London Rolls Out the Orange Carpet for 'Arrested Development'

No, you're not imagining things. There really was a Bluth's frozen-banana stand in Leicester Square in London on Thursday. And, yes, that really was George Bluth at the Tate Modern.

(Or maybe it was his brother, Oscar. They're so hard to tell apart sometimes.)

OK, it was actually Jeffrey Tambor on the receiving end of knowing glances and hushed comments at the famed art museum, but British reserve gave way to screams of delight at Thursday's orange-carpet "Arrested Development" premiere. And fans had reason to cheer, Tambor said: They're the ones who resurrected the show.

"People would come up to me and say, 'Is it happening? Is it happening?'" he recalled. "And after a while, I started saying that to the powers who were making the decisions. I told them, 'You don't know the groundswell that's going on,' and everybody started to get it. It was amazing."

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Alia Shawkat, aka Maeby Funke, still gets hit up "all the time" for details. "You never know who is an 'Arrested' fan," she said. "I'd go to music festivals and things [and run into fans], but now even my dentist will be asking me about the new episodes while he's [working on my teeth], and it's really hard to answer."

The 15 new episodes will hit Netflix on May 26 -- seven years after Fox pulled the plug on the Emmy-winning comedy.

"Huge time warp," marveled Tony Hale, who greeted fans with a Buster-style "Hey, crowd."

"We're all so grateful to be back," he gushed, "because it was the fans, it was the press -- that's what gave us all the momentum to be back."

See the cast on the London orange carpet:

It also helps that the cast members work so well together.

"It was so much fun to get to do scenes with those guys again," said Michael Cera, who singled out onscreen dad Jason Bateman for special praise. "I find [scenes with Jason] to be so satisfying because he's such a fun guy to play off of. He has such a specific energy, and he's so in control of what he's doing in the scene, it's just fun to work with."

The handful of cast members at the London premiere were contractually mum on plot details, but David Cross did let slip that we'd be seeing Tobias covered in paint again -- and it made him blue in more ways than one.

"It's awful. It's really awful," he admitted. "You don't realize how many times you touch yourself ... [and] if you do that, it smudges, and they have to redo it, so you have to stand [with your arms out] until you shoot your scene. Even if you scratch, it's a bummer. It sucks."

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Perhaps technology will solve that problem in time for the hoped-for (but not yet greenlit) movie, or even a Season 5. In pondering a Netflix-style second life for his short-lived NBC comedy "Bent," Tambor excitedly proclaimed that "the revolution is not only here, but it's been here for some time. Who knows what this is going to look like [in the future]? I mean, we may be holograms in a week. It's really exciting."

It's not "unlimited juice" exciting, but more "Arrested Development" -- even with a hologram Tobias -- would certainly be off the hook.