Here’s the cast for Julian Fellowes’s new Netflix drama ‘The English Game’

Netflix’s The English Game features a cast of familiar faces from British period dramas.

Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes has teamed up with Netflix to produce a new show dramatising the origins of football.

Set in the late 1800s, the limited mini-series was announced in 2018 and began filming in the north of England earlier this year.

The six 60-minute episodes are set to explore how “the sport crossed class lines and became a worldwide phenomenon despite its humble beginnings on the pitch at London’s Limes Field.”

The English Game will tell “how modern football came from a joining together of Etonians and factory workers to create a sport now played by 250 million in more than 200 countries.”

The cast includes Henry Lloyd Hughes (Parade’s End), Craig Parkinson (Indian Summers), Kevin Guthrie (Dunkirk), Sam Keeley (In the Heart of the Sea), Joncie Elmore (Downton Abbey), Gerard Kearns (Shameless) and Charlotte Hope (Game of Thrones).

They’ll be joined by Kate Phillips (The Crown), Kate Dickie (Game of Thrones), Edward Holcroft (Wolf Hall), Sylvestra Le Touzel (Titanic), Ben Batt (The Village), James Harkness (The Victim) and Niamh Walsh (Jamestown).

Discussing the show, Julian Fellowes told iNews: “There’s this extraordinary anomaly that football, originally devised by public schoolboys at Eton, to be played by their own rules, becomes this game that dominates the world.

“As the game spread, it becomes less tenable that the Etonians could reserve football for themselves. The clubs that rise in the industrial Midlands and the North become the true representatives of the game.”

The English Game will premiere exclusively on Netflix around the world in 2020.

Julian Fellowes is going to be a busy man next year, with HBO’s The Gilded Age in production and the script for a second Downton Abbey movie to be written.

The Downton Abbey movie is available on DVD on Amazon.