Inspiring T-shirts and a web campaign to free a fictional character from make-believe incarceration takes pretty good acting. But for millions of viewers, Brendan Coyle is Bates, the moody head valet at Downton Abbey who can’t seem to get an even break from Britain’s criminal justice system, leading loyal fans to petition Parliament to “Free Bates!”
Nominated for a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor for his Downton Abbey performance, Coyle has garnered other accolades, winning a Laurence Olivier Award in 1999 for his role in Conor McPherson’s The Weir and a New York Critics Theater World Award for Outstanding Broadway Debut for the same play in its New York production.
Coyle has been a charismatic fixture in British film, television, and theater for two decades. In 2001, he appeared in the film Conspiracy as Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller. He was millworker Nicholas Higgins in the BBC’s acclaimed 2004 adaptation of North and South by Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. Masterpiece viewers first saw him in 2001 in The Inspector Lynley Mysteries: A Great Deliverance, and again in 2006 in Prime Suspect, The Final Act, Helen Mirren’s swan song as DS Tennison, in which Coyle played her corporate-minded boss. Recently, he joined forces with Lesley Sharp to play an upbeat married couple in the new British sitcom Starlings. "It was a relief when this came along,” Coyle confided to a UK reporter. “It's a breath of fresh air because I was getting a lot of offers to play moody men.”
