A new series of the radio drama Number 10 will broadcast Monday-Thursday, February 20-23 from 2:15-3:00pm on BBC Radio 4. Damian will reprise his role as the Prime Minister Simon Laity. For downloads of previous series, visit our Media Archive here.

Jonathan Myerson’s Number 10 returns for a new series, with more drama depicting life inside Downing Street. Starring Damian Lewis as the Prime Minister, Simon Laity.

The first episode sees Scotland legalising assisted dying and a couple arrested in Northumberland on their way to the new Dignitas Clinic in Glasgow.

The politicians know this is potentially a way to promote Scottish independence but it still leaves Simon Laity, PM, with the bad press from a terminally-ill man in custody.The team want him to consider assisted dying legislation in England, but he flatly refuses – for him it is a moral issue and an uncrossable line.

The Crown Prince of West Tuvalonga, in the UK to sign a massive oil exploration deal, is angry as well – apparently snubbed the night before by Simon’s partner Alan, who seemed worse for wear at the state dinner.

Meanwhile, to win wavering votes, the PM’s strategist is promoting a reform to the international calendar – he wants a six-day week, abolishing Tuesdays. Simon is unwilling to confront Alan about his drinking, but when he finally doeshe gets a horrible surprise – Alan has been diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease. But he insists it remain their secret for as long as possible.

The second play sees a routine eviction blowing up into a full scale riot, playing into the hands of an e-petition in favour of capital punishment. But when the opposition promote it for a debate in the House, Simon feels he has to come down hard on police violence.

The third play finds the PM preparing to deliver his speech to the Party Conference in Brighton. But with just 11 hours to go, the speech isn’t even written yet.

In the final play in the series, Alan’s health is rapidly deteriorating and Simon is still struggling to find time to spend with him. Now wheelchair-bound, Alan starts talking about the Dignitas clinic in Glasgow – and when he disappears Simon assumes the worst and makes a decision that shocks the cabinet.

The series cast stars Mike Sengelow as Nathan, Gina McKee as Georgie, Julian Glover as Sir Hugo and features Stella Gonet, Steven Spiers and Jasper Britton.

According to BBC Radio 4′s Front Row and this Digital Spy article, Homeland will premiere Sunday, February 19th on Channel 4. The Channel 4 site still shows no official date. Any day now …

“Straight to the sore point,” sighs Damian Lewis, slouching deeper into an armchair in the library room of London’s Covent Garden Hotel. GQ has made the mistake of bringing up the Golden Globes: while Lewis’ stunning new psychological drama Homeland won Best Show at the awards ceremony last month, Lewis lost out to former Frasier star Kelsey Grammar for Best Actor. “I went up to Kelsey to say congratulations afterwards,” says Lewis. “He replied ‘Who are you?’ He didn’t really – but he said it with his eyes.” Although a Londoner, Lewis is a Hollywood veteran, impressing in the likes of Band of Brothers and shortlived NBC drama Life, plus a recent stint opposite Keira Knightley in the West End in The Misanthrope. Homeland is his biggest gig yet: a smart, adult thriller with a knack for explosive twists, led by Lewis’s prisoner of war and Claire Danes as Carrie, a paranoid CIA field agent convinced that he has been turned to Al Qaeda. Ahead of the series’ debut on Channel 4 later this month, we chat to Lewis about the difficulty of sex scenes, TVR problems and Billy Idol karaoke…

GQ.com: After your marine training for Band Of Brothers did you go back for a refresher course for Homeland?
Damian Lewis: No, I didn’t – even though I’m playing a US soldier this is very different. I researched a little bit into what it’s like to be a sniper, because Brody is part of the sniper platoon. I also read Brian Keenan’s An Evil Cradling, which is a brilliant account of his three and a half years in prison in Beirut.

Given the number of twists, how much did they tell you ahead of time?
I had long phone calls with the creators. Starting out I was keen for Brody not to be a brainwashed soldier à la The Manchurian Candidate but that he had made a strong choice himself to convert to Islam. Then it would be up to [series producers] Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon as to how much they preyed on audience fears that when someone converts that therefore make them a terrorist. It is far more interesting if a Marine choses Islam as a force of good that helped him and for him to be able to find the beauty in a religion that a lot of people are suspicious of. The writers agreed with that but they also said “He has to be the threat.” In the end the reasons for why he acts are different than you might expect.

You and some of cast lived together during filming. What’s a Homeland party like?
Ginger and lemon tea, a nice vegetarian dish… maybe if we’re feeling raucous an After Eight, and then home to bed. We’re very committed. [laughs] A lot of us lived in the same apartment block, so we were quite good at giving dinner parties. My proudest moment was cooking eggs and bacon for brunch before going off to watch the Carolina Panthers play – we lined our stomachs for drinking a lot of cheap beer.

What’s the best thing you can cook?
I’ve gone back to my favourite book which I used when I was a bachelor, which is Gary Rhodes’ Great Fast Food. It’s absolutely brilliant. It does take forever if you have to buy all the ingredients just for that recipe though – you go around the aisles and it takes about three hours.

What restaurant do you always go back to?
I do love J. Sheekey. Pop in quickly late night for the fish pie and buttered green beans. The Arboath Smokies they do are great and they do a fantastic kedgeree, with a lovely poached egg just sitting on top. Potted shrimps are also a favourite.

GQ cover star Keira Knightley recently said she has vodka before sex scenes and champagne after. What’s your secret?
That’s like a medicine and a celebration, isn’t it? I don’t have champagne after sex scenes. I’m full of self doubt and self analysis – just like in real life! In my view there’s usually a much sexier way of bringing two people together than seeing explicit sex. In Homeland they’re not healthy, functioning experiences. They’re an indication of the psychological breakdown and the damage that now exists in a marriage, particularly for this soldier returning from war. Sometimes on [American cable channel] Showtime there’s an obligation to do sex scenes, just because they can.

Read the full interview at the GQ.com (UK) website.

Damian Lewis is sitting opposite me, drinking tea in a wood-panelled library in a discreetly opulent Central London hotel. With his clipped Old Etonian accent and understated self-confidence, he seems the epitome of Englishness. Which is why it’s surprising that so many of his highest profile roles have been Americans.

His latest drama, Homeland, is no exception. Lewis plays US Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody, who has been held as a prisoner of war for eight years by Al Qaeda. On his return, he is feted as a hero. But CIA officer Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) believes that, far from being an All-American patriot, he has been turned, and represents a grave threat to national security.

Here, the charming and affable Lewis talks about the series, his career to date, and how he’d give it all up in a heartbeat just to change one single moment from his past.

You had a great education, went to Eton, and at the end of it, you turned around and said to your parents that you wanted to go into the most capricious business imagineable. Parents dread their children wanting to act. How did yours react?
They were brilliant, and oddly supportive. They had seen me on stage at that point. A group of us put on a play at school, and my parents saw me, and I think they decided that it wasn’t going to be a complete waste of time. And so in the last two years, when I should have been working for my A levels, I decided that I wanted to go to drama school. I’d stopped working, and my shocking A level results reflected that. So I was only going to go off to a not very exciting university anyway, and so I went to drama school. My mum said “Go, with our blessing.” And what she really meant was “And that means you can stay at home with me for another three years.” I grew up in London, so I lived at home throughout drama school. It was a very un-studenty three years. I went back to a nice family house every night where, if I was lucky, mum had left out a fishcake.

You went to The Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Have any of your contemporaries from there gone on to stardom?
There was a very rich seam of talent all around us. Joseph Fiennes was a contemporary of mine. Ewan McGregor was in the year ahead, Daniel Craig was in the year ahead of him. Just in front of them were people like Ben Chaplin and Rhys Ifans. Dominic West was just behind me.

And from there you went on to the RSC. Was that a valuable part of your education as an actor?
Yes it was. It gave me a campus life that I hadn’t had. It was a bit like going through another training – you’d have voice lessons and verse lessons, and you’d rehearse all day and perform all night. And you just happened to be living in a small wendy house of a 17th Century workman’s cottage right next to the River Avon, with Shakespeare’s graveyard 300 yards one way and where he lived a couple of miles the other way. It was a rather extraordinary, rarified existence for a year. I loved it. And I would imagine, having visited Oxford and Cambridge many times to go and see my friends who were studying there, and I played cricket there quite a lot *cough* – where I scored a century – (the only one I’ve ever scored, and it was against a team called The Grannies!) I imagine our existence [at the RSC] was quite similar, just living in these beautiful, bucolic surroundings.

Read the full interview at the Channel 4 website.

More recent press:

Press Association – Damian Lewis wants Mad Men job
Digital Spy – Damian Lewis: ‘Homeland is more psychological and political than 24′

Homeland star Damian Lewis has been cast as Lord Capulet in the Carlo Carlei-directed adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, which began filming ten days ago in Italy. Additional new casting includes Natascha McElhone (Lady Capulet), Stellan Skarsgard (Prince of Verona), Lesley Manville (The Nurse), Christian Cooke (Mercutio), Tomas Arana (Lord Montague), Laura Morante (Lady Montague) and Leon Vitali (Apothecary).

In this latest version of the classic Shakespeare play, True Grit star Hailee Steinfeld stars as Juliet, Douglas Booth as Romeo, Paul Giamatti as Friar Laurence, Kodi Smit-McPhee as Benvolio and Ed Westwick as Tybalt. Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) has written the adaptation, which while true to its original period setting is designed to draw a younger, new-generation audience.

“We felt that it had been quite a long time since there had been a romantic, traditional rendition of the piece,” says Fellowes, pointing to Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 version. “People have made Romeo since then — and some very good ones — but they were set in modern Ohio or whatever. This isn’t that. This is the romantic medieval love story as conceived by Shakespeare. We felt that really what we needed was just to make it slightly more accessible to today’s generation. That, I hope, is all we’ve done. My dream would be that you watch it and you think you’ve watched the whole thing written by Shakespeare.”

Baz Luhrmann famously adapted the play to modern day in his 1996 feature Romeo + Juliet, starring a young Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. Fellowes notes that he tightened the play to fit into a standard two-hour feature running time, but that he did very little re-writing since the themes of young love are universal.

“Every generation is interested in love,” says Fellowes, who’s currently writing the third season of Downtown Abbey. “I mean, there is something about young love that is heartbreaking, and I think every teenager in the world would agree. All of that is very powerful. The point about teenage love is it’s before cynicism comes in to reshape one’s attitudes. You love when you’re young in a way that you’ll probably never love again.”

Fellowes is also producing along with Ileen Maisel and Lawrence Elman of Amber Entertainment, Simon Bosanquet of Generator Entertainment, Alexander Koll and Dimitra Tsingou of Swarovski Entertainment and Doug Mankoff and Andy Spaulding of Echo Lake Entertainment. Filming is taking place at Cinecitta Studios in Rome, and in the towns of Mantua and Siena.

The producers and filmmakers were adamant about casting true-to-the-age actors to embody the young characters in the story. Steinfeld, Booth and Smit-McPhee are all teenagers.

“Romeo and Juliet has to be retold every 15 years,” says executive producer Nadja Swarovski, whose new Swarovski Entertainment film division is launching with the production. “And the cast that they have chosen falls in line with our support of young talent. Yes, it is a risk that we’re taking, but it’s a risk we want to take because we absolutely believe in the talent.”

The WME-repped Lewis has recently appeared in the features The Escapist and Your Highness. He also was a star of the HBO mini-series Band of Brothers.

The HuffPost has an article on the Q&A:

“You have to have a black man and a red head”, says Damian Lewis, explaining the American success of his espionage thriller Homeland.

Lewis and his fellow Brit co-star David Harewood have received a fantastic reception in the States for their roles as Sergeant Nicholas Brody, a marine and former prisoner of war, and Director of the CIA Counterterrorism Center David Estes, respectively.

The Golden Globe Award-winning drama, which also stars Claire Danes as determined CIA agent Carrie Mathison, has taken the US by storm. It’s reportedly Barack Obama’s favourite television programme and The New York Post have called it “the best thriller on American TV”, while the Los Angeles Times notes “it’s the first telling of a post-9/11 story that is all the things it should be: politically resonant, emotionally wrenching and plain old thrilling to watch.”

Now Lewis and Harewood are getting the chance to show off their lauded work back home, as Channel 4 brings the drama, loosely based on Gideon Raff’s Israeli television series Prisoners of War, to UK screens in February.

The compelling series centres on an American soldier (Brody) who was taken prisoner during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Left for dead, he miraculously returns to the US after years in captivity and the nation welcomes home their hero. However, tightly-wound CIA officer Carrie, who is battling her own psychological demons, is solely convinced that all is not as innocent as it seems.

Carrie puts her career on the line as she pursues her theory that the intelligence behind his rescue was a setup – and that he may be connected to an Al-Qaeda plot to be carried out on American soil.

At a sneak preview of Homeland at BAFTA’s headquarters, with Lewis and Harewood on hand to discuss their roles, it is clear that Homeland is going to become addictive. It’s not just a brilliantly-plotted espionage thriller with compelling and fascinating characters, it’s also a brave exploration of the difficulties of fighting terrorism a decade after September 11.

But how did they feel when they received the script for the first time – were they sure they were on to a winner?

“It was very exciting. The show sets itself up as a thriller and of course there’s a page turner left at the end as he’s standing staring at the White House. But what struck me was what they took on thematically, in just an hour’s worth of TV. The depth both in incident and character is something we don’t see over here,” explains Lewis.

Read the rest at the The Huffington Post UK.

David Harewood, Damian Lewis, Grace Dent at Monday’s BAFTA screening of Homeland. (Source: @Lt_Starbuck) Update: Found a couple more pictures here.

Gallery Link:

Public Appearances > 2012 > 2012/01/30 BAFTA Homeland Screening and Q&A

And in case you missed it, a hi-res picture of Damian with Terry Wogan was posted on Wogan’s Facebook:

Damian Lewis was on Weekend Wogan on Sunday. You can listen to it here at the BBC radio site (his part begins at the 1:24 mark) or you can download here from our Media archive.

He said in the interview that he’ll next be working in Italy on Carlo Carlei’s adaption of Romeo And Juliet. The film is being touted as “Romeo and Juliet” for the “Twilight” generation. More on the project:

IMDb – Romeo and Juliet
Variety – Paul Giamatti joins Carlei’s ‘Romeo’