The star of Sunday night’s most addictive drama, talks to Craig McLean about playing a Muslim, living between LA and London and why he couldn’t say no to Homeland

There are A-listers, and there are stars so powerful they trump even the alphabet. Damian Lewis is familiar with plenty of the former. The Londoner worked with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg on his breakthrough mini-series, 2001’s Band Of Brothers, Natalie Portman on last year’s medieval romp, Your Highness, and Mickey Rourke on teen spy yarn Alex Rider: Stormbreaker.

He went to school with one — he and Dominic West were contemporaries at Eton — and studied with two — Lewis was an undergrad at Guildhall School of Music and Drama alongside Ewan McGregor and Joseph Fiennes. The 41-year-old is even married to a top-drawer star: wife Helen McCrory is one of our greatest theatrical talents.

But all those pale next to Lewis’s newest fan: Barack Obama. Last year, the President of the United States outed himself as an enthusiastic follower of Homeland, the smash American TV series that has made Lewis a star in the US.

“Fantastic,” smiles the actor currently playing the complex lead character in the drama, an American Marine imprisoned in the Middle East by jihadists for eight years. Homeland was a ratings and critical smash when it broadcast across the Atlantic last year, and Obama’s endorsement propelled the show, and its English leading man, onto the op-ed pages of one of the country’s most august newspapers.

“I hate this word but I can’t think of anything else to say — you know you’ve hit the zeitgeist when the piece of entertainment you’re a part of has made the political pages of something like the New York Times. It’s had that crossover.

“The piece was talking about the withdrawal of troops,” the actor tells me when we meet in Kentish Town, not far from the family home he shares with McCrory and children, Gulliver, five, and Manon, four. “And about the way in which Obama has had to finish a shitty job started by the Bush administration. It said that he actually wasn’t doing it that well — but even so, he was doing it. And it talked about the paranoia that still exists in our foreign policy, and at home in the US — and that this was comparable to what we were seeing in Homeland.”

Read the full interview at the Evening Standard website.

Gallery Links:

Public Appearances > 2012 > 2012/03/21 ‘An Evening with Homeland’ – Arrivals

Public Appearances > 2012 > 2012/03/21 ‘An Evening with Homeland’ – Panel

Rewatch the panel interview below. Great stuff from the cast and crew. A couple of highlights: Damian discusses meeting the President at the state dinner (29:00) and explains how a role in low-budget porn film led to his breakthrough in ‘Band of Brothers’ (1:28). (He was just joking about the porn film! )

The ‘An Evening with Homeland’ panel interview will take place Wednesday, March 21st in North Hollywood, CA. Tweet any questions you might have for Damian Lewis, Claire Danes, David Harewood, and the producers @PrimetimeEmmys. You can watch the panel discussion live at Emmys.com beginning at 7:30pm PDT. Video of the event will be available online for later viewing.

SHOWTIME has put together a powerful one-two punch on Sundays this fall with the premieres of its top-rated drama series’ DEXTER and HOMELAND. On Sunday, September 30th, DEXTER will make its seventh season premiere at 9:00 PM ET/PT, followed by the highly-anticipated second season of the Golden Globe®-winning drama series HOMELAND at 10:00 PM ET/PT. The announcement was made today by David Nevins, President of Entertainment, Showtime Networks Inc.

HOMELAND ranks as the network’s highest-rated freshman drama series ever, and was recently awarded the Golden Globe for Best Television Drama, as well as being named one of AFI’s Top Ten Television Programs of 2011. The series averaged 4.4 million weekly viewers across platforms in its first season, and its season one finale was the highest-rated finale for a freshman series in SHOWTIME history, with five million viewers across platforms. The network’s No. 1 rated series, DEXTER averaged 5.5 million weekly viewers across platforms in its sixth season, its highest rated ever. Both series will begin production this spring. HOMELAND will shoot on location in Israel and in North Carolina, and DEXTER will continue to shoot in Los Angeles.

HOMELAND is a one-hour drama series that tells the story of Carrie Mathison (Golden Globe winner Claire Danes), a CIA officer dealing with bi-polar disorder, who becomes convinced that the intelligence that led to the rescue of Nicholas Brody (Golden Globe nominee Damian Lewis), a U.S. soldier who had been missing and presumed dead for eight years, was a setup and may be connected to an Al-Qaeda plot to be carried out on American soil. The series also stars Morena Baccarin, David Harewood, Diego Klattenhoff, David Marciano, Navid Negahban, Jamey Sheridan, Morgan Saylor, Jackson Pace and Mandy Patinkin. HOMELAND is based on the original Israeli series “Prisoners of War,” by Gideon Raff, developed for American television by Howard Gordon & Alex Gansa. Along with Gordon, Gansa and Raff, the executive producers for season one are Avi Nir, Ran Telem and Michael Cuesta. The series is produced by FOX 21.

One of the most acclaimed shows on television, DEXTER stars Michael C. Hall, who has earned multiple Emmy® nominations as well as a Golden Globe award for his role as a complicated and conflicted blood-spatter expert for the Miami police department who moonlights as a serial killer. The show has received multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for best television drama series, as well as a prestigious Peabody Award in 2008, and was twice named one of AFI’s Top Ten television series. The series also stars Jennifer Carpenter, Desmond Harrington, C.S. Lee, Lauren Vélez, David Zayas and James Remar. John Goldwyn, Sara Colleton, Scott Buck, Manny Coto, Tim Schlattmann, Wendy West and Michael C. Hall are the executive producers of the series for season seven.

Source: Showtime

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences will host ‘An Evening with Homeland’ in North Hollywood, CA on March 21st. The panel discussion which will include Damian Lewis and much of the cast and creative team behind Homeland is members-only but will broadcast live on Emmys.com and should be available online for later viewing.