A household name both sides of the Atlantic, Damian Lewis came to international prominence starring in Band of Brothers, furthering his reputation in The Forsyte Saga, Life and numerous stage plays.

A consummate actor of theatre, film and television, his recent triumph in Homeland won him a Golden Globe and an Emmy. In a great scoop for Epigram, he granted me an exclusive interview. I tried to uncover a few pearls of wisdom from the most exciting British actor of the moment. For many students staring nervously into the precipice of recession unemployment, Damian Lewis’ characters seem unrealistically cool and successful. Decisive and worldly, these soldiers, cops, business executives and assassins don’t rely on others. I asked him what advice he would offer graduates making their way in the world. But his own life wisdom is refreshingly clear. ‘Work hard, play hard,’ he summarises deftly. ‘Understand what makes you happy and do it.’

Such an approach has clearly served him well: he has dined with the U.S. President and been directed by Steven Spielberg. But his drive is evident. ‘I still think I’m trying to make it. A bit like chasing one’s tail. Not healthy, but part of the condition.’ Modest, certainly, but that attitude betrays the aspirations of a winner. I suspect that he does not consider sitting on his laurels to be a viable option. If he retired from acting today, he said that his dream job would be teaching. Well, an audience is an audience.

Rest assured, even someone as successful as Damian Lewis can encounter bumps on the road. ‘The cold sweat you get on stage the moment you know you have absolutely no idea what to say next haunts me in my dreams,’ he observes. Famously, his eyebrow was slashed open by Ralph Fiennes during a performance of Hamlet. Pretty awkward, but dramatic at least. ‘Worst moment though was when I was at The RSC. and heard my cue over the tannoy system. I was still in my dressing room four floors up and quite literally skidded to a halt at the end of my hysterical dash on to the stage. The other actors were pacing up and down. If looks could kill…’

As a notorious master of accents, perhaps mimicry is effortless. I wondered if there was any accent he had struggled to perfect. ‘I played football with Paul Gascoigne for a week and spent every moment I wasn’t with him trying to be him. I sounded mad. But then so does he. That was Geordie.’ I guess he won’t be adding The Pitmen Painters to his CV any time soon.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that to reach the top of your game you must be an arrogant prima donna. In order to prepare for a role, Damian Lewis declares that he has ‘no rituals. Just quiet time on my own when I need it.’ Neither does fame seem to have gone to his head. I am confident that he keeps Balotelli-style antics to a minimum, but surely, I joked, there are some inescapable consequences? ‘I haven’t burnt anyone’s house down if that’s what you mean…’ That fame has not created a pyromaniac is certainly reassuring for his neighbours. Indeed, the single role from cinematic history which he would most like to have played is reassuringly respectful to an historic masterpiece of acting: ‘Ben Braddock in The Graduate.’ Homeland might be Damian Lewis’ biggest success to date, and certainly is in terms of awards. The tense storylines leave many viewers desperate to uncover what happens next. Does he tell anyone what happens before it airs? ‘My wife. Leave her alone.’ You heard him.

Despite a significant number of interviews, there is never a great deal of personal information about the avid Liverpool FC. fan in the press. I wondered if he draws on this ability to play his cards close to his chest when portraying the mercurial Sergeant Brody. ‘Brody doesn’t know who he is anymore. He’s become a kind of sociopath, extremely adept at compartmentalising. Every actor needs a bit of this.’

Homeland flags some contemporary political issues, such as nationalism, power relations and the nature of war. Does its leading man think that mass entertainment can convey serious political messages? ‘Yes I do. Especially in long form drama.’

Acting aside, his performances in charity football match Soccer Aid proved solid. When I asked him which celebrity he considers to have been the worst player, he named Alastair Campbell. It just goes to show: follow Damian Lewis’ example, and you too could outplay the most powerful opponent.

Source: Epigram

Damian Lewis attended Lord’s England v New Zealand cricket match on May 17th. Click here for BBC Radio 5′s Test Match Special interview with Damian (almost 27 minutes). ECB also has a short interview below:

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Damian Lewis was last in a desert almost a decade ago. The trip came in the wake of both his acting breakthrough in Band of Brothers, and the death of his mother in a car crash in India.

“The worst thing about that period, though, was losing my Band of Brothers penknife,” he says. This is something of a Lewis trait – making light of something heavy. “I took myself off on my own to Egypt and Jordan with a backpack. And I befriended a Bedouin in the Wadi Rum, who took me camping there. And we got caught in a sandstorm. He was a little fellow called Suleiman. I only realised after I’d left him the next day that he’d nabbed my Band of Brothers penknife. It was very frustrating.” Was this a special memento from the Second World War series, I ask, dedicated to their leading man and perhaps engraved by producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks?

“No, it was just a really cool little Swiss Army knife. But yeah,” the Old Etonian continues, “I went off to the Middle East for a month, and I remember infuriating the locals in Luxor playing backgammon. They played it incredibly passionately and incredibly quickly in Egypt – it’s an extraordinary experience. You just heard the constant rattle of dice and chk-chk-chk of the counters. And I used to sit there, really slowly pondering my moves. And one afternoon I had this whole café gathered behind their fella – this wizened old guy with a beard – and they were all just shouting at me, cursing at me, for playing so slowly. Oh, it was great though,” he smiles wistfully. “I played a lot of very stoned backgammon there.”

We’re in a remote Chilean town situated in the highest, driest desert in the world, and Lewis – clad entirely in Burberry – is sitting in a blood-red sports car, impatiently honking at a children’s marching band as he tries to inch his way through them. Someone, or something, is on his tail.

Among the film crew bustling beside him is stunt co-ordinator Daniel Hirst, fresh from working with Tom Cruise on the sci-fi epic All You Need is Kill, and here to help Lewis with action sequences, including one where he smoothly disarms a gangster. Which, given that the character the 42 year-old is playing is supposed to be a well-spoken English chap who delivers luxury sports cars for a living, is not a skill we’d expect to be high on his CV.

I ask Hirst: was Lewis “fight-ready” after two seasons playing a battle-scarred former US marine in Homeland? “Yeah, he was very easy to teach,” the no-nonsense former British military officer shoots back. “When he went into the first move from the dialogue, even though I hadn’t had time to give him a brief, Damian had the step-to-one-side and control-the-weapon routine pretty straight up. So I think he’s probably done that before.”

Source: Telegraph

Throughout his 20s Lewis worked steadily. But he was 30 before Band of Brothers brought him headline success. His vivid portrayal of the real-life hero Major Dick Winters in the Spielberg and Tom Hanksproduced HBO series still reverberates to this day, not only for the Damian Bunnies, but for the military families he regularly meets while filming in the US.

Lewis tells a story of shooting an episode of Homeland in a Presbyterian church. The minister’s son was in the US Army, and had just returned to Afghanistan for a second tour, “and he was struggling mentally with his time there”. He asked if Lewis might film a video message to send to his soldier son. “He wrapped his arms around me, squeezed me tight, and we both looked at the camera and I just said, ‘Hello, what you’re doing out there is extraordinary, thank you so much. And I hope you get home soon’. And this father, his eyes were filled with tears. Band of Brothers brings a sort of a terrifying responsibility, and it’s also been very moving.”

It must be freighted with deep personal memories for Lewis, too. His mother was killed in a car crash in India in 2001. In the year of his breakout success, when he was suddenly thrust into the spotlight, he was also coping with crushing private anguish.

“Well, it was a lot to take in,” he says slowly. “It was a transforming year or two, definitely.” Another pause. “And it is a shame that my mum isn’t around to see more of it. That’s all. Because she was the proudest hen in the coop.”

Lewis met his wife Helen McCrory a couple of years later, around the time the actors appeared in Five Gold Rings (2003) at London’s Almeida Theatre. Michael Attenborough, who directed the play, remembers Lewis as a brilliant stage actor.

‘When he walks on stage he has a kind of energy inside him. People give it fancy names like presence and charisma, but they’re posh names for energy. Damian walks on and you know something is going to happen. There’s something inside him that’s combustible and energised.”

Attenborough also recalls the emotional intensity between his two leads. “I could have warmed my hands on it,” he laughs. “It was like directing a fire.

They were playing two characters who shouldn’t be falling in love with each other — he was falling in love with his brother’s wife. And Damian and Helen were incredibly sexy together. I wouldn’t want to suggest that the only time you get sexy performances from people is when they fancy each other, but I’m absolutely sure it did us no harm.”

I ask Lewis if he and his wife would like to act together again. “Yeah, definitely. I have a pipe dream of maybe running one of the smaller theatres in town. So, yeah, there are lots of notions running around.”

The read the full interview at the Irish Examiner.

Playing catch-up this Sunday! Excerpts from a few interviews published this week:

“I think if I am attracted to those sorts of characters _ intense characters or serious characters _ I think it’s not so much that they’re intense and serious, I think I’m interested in people who are conflicted. That’s the most interesting character to play. It allows you to explore subtext. It means there is a subtext … I’m really just drawn to good writing _ what’s concealed and not revealed. Perhaps that’s a particularly English thing, as the English don’t let their emotions out that much. [Chicago Tribune]

Your Homeland character, Nicholas Brody, has been through a lot: kidnapping, eight years held hostage by al-Qaeda, post-traumatic stress disorder. What research did you do? An Evil Cradling, by Brian Keenan, about his four years in captivity in Beirut in the 1980s is still the best book on the subject, so I read that again. And I watched Restrepo, the documentary which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance a couple of years ago. I found it to be a very moving and accurate depiction of boys just stuck in war. When they are asked to articulate their feelings, they can’t, they are constipated – it has all been drummed out of them. And that is what, of course, creates all the trauma. There is also a unit out in Gloucester, where soldiers are able to go for therapy and I talked to a couple of people there, which was hugely helpful. [ Metro.co.uk]

HE’S at the top of his game these days, so you would expect Damian Lewis to be the epitome of cool. But he stumbles and nearly trips as he strides into the Savoy Hotel, laughs at his clumsiness and looks a little flustered as he settles into a chair. Could it be the Homeland star is feeling the pressure now that Season Two is out for public consumption? “Definitely,” he says, as open as his character Sergeant Brody is difficult to read. “There were no expectations with the first season but now we’re in a bit of a goldfish bowl.” [Express.co.uk]

Two or three years ago, Lewis toyed with sidelining acting in favour of pursuing writing or directing. ‘I’d been acting for a certain amount of time and started to feel like I understood it. So I started reading all these books on writing and directing, and realised they were preoccupied by the same things as actors. I thought that was interesting, so I decided to re-explore acting again and, well, try to be better.’ He laughs, adding sheepishly, ‘I carry a notepad around with me to jot down script ideas, but instead it just gets filled with “wallpaper for kitchen” or “do taxes”.’ [Time Out]