see here a few pictures and read some extracts and let’s look forward to the show on Saturday

source:express.co.uk

Damian Lewis knew he’d ‘made it’ after his Homeland character was referenced by Jay Z

HE WON numerous awards and nominations after starring as Nicholas Brody in the hugely successful political thriller, Homeland.

However it was only when Damian Lewis’ character was mentioned in a rap song that the actor realised he’d made it across the pond, he jokingly revealed this week.

Speaking on The Jonathan Ross Show – set to air tomorrow evening – the 44-year-old was asked about the cult US series and its celebrity fans.

The father-of-two said: “He referenced Brody in one of his songs which was, I don’t know, if you want to arrive anywhere, that’s where you want to arrive isn’t it? In a Jay Z song.”

When asked if he had spoken with the rapper about the track, Damian joked: “It’s ‘Jay’ now between us two but no I haven’t.

When questioned about meeting actress Jennifer Lawrence, the Band Of Brothers star said: “We found ourselves next to each other on the red carpet in LA recently… We were being interviewed independently and she just suddenly went ‘Oh My God… I love your show, it’s Brody, oh wow!'”

And on the interviewer revealing a spoiler connected with the plot, Damian said of the Oscar winner’s shock: “She went ‘What!’ and the woman just crumpled, she knew immediately [that she’d spoilt it.]”

Speaking about his family, Damian explained what he and actor wife, Helen McCrory, tell their young children about their exciting jobs.

“It’s not age appropriate a lot of the work that I do, unfortunately… They don’t know what acting means, you tell a seven year old or a five year old that you’re actors and they’re as likely to say, ‘aren’t we all’… So we still tell them we get paid to tell stories for people and they seem to understand that.”

Damian added: “Going on the school run actually during the height of Homeland, there was this one billboard which was an enormous poster of Homeland with me on it.

“I thought it’d be confusing for them, they were only five and six at the time and I always pointing at things out the other window.”

Damian Lewis is joined on this week’s programme by Paloma Faith, Josh Widdicombe and Bryan Ferry.

The Jonathan Ross Show will air tomorrow night on ITV1 at 9.55pm.

The Jonathan Ross Show is back for a brand new series on ITV in January 2015.

This week, Jonathan welcomes Homeland and Wolf Hall star Damian Lewis and music legend Bryan Ferry, who will be performing as well as chatting. Further guests tbc.

Saturday 07.March 9:55 pm to 10:55 pm

read extracts from the interview here:

THERE ARE MANY who swear that Mark Rylance, the man Callender tapped to play Cromwell, is the greatest actor alive, that seeing him embody the small-time drug dealer Johnny “Rooster” Byron in Jerusalem is as close to a religious experience as the theater can offer. At lunch on a Pasadena, California, hotel patio, Rylance blushes, looking at his feet while Damian Lewis, who plays Wolf Halls Henry VIII, testifies to his brilliance. “I don’t know who the greatest actor is—it’s kind of a ridiculous notion—but if you haven’t seen Mark onstage, I’m here to tell you he’s extraordinary,” Lewis says. “He’s kind of cornered the market in redefining characters that we think we know.”

As they are both actors who spent their early professional years performing the Bard at the Royal Shakespeare Company, it might be tempting for American audiences to toss Rylance and Lewis into the same classically trained British actor bin. But just eyeballing them sitting next to each other suggests that their social circles rarely intersect. Rylance, who arrived wearing his trademark fedora, comes across as a theater bohemian, with silver Navajo bracelets on each wrist (he’s actively involved in Survival International, a group committed to protecting tribal people around the world) and a short-sleeved patterned bowling shirt; Lewis, the Eton-educated, St. John’s Wood–reared son of London privilege, is chic in a tailored dark blue shirt, designer jeans and a Rolex, and carries himself with a natural masculine confidence. Given that Rylance has spent his life projecting his voice onstage—he’s won three Tonys and two Oliviers—it’s surprising that he speaks so softly one has to lean in to hear him, even sitting a few feet away. (As a child, Rylance suffered from an intense shyness that kept him from speaking a word until he was 6.)

Through Wolf Hall  Rylance has taken on the job that Mantel began—redefining Cromwell, saving him even, almost 500 years after he was beheaded on trumped-up charges of treason. Rylance, best described as sprightly, might not be the first actor who comes to mind to play Cromwell; in Wolf Hall  he’s a physically imposing brute who had likely killed a man or two in close combat during his mysterious younger days and was depicted in the enduring Hans Holbein likeness as a bruiser, fleshy and austere under his black bonnet. “I’m aware I’m not so big as Cromwell is physically, but I can take on psychological weight,” Rylance says. Playing bigger isn’t a problem for an actor of Rylance’s gifts; in fact, just the day before, he’d been sitting with Steven Spielberg, discussing how he will play the titular big friendly giant in The BFG the director’s upcoming adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book. He’s thought deeply about the mechanics of the Cromwell-Henry relationship and came upon an unexpected insight when he encountered a man who keeps grizzly bears in Montana. “He said to me, the thing with bears is they are incredibly emotional, they’re made of emotions,” Rylance says. “You have to be very clear and very loving towards this bear, which is emotionally like a 15- or 16-year-old autistic child. I compare Damian’s Henry to that.”

Given Rylance’s and Lewis’s different career trajectories, it’s no surprise that the two had never met before showing up to rehearse for Wolf Hall.If fans weren’t stopping Lewis on the street regularly enough after he’d been plucked from obscurity by Spielberg to play Major Dick Winters in HBO’s 10-hour World War II miniseries,  Band of Brothers , his three seasons as Homeland’s Nicholas Brody has made his face world famous. He and his wife, the actress Helen McCrory, are frequent paparazzi  targets when they are out near their London home with their children, Manon and Gulliver. After settling down at lunch, his eye catches a phone being trained at him from a neighboring table. “Sorry, it’s a little off-putting, OK?” Lewis says to the amateur photographer. Rylance says he almost never runs into this problem: “I only get recognized in theatrical districts, like around Broadway or the West End.” Rylance is a theater actor and seems to want to keep it that way. “All my life agents have told me you must be a film and television actor to be a full actor,” he says. “But I thought, I’m really happy being a stage actor.”

A full decade elapsed between  Band of Brothers and Homeland during which Lewis spent a few years in and out of L.A., doing what seemed the logical next step—movies. His big pivot into film was Dream catcher  a gory Stephen King adaptation in which Lewis was possessed by a homicidal alien. “I found the experience lonely and unsatisfying,” he says. “I wasn’t ready for it. After  Band of Brothers was in L.A., sleeping in my agent’s spare room, reading scripts that I simply didn’t think much of. So I decided I could sit in Hollywood and make movies that I was not very proud of until one maybe came along that was really great. But I ran away, fearful that I’d lose my integrity.” His experience doing television at home in England—in PBS’s period drama The Forsyte Saga —proved far more nourishing, so joining Wolf Hall was not a tough call for him, especially since he would be able to avoid playing, as he’s put it, the “syphilitic, philandering Elvis” of Henry’s later years and people’s imagination; instead, he embodies the young, athletic Henry, a man apparently quite vain about his calves. “He was always boasting how his calf was bigger than Philip the Fair’s, of France, in a sort of schoolboyish way,” Lewis says.

Kosminsky chose carefully in casting Lewis as Henry VIII and Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn, the two characters who would share the most screen time with Rylance. “Mark is the best actor we have currently,” says Kosminsky. “And when you’re dealing with Mark you feel you’re dealing with nothing so much as a thoroughbred. Thoroughbreds can be highly strung, of course.” He’d given Lewis his first major role inWarrior’s, about the war in the former Yugoslavia, and he’d just worked with Foy in 2011’s The Promise ,about Britain’s role in the creation of Israel.

When it aired in England earlier this year, the reception for Wolf Hall was rapturous, with one or two critics even suggesting that, thanks to the performances, the show equaled its source material. Authors are notoriously finicky about adaptations, but Mantel is unreserved in her praise. “I like it very much, yes,” she says. “It’s really a privilege to have such a skilled and thoughtful adaptation. It’s a beautiful work in its own right.”

Which naturally brings about talk of sequels, and whether Lewis and Rylance will be able to finish the job with Cromwell, who, at the conclusion of the miniseries, is still four years from meeting his gruesome end. This would require Mantel to deliver the third book in the Wolf Hall  trilogy, but she’s been busy, primarily helping with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s staged adaptation of Wolf Hall . “Now I’m just part of the team,” she says. “There’s all those clichés about the theater being a family.” Becoming part of a troupe apparently agrees with her so much that she’s joining the new cast in New York this month to prepare them for their Broadway debut.

Lewis is willing to continue in the role—though not, he says, to gorge himself enough to arrive at Henry’s latter-day girth (by the time he died, he had a 54-inch waist). “Don’t worry,” Lewis says. “There’s a very good fat suit which is doing the rounds.”

read the full article here

http://www.wsj.com/articles/damian-lewis-and-mark-rylance-star-in-pbs-masterpieces-wolf-hall-1425587807

Gallery Links:

2015/02/15 ‘Wolf Hall’ Press Conference
Photoshoots > Session 083

See the first and fantastic artwork for

American Buffalo

The first poster for Damian Lewis ‘s American Buffalo has been released.

The Wolf Hall actor will return to the West End stage for the first time since 2009 when he stars in the revival of David Mamet’s play.

John Goodman and Tom Sturridge will also star in the play.

the production, which will be staged at London’s Wyndham’s Theatre from April 16 to June 27.

Daniel Evans is on board to direct the play, which follows three small-time crooks as they plan a massive heist. 

American Buffalo premiered in Chicago and opened on Broadway in 1977. It was later adapted for a 1996 movie starring Dennis Franz, Dustin Hoffman and Sean Nelson.

Lewis said that he is “thrilled” to be starring in the revival of Mamet’s play, and expressed his excitement to be working with Evans, who he studied with at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Tickets for American Buffalo are on sale now.