Dame Maggie Smith Once Lost Her Shit At The ‘Better Homes & Gardens’ Crew

If there’s one thing Harry Potter fans know it’s that you don’t mess with Professor McGonagall and as Johanna Griggs learned the hard way, you don’t mess with Dame Maggie Smith, either.

The Better Homes & Gardens star has opened up about meeting the iconic British actress on the set of Downtown Abbey way back in 2011 when the show was just getting started.

“Downton Abbey had launched overseas but they hadn’t launched in Australia, so they asked us to go over and do a behind-the-scenes look at the cast and the crew,” Griggs recalled to news.com.au.

The BHG crew spent the day filming on the show’s set at Highclere Castle in Hampshire, England.

“Obviously we’d seen a lot of pre-episodes of Downton Abbey, we’d heard all the hype about it coming out and I was personally so excited about meeting Dame Maggie Smith,” she added.

“We kept saying to them, ‘We’re going to be really, really easy. You won’t even know we’re here, we’re going to be behind the scenes. We’ll grab you each for two minutes if you’ve got a spare two minutes between scenes.’ In my head I was like, ‘I can’t wait to meet Dame Maggie, I can’t wait!’”

Unfortunately for Griggs, the real life Lady Violet Crawley wasn’t quite as pleased to meet her.

“They were doing a rehearsal for a scene and we had permission to film so we were shooting a wide shot of the room and then Dame Maggie just quietly stops and says, ‘Why is there a fucking camera in my face?’

“The PR company said, ‘Oh, Dame Maggie, this is a crew from Australia called Better Homes And Gardens. It’s the number one lifestyle show and we’re about to launch in Australia and we’ve had lots of discussions about this. They’re here to promote the show.’

“She goes, ‘Well, I don’t care who they fucking are, so get the fucking camera out of my face.’

“We just very quietly backed out of the room and closed the door. It was one of those things where you’re like, ‘That’s not how I thought that would go in my head.’”

While Dame Maggie’s reception was rather frosty towards the Aussies, Griggs added that the rest of the period drama’s cast and crew were V. friendly and apologised on Smith’s behalf.

“They said to us, ‘That’s just Dame Maggie — she loves to do this and put people off. It’s her thing,’” Griggs recalled.

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