LOS ANGELES — A pregnant woman approached with three tots in tow.
“I am so sorry,” she said, one hand on her protruding belly, the other covering her mouth. “I love you. I love you,” she gushed as she got closer to Blair Underwood, dining at Clementine, a sidewalk cafe in Los Angeles.
“It was the funniest thing when you were on that show, ‘Christine,’ ” the woman said. “I was dying. The whole time I was dying.”
“I was too, ’cause I loved it,” replied Underwood, who has been toiling in TV and film for two decades and might just get his first Emmy nomination this year, if buzz is a reliable barometer of such things.
The woman referred to Underwood’s guest-star stint on CBS’s “The New Adventures of Old Christine” this season in which he played Christine’s (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) suave, sexy boyfriend, Daniel.
But that was only one of three prominent spots Underwood held on the tube this season.
On ABC’s “Dirty Sexy Money,” he plays the wealthy, dashing and ambiguous Simon Elder. On HBO’s “In Treatment,” which ended in March, he took on Alex Prince, a troubled Navy pilot whose brusque demeanor disguised his profound pain. Week after week, Underwood’s exacting portrayal of that duality captured both critics and his peers, leading to industrywide speculation that this could be Underwood’s year.
“These three projects are all projects I’m proud of,” Underwood said. “It’s not just fluff or doing it because you can. So to be able to have the opportunity to do the work and then for people to respond in such a way, to engage in that conversation, is in and of itself a reward to me.”
Over the past two decades, Underwood has turned in solid performances on popular TV series such as “L.A. Law” and “Sex and the City,” and films like “Full Frontal.” In Tyler Perry’s “Madea’s Family Reunion,” he portrayed a charismatic man who secretly beats his wife and later falls apart.
Someone who took notice of that performance was “In Treatment” creator Rodrigo Garcia, who adapted his series about a therapist (Gabriel Byrne) and his patients from a successful Israeli drama.
As Garcia crafted his version, changing a soldier into an American pilot who bombed an Iraqi school under orders — killing 16 children — he thought about Underwood.
“I think that it was easy to cast Blair for that terrific presence, that eloquent way of speaking, the way he conducts himself physically,” Garcia said. “But what he brought to Alex that was more than I bargained for was that way of balancing his incredible cockiness with those glimpses of pain and insecurity. He’s … so capable of giving those flashes, these little cracks that go by in a frame, and then you realize that this guy is a pretender.”
