. “There is this consistency of unconventional characters who are very compelling, all the way through to the 1960s. They had this particular outlook on life [that,] as a dramatist, was an absolute gift to discover.”
Meeting Lowell at a London pub sealed the deal. The only hiccup was that the place didn’t have any Guinness on tap, and the proprietor had to send out for some. “We just got on so well,” says Lowell. Though she was tempted to give Knight notes after receiving his first script, she thought better of it. “We had a few conversations [because] he just wanted to make sure that certain things were accurate. But once he got writing, he just did his thing.”
The result is House of Guinness, a rollicking 19th-century costume drama that opens with the death of Arthur’s grandson: Sir Benjamin Guinness, who built the business into one of the largest breweries in the world. The Succession-like saga kicks off when he unexpectedly leaves only two of his four children in charge of the enterprise as well as his extensive estate. Arthur (Anthony Boyle), the closeted eldest, is an Eton and Oxford graduate with no interest in the brewery, and who’s expected to assume his father’s seat in the House of Commons. Ambitious and hard-charging Edward (Louis Partridge) has been hands-on at St. James’s Gate. Left out of the will is Anne (Emily Fairn), a steely but frail woman in a loveless marriage who is also carrying on a clandestine affair with the brewery’s ruthless foreman, Rafferty (James Norton). Lastly, there’s Benjamin (Fionn O’Shea), the wastrel youngest who drinks and gambles too much and owes money to the local loan shark, Bonnie Champion (David Wilmot).
“Do you not see the miracle of this?” Anne asks Edward. “Our father has managed to bequeath millions in money and land, and yet make all of us unhappy.” According to the series, Benjamin’s vast personal fortune is worth the equivalent of about $162 million today, plus houses, shipyards, railroads, and real estate. Complicating matters for the fractious siblings is the country’s volatile political climate. The Fenians, the group fighting for Irish independence, blame Benjamin for cozying up to the British, who still have control over all of Ireland. As the family’s indispensable butler Potter (Michael McElhatton) puts it, “The evangelists blame him for everything else.”
Episodes are propelled by an Irish music playlist that runs the gamut from traditional folk (the Clancy Brothers) to punk (Fontaines D.C., Dropkick Murphys), heavy metal (the Scratch), and fusion electronica (Afro Celt Sound System). A disclaimer notes the story is fictional but inspired by the truth. “When I hear the true stories of what happened, then it’s almost like the gloves are off,” Knight says. “Because so much went on that was so wild that often, when you invent something it’s nowhere near as outrageous or unlikely as the things that really happened. For example, the way that Arthur tried to rig an election using bus tickets and wardrobes with holes cut into the back is true.”
In the series as in real life, we see the Guinness clan entering into marriages of convenience with aristocrats who can confer further legitimacy onto them. Arthur has un mariage blanc with impoverished Lady Olivia Hedges (Danielle Galligan)—the daughter of an earl who agrees to find intimacy elsewhere. (Lowell says the pair never had children.) Edward has a dalliance with fictional Fenian leader Ellen Cochrane (Niamh McCormack)—but eventually the heir marries his distant Guinness cousin, Adelaide (Ann Skelly). Knight thought Ellen served an important function in the story: “What I wanted was a human relationship that represented the need for the Guinness family to shift their position, especially in the late 1860s,” he says.
“I think everyone in the family tried to be apolitical,” Lowell notes. “They wanted to use politics to get where they wanted, but they weren’t passionate [about it].”
Rafferty, the family enforcer—Arthur tells Olivia he’s “a linchpin, protector, and weapon of control” who uses a vintage piece of brewing equipment as a weapon—is based on a real person. “There was a fixer…who did the job that the family needed to be done,” Knight says. But the character’s extreme familiarity with some female family members is fiction. Byron Hedges (Jack Gleeson), the illegitimate Guinness Fenian who goes to work for Edward in America, is a composite character. “There were lots of illegitimate Guinness children,” says Knight. “And there was a movement into the United States that was founded upon the efforts of some of [those] people.”
“In our family anything goes,” Lowell admits. “It’s the same today as it has always been…. My Aunt Perdita [Blackwood]—my mother’s sister, [who] still lives on the family estate in [Northern Ireland]—always says, ‘Well, that’s just how it was’ when she talks about her childhood. She doesn’t question it.”
Lowell investigated her own trauma-filled upbringing in her 2010 memoir, Why Not Say What Happened?. A peripatetic childhood marked by sexual abuse, extreme burns after being struck by scalding water, and the heroin overdose of her older sister Natalya led to Lowell’s reliance on alcohol, although she’s since written about going to rehab. After Lady Caroline’s death from cancer in 1996, Lowell learned that her father wasn’t actually her mother’s second husband, composer Israel Citkowitz—whom Caroline married after painter Lucian Freud and before poet Robert Lowell. Instead, a DNA test Lowell took while pregnant with her now 25-year-old daughter, Daisy Miller, confirmed that Lowell’s biological father was British screenwriter Ivan Moffat.
Now living in the Hamptons, where she raised Daisy, Lowell is still close with family members including fashion icon Daphne Guinness and designer-model Jasmine Guinness, both of whom attended the show’s premiere this week, along with many Guinness cousins. (Though Lowell’s sister, Evgenia Citkowitz, who was married to actor Julian Sands until his untimely death, wasn’t there.) Lowell thinks there are now about 100 Guinness family members, some of whom live on what she estimates are the family’s 10 remaining estates.
As for House of Guinness season two, Knight—who’s currently writing the next James Bond movie for director Denis Villeneuve—doesn’t have one mapped out yet. But he wants viewers to understand how the members of this dysfunctional dynasty are fully aware of their own absurdity. “The beer is great, and that’s important. The people themselves, they make mistakes, they’ve got flaws, and they live these slightly chaotic lives. But it’s done with a certain amount of flair and panache,” he says. “They’re always surrounded by artists and poets for a reason, you know. Ivana’s mom was a muse for a reason.”
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