Click below for pics of Damian Lewis at the BAFTA TV Awards at The Royal Festival Hall on Sunday, May 12th in London. Damian and David Harewood presented the award for Drama Series.

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The 10-part Book at Bedtime series A Delicate Truth will begin broadcast this week Monday-Friday from 10:45-11:00pm on BBC Radio 4. John le Carre’s novel “about a good man who must choose between his conscience and his duty to the Service” is read by Damian Lewis. The episodes will be made available to listen to at the BBC website for 7 days after broadcast. We’ll try to upload the series to the Media archive. Update: Downloads are now available at the Media Archive.

‘It would be so brilliant if I was actually a spy!” Damian Lewis is in a basement somewhere under Soho. There’s a new le Carré out and when Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime was casting around for a reader, who else could they turn to but the Emmy-winning star of Homeland? “My front as an actor,” he adds, “is going really well.”

It really is. Lewis was by no means the first to be cast as a spy, but more than any actor apart from Daniel Craig, he is now indissolubly linked with espionage. It seems to have infiltrated his manner of interacting with the world. “We’re being monitored in a bunker,” he says, as a BBC publicist sits down to listen in.

We edge into a discussion of le Carré’s A Delicate Truth, the abridgement of which Lewis has just spent three days recording. The story, he advises, “has a terrific opening which happens in a little bit of British soil somewhere else not in Great Britain”. As in Gibraltar? The plot précis is all over the media, I tell him. “Gib,” he confirms, tersely.

Lewis came to le Carré through boys’ own tales. “My first recollection was sun-stained copies of Smiley’s People and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold at home. I flicked through them as a follow-on from Fleming and Franklin W Dixon’s The Hardy Boys and Desmond Bagley, Alistair MacLean and Willard Price. I really had not had anything to do with him for about 20 years and then, doing Homeland, it was clear there were many similarities, so I’ve just been dipping in and out on the loo.”

Is the actor who plays the war hero who would be US vice-president sure that he wants to reveal where his reading takes place? “I don’t see why not. Whether David Cornwell [le Carré’s real name] will be happy with people thumbing his texts while in the throne room I’m not sure.”

Source: Telegraph

Here’s a short review from the Radio Times.

Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory attended the Olivier Awards at The Royal Opera House in London on Sunday. Click below for pictures from the event.

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Thanks to Ali for the clip!

I meant to upload these ages ago, but only got around to it today!

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Thanks to Ali for the scans!

The Emmy winner tells THR about his Sundance London collaboration with the automaker and his decision to put a humorous spin on the Bond-esque hero: “There’s not a lot of comedy in ‘Homeland.’”

The kind of TV affection that Damian Lewis has earned since Homeland premiered tends to come with a high-profile endorsement deal — preferably for an automaker.

Many of the of Emmy and Golden Globe winner’s contemporaries are partnered with some of the big ones. Dexter star Michael C. Hall narrates Dodge ads, Mad Men’s Jon Hamm is the voice of Mercedes-Benz and co-star John Slattery can frequently be seen behind the wheel of a Lincoln.

But Lewis strays from the pack in his elaborate production for Jaguar. He doesn’t provide a voice over, and you won’t see 30 second spots airing during ad breaks for SportsCenter. Lewis’ Jaguar commercial is a 12-minute movie produced by Ridley Scott’s advertising company.

Desire, being screened as a part Sundance London’s 2013 programming, premieres in its official venue, YouTube, on Wednesday.

“It sort of fell into my lap,” the London-born actor tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I’ve never done anything for the online market before, and I just thought it was cool to work with Ridley Scott and [director] Adam Smith. I thought the script had a kind of nod to the Americana that you find in the Coen brothers’ movies.”

In Desire, Lewis plays Clark, a man who encounters difficulties in his attempts to deliver a Jaguar F-TYPE to a rather shady man who’s at odds with a mysterious young woman (Shannyn Sossamon). The lawless, Coen-esque desert depicted film required a five-day shoot in Chile for Lewis — who says he had a somewhat lighter read of the character that some might be quick to brush off as a James Bond homage.

“I thought he had quirky voice and actually I might have pushed comedy a bit further because I found him as sort of a comedic character,” says Lewis. “At times there’s an oddly hapless quality to him, and I quite liked that. He wasn’t just a stereotypical monosyllabic hero. I think I went a little bit to Cary Grant, David Niven and these famous British movie stars of the past. There’s something very British about them which I tried to evoke.”

That humor is another thing Lewis’ says attracted him to the project. His next film credit is Lord Capulet in a new adaptation of definitive downer Romeo and Juliet, and as Lewis is quick to point out: “There’s not a lot of comedy in Homeland.”

Those more familiar with Lewis’ biggest U.S. credits — Homeland, NBC’s Life, HBO’s Band of Brothers — also get the less common sound of the actor’s natural accent throughout the short. Though what couldn’t be further from London is Desire’s South American locale.

“It’s dry as hell,” says Lewis, who’s grown used to Homeland’s humid North Carolina set. “Dust and sand and dirt get into your eyes, and your lips crack. As a redhead, I stood there occasionally thinking, “Wow, I really wasn’t designed for the desert.’ But it is an extraordinary landscape to shoot in.”

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

See Also:

Daily Mail – The new transporter! Forget Jason Statham… Damian Lewis stylishly delivers in Jaguar’s short film Desire