Press

Winston-Salem Journal
08 August 2001
by Tim Clodfelter

Fit for the Part: Actor Drew Inspiration from the ‘Natural Leader’ He Portrays in Miniseries

When actor Damian Lewis was preparing for his role as World War II soldier Richard Winters in the miniseries Band of Brothers (starting at 9:00 p.m. Sunday on HBO), he knew he couldn’t stray far from the truth. After all, the real Winters - age 83 - was there, acting as a consultant. “It was incredibly daunting, but a privilege as well,” Lewis said of the man he was hired to play. “As a 26-year-old, jumping into Normandy in 1944, he established himself as a natural leader, a person who was able to think lucidly and quickly under extreme fire, and 90 percent of the time made the right decision, so people were prepared to follow him. He became, naturally, the commanding officer of the unit, because he was a brilliant, brilliant soldier, and a superb athlete as well.”

To portray the athleticism if Winters, Lewis had to work with a personal trainer and attend an intense two-week “boot-camp” run by Capt. Dale Dye, a retired Marine Corps officer who has previously acted as a consultant on such films as Platoon and Saving Private Ryan. “I looked a bit like rice pudding before, and afterwards I looked like a stick of celery, ” Lewis said. “The love handles went, the flabby arms went.” Knowing how fit the real Winters had been, Dye paid special attention to Lewis to make sure he stayed in shape.

The physical demands of the role were matched by the mental demands of trying to accurately portray a man like Winters. “Getting the soul of the guy was kind of like climbing Everest to start with, ” Lewis said. “He’s your archetypal enigmatic hero as well. They really did make them like that. He’s an old-fashioned hero, that was economic with words, wasn’t a womanizer, wasn’t a drinker, wasn’t a smoker, a man with incredible moral bearing. “He commanded huge respect from people, and I felt meeting him, that you have to earn his respect. That’s just the way he is. It doesn’t mean he’s a cold man, but he’s a pretty formidable man. I had to find a way to make silences interesting.”

The 10-hour miniseries opens with a two-hour premiere this week, followed by hour long installments starting Sept. 16.

Based on the best-selling non-fiction book by Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers follows the exploits of Easy Company, a U.S. Army regiment that parachuted into France early on D-Day, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and eventually captured Adolf Hitler’s mountaintop fortress, Eagle’s Nest. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks (who also directed one episode and co-wrote the premiere) served as executive producers on the miniseries, and tried to keep things as true-to-life as possible. “We had a scene in episode two, where I collapsed by a log, exhausted, having led this incredible little skirmish attack,” Lewis said. “And (Winters) said ‘no way I would stop by a log and rest, even for 20 seconds, I’d just make it back to my unit base with my men,’ and so it was cut. That was Tom’s final decision. In the search for authenticity, he cut it.”

The moment of truth as far as historical accuracy is concerned came on June 6, the 57th anniversary of D-Day, when 47 of the 51 remaining Easy Company veterans and their families were flown to Normandy to attend a screening of the first two episodes. “I sat down in a huge theatre with these veterans, ” Lewis said, “and they came out and they were blown away by it. They said it was shocking to relive, it was so accurate.”