Press

Elle
September 2001
by DAVID HANDELMAN
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Men Of Honor

RON LIVINGSTON AND DAMIAN LEWIS- STARS OF HBO’S BAND OF BROTHERS- BRING THE GOOD WAR HOME.

“There are acting jobs,” says Ron Livingston, ” and then there are once in a lifetime experiences.” Being cast by producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg in Band of Brothers, HBO’s ten-hour World War II miniseries about the U.S. Army’s legendary 101st Airborne Division promised to be both.

But because the scripts, based on Stephen Ambrose’s best-selling account of the platoon known as Easy Company- which parachuted into France on D-Day to capture Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest”- weren’t finished until last minute, the actors “had to go into it on faith,” says Livingston. “A lot of people arrived and found out they’d signed on for nine months of work as little more than extras. It’s hard for an actor to put in twelve hour days and be speck in the background.”

Luckily for Livingston (a thirty-two year old, Yale Drama School- trained Iowa native who has appeared in TV’s Townies and in the movies Office Space and Two Nina’s), he landed in the foreground, playing Nixon, the hard drinking reconnaissance man. And although there are few recognizable faces under the helmets (such as David Schwimmer and Donnie Wahlberg’s), the lead role, of stoic platoon leader Richard Winters, went to another relative newcomer Damian Lewis- despite the fact that Lewis is British. “I don’t think they expected to find Dick Winters in London,” says Lewis, thirty, whose American work includes 1996’s Robinson Crusoe, with Peirce Brosnan, and the role of Laertes in the 1995 Broadway production of Hamlet, opposite Ralph Fiennes.

Lewis and Livingston were thrown together with hundreds of other young men for ten days of bootcamp followed by nine long, grueling, disorienting months of rolling around in the dirt amid gunfire and explosions. “You get these feelings of pain and fear and confusion,” Livingston says. “Even though you know its fake, you have to fight to overcome them.”

Band of Brothers’ subdued documentary style may take some getting used to for viewers raised on Hollywood’s usual war melodrama’s (remember Pearl Harbor?). “Rather than having the constraints of the two-hour formula,” Lewis says, “you can afford to be rambling and sprawling; stories can emerge and subside. It’s not about how America won the war, but a far more localized account of an extraordinary group of men and the thinkgs they achieved during the years they were together.”

In most war movies, Livingston adds, “there’s always a guy who gets gunned down and his buddy cries, ‘NO!’ and spends thirty seconds staring at him, and then gets up with steely determanation. Veterans hate that, because it never happens. If the guy next to you goes down, you are the next target- there’s no time.” Actual combatants suffer from “the fog of war- no one knows what’s going on. But portraying that realistically doesn’t make for good story telling. So we had to walk an interesting line between the way people expect to see the story told and the way the guys who actually fought it remembered it.” (The true test came in June, when HBO flew the actors and surviving veterans to a premiere screening in Normandy, where the efforts of the former were warmly recieved by the latter.)

Like war buddies themselves, many of the cast members now have such a strong sense of shared history from the filming that they have allready reconvened for reunions in LA and London. “You can’t help but get close with people- or hate them, which happened on occassion,” Livingston says. “But it was like an extended family. Like brothers.”