ON AND off screen, Damian Lewis has been in the wars. At home in north London, five-year-old Gulliver is in the middle of a testosterone spike. Little sister Manon, four, is all sweetness and light, but his son is a running, punching, kicking, Power Rangers-mad ball of aggro energy.

“You’re having a perfectly normal conversation,” recounts the actor, “then suddenly he goes hiya – a punch straight in the balls! Just out of nowhere!” The 41-year-old shakes his head and grins. “You’re lying there crumpled on the floor. Unprovoked!”

Maybe little Gully is getting his own back on dad. Or maybe (whisper it), mum – actress Helen McCrory – is transferring some of her home-alone fatigue to their son. After all Lewis has been working away from home rather a lot in the past year. The London-born star of Band Of Brothers is – a decade after that Second World War HBO series made his name – a star in America, and has been putting in the filming hours to warrant it.

Lewis is the lead in Homeland, a new drama series made by US channel Showtime. He plays Sergeant Nick Brodie, an American Marine presumed dead in Iraq. But eight years after being declared missing in action, a Special Forces operation in effect trips over Brodie. The soldier emerges, battered, bearded and tortured, from an insurgents’ hole, and is promptly returned back to the States to a heroes’ welcome.

But is that all there is to it? A rogue CIA agent, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) has received a tip-off that an American serviceman has been converted by an al-Qaeda-associated group. Is this Brodie? Has he deliberately been freed so he can return to American soil as, in effect, a walking timebomb? Has patriot turned jihadist?

“Ten years on from 9/11, even though the power of al-Qaeda has been diminished, all these rogue factional elements have sprung up,” says Lewis. “So there are now terrorist networks operating in all these different countries with their own independent cells. And we’re just as likely to receive a terrorist attack from one of them as we are directly from al-Qaeda.”

“And I thought it was fascinating that there are high profile cases of British and American soldiers who have converted to Islam. John Lindh was famously known as the ‘American Taleban’, and is in fact still in prison in the United States. It’s absurd he’s still in custody.”

Read the full interview at the Scotsman.com website.

More Homeland press:

Digital Spy – ‘Homeland’ premieres to nearly 2m on Channel 4
Telegraph – Homeland, Channel 4, review
The Guardian – A brilliant, complex thriller, Homeland promises to be one of the hits of the year

Season 1 of Homeland is now available for pre-order at Amazon.co.uk and is set to be released on October 1st. Still no release date for the US.

Amazon.co.uk – DVD
Amazon.co.uk – Blu-Ray

Amazon.com – DVD
Amazon.com – Blu-Ray

Survey Damian Lewis’s CV and you’ll find he’s had a string of roles that required him to exude a certain kind of laconic, tight-lipped, battle-hardened maleness, holding it together as things fall apart. In 1999, he starred as a lieutenant in Warriors, a BBC production about British peacekeepers. He then crossed the Atlantic and starred first as Major Winters in Spielberg’s Band Of Brothers, and then in Life as Charlie Crews, a detective imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. Now, in new US drama Homeland, he’s playing Sergeant Nicholas Brody, a marine who, while held captive in Iraq, might have been turned by al-Qaida. It’s perhaps his most testing role to date, but one in which Lewis proves remarkably effective.

Those are the roles, but then there is Damian Lewis, actor, who breezes into the library of a Soho hotel, cheery and effusive in a big scarf, yellow buttonhole and slimcut jacket. He reminisces about hanging with fellow Etonian Dominic West and tracking down George Clooney’s party at the Golden Globes (Lewis was a Best Actor nominee), generally holding forth 19 to the dozen as he tucks into a breakfast order of pancakes, maple syrup and bacon. The contrast with the characters is quite astonishing, like Sean Bean turning out in real life to be more like Russell Brand.

“I do have this dual persona,” admits Lewis, who spends seven months of the year in the UK and five in the US. Does he maintain the American accent when he’s working in the States? “I do! I’m one of those idiots,” he roars. “When I’m working in America, I wake up with an American accent and stay with it all day till makeup comes off. I just want everyone to be at ease, and not have the show’s creators think, ‘Oh my god, he’s so English, why did we hire him?’”

Hire him they do, however, most recently in Homeland, which debuts in the UK this week. It’s made by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, both of whom worked on 24. But whereas that series eventually palled for many, Homeland – while equally gripping as it twists and unfurls – might find greater longevity thematically and in its central characters (Claire Danes won a Golden Globe for her role as a tenacious loose-cannon CIA agent with a bipolar condition). If 24 espoused a wishful, bravura sense of America as the world’s most effective global policeman, attaining results via methods that weren’t always for the squeamish, Homeland is more reflective and ambivalent, more conscious of the blowback that can result from ill-considered overseas intervention, bringing home the anger and resentment bred by US foreign policy.

“24 was a muscular, macho response to 9/11 and Kiefer was always going to save us,” says Lewis, who marched against the war with Iraq and shares the disaffection with western leadership that informs Homeland, a series he describes as “more liberal”. “The world went to war against terror and this has fostered greater uncertainty,” he says, “especially concerning our own governments.”

Read the full interview at The Guardian.

Within a few days, I’ve seen three sides to Damian Lewis. There’s the brilliantly gifted screen actor who plays Marine Sergeant Nick Brody, an American POW who may have turned Jihadist after eight years in captivity in Afghanistan in Channel 4’s gripping US import, ‘Homeland’. Then there’s the born stage performer at a Bafta Q&A, oozing confidence, playing to the gallery and toying with his questioner. And finally there’s the warm, thoughtful, self-deprecating guy sitting in the wood-panelled library of a London hotel. While many of his best-known characters have hinged on his mastery of suppressed emotion and underplaying, the man himself is rather more open. He explodes out of his armchair with excitement on discovering he’s getting a poached egg with his chicken caesar salad, but also sits in comfortable silence while pondering the psychological complexities of his latest challenge.

‘Well, I discussed with Alex [Gansa] and Howard [Gordon, show co-writers] the way in which Brody might have become a Muslim – and I’m not saying he has!’ he adds hurriedly, running his hand through his familiar and carefully tended red hair. ‘But it was important that it wasn’t a brainwashing, a “Manchurian Candidate”-type affair – that he might have found Allah as a force for good, a nurturing, sustaining, positive thing. I thought that would be far more interesting and powerful, and, as a prisoner of war, he would certainly have had more access to a Koran than a Bible. But this is a thriller, so you want provoke people in that way, putting this symbol of the upholding of Western belief systems into this situation. Seeing a man praying to Allah is enough for some people to assume he is a terrorist.’

His research took him to Brian Keenan’s chronicle of life in captivity, ‘An Evil Cradling’; to meet people suffering post-traumatic stress disorder; and to the London Central Mosque, where he was invited to sit in on prayers. His school days at Eton instilled in him ‘a watered-down, digestible Anglicanism’, but Lewis now feels he responds to different aspects of different religions. ‘I don’t believe Jesus was the son of God, although I’m inclined to think he might have been a great prophet.’ He massages his brow and strokes his chin, playing the philosopher with a pleasing lack of self-consciousness. ‘You know, I think I am faintly spiritual. I’ve had loss in my life, and I like to think my mother’s energy lives on in some faintly Buddhist way. I do find some comfort there.’

It’s undeniably unusual for a major American TV drama to address these issues in such a balanced manner, and ‘Homeland’ has clearly stuck a nerve. Golden Globes for Best Drama and Best Actress for Lewis’s co-star Claire Danes (and a nomination for Lewis himself), certainly, but it’s also Barack Obama’s favourite show and prompted an op-ed piece in The New York Times conflating events on-screen with current US foreign policy. Curiously, the producers also worked on ‘24’, one of the more reactionary takes on the War on Terror. ‘I always thought that was an easy allegation to make [about ‘24’], because it was a visceral, macho response to 9/11,’ Lewis argues.

Read the full interview at Time Out London

More ‘Homeland’ press:

I’ve added 45+ HQ stills from Homeland episodes 7-12 to the gallery. Thanks again to Sami for the assist!

Note: To hopefully make it easier to browse the gallery, I’ve now added intermediate pictures. To view the larger or HQ picture – if available – just click on the intermediate picture.

Gallery Links: