Hugh Bonneville (left) and Brendan Coyle of "Downton Abbey" with T-shirt after press conference Credit: Terry Morrow
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Just how far will a British gentleman go to support the man who dresses him?
Hugh Bonneville, who plays the usually very proper Lord Grantham on PBS' “Downton Abbey,” tore off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt Saturday night before a roomful of TV critics to reveal a T-shirt that read “Free Bates.”
So, OK, it wasn't exactly a striptease. And it's not as if Bonneville dropped his trousers – something that's happened, onstage, during at least a couple of Television Critics Association events in recent years – but for PBS' portion of the group's summer meetings, which began this weekend in Beverly Hills, it counted as a Moment.
And a nearly spontaneous one at that, Bonneville having conceived the idea only that morning. “I don't know how it came up, but I said, 'How about getting a T-shirt with “Free Bates” on it?' and someone went out “and bought a T-shirt and stenciled it on,” he said afterward.
“Downton Abbey,” whose second season on “Masterpiece” last week received 16 Emmy nominations, including one for outstanding drama and another for Bonneville as a lead actor, is giving once-staid PBS plenty of moments these days, none perhaps more anticipated than the one in which Maggie Smith, as the dowager countess, comes face to face with Shirley MacLaine for the first time onscreen in Season 3.
PBS ran a teaser reel for critics and let's just say hilarity does ensue.
Offscreen, too, apparently.
The Emmy-nominated Smith, alas, wasn't among the cast who crossed the pond for the critics' shindig. Besides Bonneville, they were the Emmy-nominated Brendan Coyle, who plays the unlucky Bates, currently serving a life sentence for a murder we're all pretty sure he didn't commit; the Emmy-nominated Michelle Dockery, who's Lady Mary; the Emmy-nominated Joanne Froggatt, who portrays Bates' loyal wife, Anna; and Elizabeth McGovern, who's Cora, Lady Grantham.
And we also got MacLaine, who may have had less distance to travel but who came prepared to play.
When I asked the actress, who's playing American Martha Levinson, Cora's brash mother, whether she and Smith had ever met before, she started to laugh.
“Oh, God. Should I tell this story?” she said.
Of course she should, I told her.
“Well, we were lovers in another life,” she joked.
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