Damian Lewis
Actor, Dad, Redhead, and Ping Pong Champion
Categories Print Media Stolen

Stolen: Damian Lewis Investigates the UK’s Secret Slave Trade – June 30, 2011

A Gripping Thriller Based on the Real-Life Child Slaves Still Being Smuggled into Britain

by Olly Grant | The Telegraph | June 30, 2011

Ultimately, every fictional drama gets its inspiration from something real. In the case of BBC One’s new thriller, Stolen, it was a 60-second radio bulletin, way back in 2003. “I was listening to the news on 5 Live,” explains writer Stephen Butchard, “and they had a report about an African child who had been trafficked into the country to work as a domestic slave.”

It made him do a double-take. “I thought, ‘Surely that can’t be happening in this country?’” he recalls. “But they said it wasn’t a one-off; it happens again and again. So I fired off an email to the BBC drama department…”

Eight years on, the result of Butchard’s email is about to make it to the screen. Stolen, starring Damian Lewis, takes the idea behind that report and spins it into a multi-stranded thriller about the scandal of modern-day slavery.

Thematically, it’s treading similar ground to Channel 4’s Bafta-nominated 2010 drama, I Am Slave. Yet Stolen broadens the canvas by following three children in very different forms of British-based slavery – an African girl and two boys from Vietnam and Ukraine – with Lewis as an anti-trafficking detective and a kind of lynchpin character, drawing their stories together.

Continue reading Stolen: Damian Lewis Investigates the UK’s Secret Slave Trade – June 30, 2011

Categories Media Print Media Stolen

Damian Lewis: Back in Britain and Starring in Stolen – June 29, 2011

Damian Lewis: Back in Britain and starring in Stolen

The actor has no regrets about leaving Tinseltown for the mean streets of Manchester — and a spot of fishing.

Damian Lewis, the most famous screen redhead since Shirley Temple
Damian Lewis, the most famous screen redhead since Shirley Temple, BBC 

It’s given that most actors don’t have two ha’pennies to rub together. The London-born actor Damian Lewis seems keen to show he’s not one of them – during the interview he holds two pounds coins, clicking them together to punctuate points he is making. It might be a nervous affectation or a show of ostentation. Given the shiny blue suit and polished brogues that he is wearing at BBC TV Centre, it might well be the latter. This is after all, the actor who was thrust into the spotlight in the epic Spielberg- produced mini-series Band of Brothers in 2001, became an overnight sensation, the most famous screen redhead since Shirley Temple, and was whisked off to Hollywood in the wake of that show. But Hollywood didn’t quite work out, and after some dud films and a cancelled TV series, he is back in Britain, his latest role in a BBC TV film Stolen, an earnest, quietly moving film about child trafficking.

Continue reading Damian Lewis: Back in Britain and Starring in Stolen – June 29, 2011

Categories Stolen

New ‘Stolen’ feature at Life of Wylie

Ian Wylie’s posted his Manchester Evening News feature on ‘Stolen’ on his blog:

ONCE upon a time, each and every day in fact, children are being trafficked into the UK and put to work. Unpaid, unprotected, unseen.

So begins a shocking, disturbing and sometimes distressing TV drama. Filmed in Manchester and Salford, Stolen is a gripping thriller based on a reality hidden away from our everyday view.

“It’s absolutely heartbreaking,” reflects Band of Brothers star Damian Lewis, who plays Det Insp Anthony Carter, head of a human trafficking unit racing against time to save child slaves.

“It left me reeling at the thought of just how overwhelming the scale is of the trafficking that comes in and out of this country in human beings…little children.”

Read the rest at Life of Wylie.

Thanks to Chantal for the heads-up!

Categories Interviews Stolen

New Guardian Interview: Damian Lewis: Top of the cops

He made his name playing troubled soldiers and driven detectives. Why has success left Damian Lewis so unsatisfied? He talks heroism and home life with Maddy Costa

Subtlety and restraint are Damian Lewis’s hallmarks as an actor. His ability to convey a character’s innermost thoughts with just a flicker of an eyebrow is even more impressive when you discover how animated he is in real life. When we meet, in a chi-chi members’ club in west London, he has a pint of coffee working through his system, and that natural energy is comically amplified. His accent careens from Prince Charles to Jamie Oliver, as he talks about his guilt at not doing more theatre, the appeal of playing policemen and soldiers, and the satisfactions of domesticity; he alternates between supreme self-confidence and genuine horror at what he thinks is coming across as his own solipsism.

Some of this internal tussling stems from his turning 40 this year. This has, he says, encouraged in him “a new-found seriousness about what I do”, as well as a desire to “explore more than just the showing-off element of acting”. His latest film, Stolen, which screens on BBC1 on Sunday, is visibly the work of a man muzzling his ego. Stolen revolves around three children who have been trafficked to the UK; Lewis plays Anthony Carter, the detective inspector attempting to trace their whereabouts. Though Carter is central to the narrative, the character’s range is limited. “He needs to be undemonstrative and unshowy,” explains Lewis. “The focus needs to be on the children.”

What grabbed him about this part was the story’s political dimension and the promise of the director, Justin Chadwick (who made The Other Boleyn Girl), that the finished film would be visually arresting. Usually, Lewis says, he likes working in TV, despite the lower wages, because “narrative is everything. I like the precision of the storytelling, and that it’s done through characters.” Stolen was an opposite experience: he is proud of the film because of the way it looks – there is a poetic quality to the camerawork that raises it above a bog-standard issues drama.

 

Read the rest at The Guardian.

Categories Interviews Media Personal and Family Life Print Media Stolen

Damian Lewis: Top of the Cops – June 27, 2011

Damian Lewis: Top of the Cops

He made his name playing troubled soldiers and driven detectives. Why has success left Damian Lewis so unsatisfied? He talks heroism and home life.

by with Maddy Costa – The Guardian – 27 June 27 2011

Damian Lewis
 ‘I wasn’t humble enough’ … Damian Lewis. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Subtlety and restraint are Damian Lewis’s hallmarks as an actor. His ability to convey a character’s innermost thoughts with just a flicker of an eyebrow is even more impressive when you discover how animated he is in real life. When we meet, in a chi-chi members’ club in west London, he has a pint of coffee working through his system, and that natural energy is comically amplified. His accent careens from Prince Charles to Jamie Oliver, as he talks about his guilt at not doing more theatre, the appeal of playing policemen and soldiers, and the satisfactions of domesticity; he alternates between supreme self-confidence and genuine horror at what he thinks is coming across as his own solipsism.

Continue reading Damian Lewis: Top of the Cops – June 27, 2011

Categories Stolen

Crime Time Preview: Stolen starring Damian Lewis BBC1 PREVIEW


Rating ★★★★

BBC1, Sunday, 3 July, 9pm

Plot twists, multiple murders, glamorous cops – you get none of these in this serious but emotional drama.

Child trafficking and slavery is the story here, and the writer, Stephen Butchard, clearly wants you to be aware of the crime and its attendant heartache going on all round us.

It follows detective inspector Anthony Carter, played by Damian Lewis, who tries to make a difference working at the Human Trafficking Unit. Part of the Unit’s role is to sweep up kids who crash out of the trade, chased by gangmasters or gangsters. If he can find the victims, he then has a monumental job of trying to get them to help him arrest their exploiters.

Read the rest at Crime Time Preview.

Categories Homeland Interviews Stolen

New interview, ‘Stolen’ broadcast date, ComicCon panel


  • New interview on the Metro.co.uk website:

    What research did you do into trafficking for this role?

    I went to a police trafficking unit and spoke to the man who set it up. Trafficking goes on all around us. There are people being trafficked in and out of the country at an alarming rate and it’s difficult to bring prosecutions because they often come in with valid passports. After they arrive they’re smuggled off into the shadows and face exploitation.

    Was it disappointing when your US police series Life was cancelled?

    Yes. The work was terrific and the creator of the show is incredibly talented. I had a wonderful character and the storylines were interesting. It was fun living in LA for a couple of years but you work very hard and very long hours. I was starting a family and was away from them a lot. Goodness knows how people do it for seven years in those long shows. Cable shows are different because they have shorter runs so you have five months of the year to do other things.

    Why did you want to become an actor?

    Acting was something I instinctively did and liked. I was happier acting than doing anything else. I was disenchanted by the idea of university and decided to try for drama school. I came out of drama school, got work, kept working and I’ve been incredibly lucky since.

    Was there a particular performance that inspired your interest in acting?

    I put on a production of The Long And The Short And The Tall with some friends at school and played Wackford Squeers in a production of Nicholas Nickleby. My dad used to take us to see West End musicals as holiday treats – things like Guys And Dolls. I loved the theatre as a kid and still do.

    Read the rest @Metro.co.uk.

  • According to online tv guides, Stolen will broadcast July 3rd from 9:00pm – 10:30pm on BBC1!

  • Showtime will have a panel at this years Comic-Con (July 21) and debut an “exclusive first-look” at Homeland. Morena Baccarin will introduce the trailer. No Damian apparently. Source

Categories Media Personal and Family Life Print Media Stolen

Damian Lewis: I split my eye open while duelling with Ralph Fiennes, Metro, June 21, 2011

Original article at Metro, corrected here for many technical typos

Actor Damian Lewis talks to Metro about the worst job he’s ever had, starring in a musical and anti-ginger prejudice. The 40-year-old stars in the forthcoming BBC drama Stolen.

Continue reading Damian Lewis: I split my eye open while duelling with Ralph Fiennes, Metro, June 21, 2011

Categories Stolen

August broadcast date for ‘Stolen’?




Sunday’s The Independent profiles several British actresses including actress Vicky McClure, who has a role in the upcoming BBC1 television movie Stolen. The Independent lists the broadcast date as August. (A July date had been mentioned in a recent BBC Breakfast interview.) Here’s the snippit that discusses her role in Stolen:

That persistence is starting to pay off. Other new projects include an episode of the upcoming Waking the Dead spin-off The Body Farm, and playing Damian Lewis’s police sidekick in human-trafficking drama Stolen. “It was great to act with Damian,” she says. “We joked that we were a bit like Mulder and Scully.”

Source

Categories Download Events Gallery Stolen Video

More from ‘Stolen’ BFI Screening and Q&A


The British Film Institute website has video of Director Justin Chadwick, writer Stephen Butchard and Damian Lewis discussing Stolen at the May 9th BFI screening and Q&A. Click here to download the clip from our Media section.

Gallery Link:

Public Appearances > 2011 > 2011/05/09 BFI ‘Stolen’ screening