Time and place: Damian Lewis

Camden was happening while the actor and film producer lived there in the Noughties – and soon his career was, too

I never anticipated living in Camden Town. As an 18-year-old, I’d gone to the Crush nights at the Electric Ballroom, so I thought that this part of London was a place for students and people wearing tie-dye T-shirts. But I found a fantastic little house with a roof terrace in a gorgeous, very urban row of workmen’s cottages on Prowse Place, a cobbled mews tucked away between Camden and Kentish Town. I bought No 7 in 2001 and lived there for five years. I had Baz Bamigboye on one corner and Amy Winehouse on another.

The house suffused with glorious morning light on one side and evening sun on the othet. It was close to the railway line; the arches were just down the street. It felt quite Dickensian, and I loved it.

Someone before me cleverly had inverted the house – you walked upstairs to the kitchen and the sitting room, which was open-plan, so it had a Manhattan-loft feel. It had a warm reddish wooden finish, with a fixed ladder through a hole in the roof to the terrace. I used to have friends round for barbecues and parties up there.

The kitchen felt a bit like a ship’s galley, with exposed beams and a burnished orange colour. Downstairs, it had one bedroom and a bathroom. I gave the place a lick of paint, but left it pretty untouched. My biggest purchase was a sofa from Heal’s, but my best was a dark-wood table and chairs for £60 from a local junk shop. I still have them.

I was filming a lot. I was up in Manchester making The Forsyte Saga, which was great, as I was able to get across to watch Liverpool play at weekends. I grew up in north London, so I should really be a Gooner [Arsenal fan], but my dad was more of a rugby man, so I was left to my own devices. I started supporting Liverpool because, in the late 1970s, they were the kings of Europe and had all the glam players.

Filming Dreamcatcher in 2002 was a slightly lonely experience. It took four months to make in Canada, and tanked terribly, so I didn’t get much joy out of that. Then I lived in New York for six months in 2004 when I was making Keane, a film I’m proud of.

I stayed on Christopher Street, in the West Village, in a classic old New York building with an iron fire escape, and lived the life of a single man in a bedsit, which was a lot of fun. Manhattan has an intensity because of its density – it never really closes down, and you can walk everywhere.

Camden, too, has its own particular bustle. Sometimes I would walk home and find litter all over the street where someone had been through the rubbish, and at other times I’d be popping round the corner to Whole Foods. There was also a little club at the beginning of my time there, which Coldplay used to go to.

I was having a sports-car moment when I lived there. I had a a racing-green TVR, which I loved, even though it never started when I wanted it to.

And I rode my bicycle a lot. It was fun to bomb along the Regent’s Canal to see friends in Hackney. I love the canal as a feature of the London landscape. People don’t realise how far you can travel along it.

I have a fabulous tie living there. I’d made Band of Brothers and had a career in America, so I was enjoying the fruits of that. And I met my wife, Helen [McCrory], towards the end of y time there, which is why I moved out. The house was just too small.

Damian Lewis stars in the film Will, which will be released on Friday

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

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.

Is he drawn to these more serious subjects? After all, in 2004 he starred in the intense film Keane, about a man who loses his daughter, which was hardly a laugh a minute.

“You saw that?” he says. “That makes two of you. The answer is yes and no — after Band of Brothers I made a film called Dreamcatcher, about aliens exploding out of people’s bottoms, so I do like a bit of popcorn with my caviar. It was very exciting, it was a big studio movie, an $80 million movie, and it was … it was awful! And a film I just did, Your Highness, is sort of like Porky’s meets a medieval spoof. Toby Jones, he was so upset, he was so unhappy to be in it. I had to talk him down from the ledge a few times — he has to wear a naked suit where he has no penis.”

In Stolen Lewis plays a policeman on a child trafficking unit trying to keep a young Nigerian girl safe, attempting to keep his family together and track down a particularly nasty criminal. Wouldn’t he prefer still to be working in Hollywood, rather than the grotty backstreets of Manchester, where Stolen was filmed? “I could have sat in LA for two or three years and just decided right, I want to pursue studio movies. I could have just done one after the other and ticked the boxes.”

Instead, he claims, he came back to the UK to make the TV series the Forsyte Saga because he liked the script so much. But he was soon back in LA playing the lead as a disgraced cop in the TV show Life, which ran for two years until 2009, that Lewis says was ignominiously axed by the network despite being a critical hit and a moderate audience success. It was back to the UK again, but there is no love lost between him and Hollywood.

“What can I say about LA?” he says, the coins tellingly leaping about like Mexican jumping beans in the palm of his hand. “It’s a fabulous little sort of adventure bubble — it’s lovely being on the beach looking at the Pacific Ocean and palm trees and another blue sky, and there’s lots going on for it — but it’s a second-rate city, basically. There are lots of fabulously talented interesting people there but they’re surrounded by millions of idiots, so it’s a slightly charmless place in the end. There’s a general dissatisfaction and a lack of good humour and generosity of spirit.”

He pauses. “Having said all of that, it gets under my skin a little bit, I enjoy rolling the roof down on the car and bombing along the freeway to Malibu. It’s fun — I wouldn’t want to live there. I wanted to live there for about as long as that job lasted, which was just perfect, it was two years.”

If he’s embittered by any of this, he doesn’t show it (although about fellow Old Etonian Dominic West, who has had enviable Stateside success with The Wire, he is cheerfully bitchy: “He’s got a bit of a funny monkey-muscle body, Dom, and he had this lovely sonorous voice, now he’s starting to bark like a Tory landowner.”) Perhaps the best is yet to come for Lewis. After all, didn’t the likes of Clive Owen and Rufus Sewell have to wait until they hit their forties until they started to really find their niche? Lewis turned 40 in February.

“Simply in terms of acting there is no escaping the fact you look at yourself on screen and think: ‘Oh God, I look a bit craggier than I did five years ago,’ ” he says. “You won’t believe me but that’s not really the prime focus of my attention. The next ten years I really want to focus on things — focus on my family, which is a fabulous thing to have, a real gift [he is married to the actress Helen McCrory and they have two young children]. Not so much running around like a headless chicken wondering what the world is all about. It’s more about exploring with a greater concentration all the other things in life that I’ve been too busy to do.”

You’re talking about fishing, aren’t you? “I am going to do a lot of angling,” he says, the coins finally settling down in his palm. “And I just need to find a pair of comfy slippers I could wear round to the corner shop. Maybe a moccasin.”

Stolen is on BBC One, Sunday, 9pm

Damian Lewis: I split my eye open while duelling with Ralph Fiennes

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.

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.

What role has had the biggest impact on your career?

Band Of Brothers was the first American thing I did and it had all the marketing power of HBO behind it. It was the first thing I’d done which was a global hit. I’m recognised for that more than anything else and people are passionate about World War II and what the veterans did on our behalf.

Have you had any onstage mishaps?

I cut my eye open on stage while duelling with Ralph Fiennes. It was at the end of the fight between Hamlet and Laertes and we had this extraordinary duel choreographed for us. The pommel of my own sword came back and whacked me on the eyebrow. I felt it split open. I had to fall to the floor as part of the fight and Ralph turned around to see blood pumping out of my face. Ralph continued with his lines, then whispered: ‘Christ, are you alright?’ We carried on to the end of the show, then I went to hospital to get stitches.

What’s the worst job you’ve had?

Selling car alarm systems in the Elephant and Castle. I had to convince people they needed new car alarms and occasionally give a demonstration. I did it for two months.

Have you ever faced anti-ginger prejudice?

No. But I get letters from little boys who write to me saying they get teased at school about it, which makes me angry. People still think it’s OK to say: ‘Alright, ginge?’ or ‘what are you looking at, ginge?’ and I don’t have any time for it. I’ll definitely come to someone’s help if they’re upset by it.

What else would you like to achieve in your career?

Maybe a musical. Just continuing to do what I’m doing. You have to juggle things with a family and my wife’s very successful so I have to fit in with her. I’m about to direct my first short film so maybe there are things on the other side of the camera that I’d like to do. Acting remains interesting as you can always get better at it.

Stolen can be seen on BBC1 in July.

Celebrity foodies take Lucy Hunter Johnston out to lunch

I met Harold Pinter for the first time at J Sheekey. He was charming, undeniably rather gruff and imposing, but he adored Helen, so I was happy to let him flirt with her all night while I talked to his wife Antonia. It was in the very early days of our relationship, but I wasn’t jealous; I was proud.

I love being part of the legacy of Sheekey’s. It’s taken a while, though. I didn’t start coming properly until I was in my thirties. Trying to book a table when I was 25 would have felt pretentious; you need to earn your stripes. The Parisian/New York brasserie feel of the place is completely to my taste. They are so warm and welcoming here that they just gather up regulars, and always look after you and find you a last-minute table.

Helen and I partied very, very hard before we met and then we collided at the Almeida in 2004 [in Five Gold Rings] and together we partied even harder. We used to lose entire evenings listening to jazz at Ronnie Scott’s. We love to dance, and when we weren’t out we’d put on music really loudly and dance around the house, just the two of us.

I proposed to Helen in Paris. I tried to do it on the Pont Neuf – I was sweating bullets and wrestling in my overcoat pocket for the ring, which had got stuck in a little Cellophane bag, but when I finally got it out, a gaggle of Japanese tourists surrounded us like a flock of seagulls, taking pictures, and the moment was totally destroyed. I now take Helen back to Paris for three days without our two kids [Manon, four, and Gulliver, three] every February for our anniversary. We walk about the city, and sit in bars drinking rosé.

I only really started cooking when I became a dad. Helen was flat out breastfeeding and sleeping, exhausted all the time. I realised that if I didn’t cook, we wouldn’t eat. Now I love to cook Gary Rhodes’ fishcakes with a lemon butter sauce and green beans. I’m no food connoisseur, though; foodies have palates that can speak hundreds of different languages – mine can only manage about one.

The first time I came to Sheekey’s was when I was working at the Donmar in 2002 [in Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night] with Sam Mendes and Kate Winslet and I fell in love with the fish pie. It’s since become one of those places that I have visited so many times that it feels like my local pub. I have so many memories of evenings spent here. I look in one corner and think of the first time Brian Selznick came over: we all had dinner here with Scorsese. We’re here all the time; last week we saw Sienna [Miller] in Flare Path and all had dinner here afterwards; the week before we were here with Benedict [Cumberbatch] after seeing him in Frankenstein. The other day I bumped into Dom West in the street and we sat at the bar and had Welsh rarebit and a Guinness. When Sienna and I were in As You Like It we used to come every lunchtime and every evening. I would order razor clams with broad beans and chorizo, then fish pie with mushy peas, and finish with Scandinavian iced berries.

When I’m working on stage I rush around a lot, so I can eat more, but when we’re filming it’s completely different. Basically everyone arrives on the first day at their normal weight and leaves double the size, spines crushed a foot shorter with fat. That’s the problem with eating on the Harry Potter set [she plays Narcissa Malfoy]. It’s even worse when you’re doing a US production – they may have sushi and salad bars in addition to the burgers, but I have seen living proof that you can get fat on salad. That said, Damian and I love eating out twice a week, we always have. Even when the children were really little we’d take them in cots. We were big party animals, but now instead of keeping going until the early hours, we’ll be done by midnight and think, ‘Wow, what a fantastic evening.’ It’s an age thing; quite frankly, we don’t have the staying power we used to.

‘V’ Star Morena Baccarin Joins Showtime Drama Series ‘Homeland’ As Regular

TV cop and Standard reporter scoop film award at top festival

A film-making duo from London scooped a top award at Robert De Niro’s international Tribeca movie festival in New York.

Actor David Leon, who plays sergeant Joe Ashworth in the new ITV1 drama Vera, teamed up with Evening Standard reporter Rashid Razaq, an old schoolfriend, to write the script for their film, Man And Boy.

Judged best narrative short film, it was made for just £5,000 and Leon, 30, co-directed it with Marcus McSweeney.

It stars Eddie Marsan, who played Inspector Lestrade in the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes, and is based on the real-life case of Scott Campbell, who fell to his death from a tower block in 2008 as he fled a vigilante mob who thought he had sexually assaulted a boy.

The Tribeca jury, headed by When Harry Met Sally writer Nora Ephron and The Fighter director David O Russell, praised its “marriage of brilliant acting, superb technical prowess, and provocative subject matter”.

Leon, who lives in east London, said they were all “tremendously proud” to have triumphed at the festival co-founded by De Niro, one of his cinema heroes – although work commitments meant none of the team was able to accept the prize from the Hollywood star in person.

The honour comes as Leon and Razaq, 31, are fundraising for their first full-length feature script, Driven, a crime thriller-meets-love story with a budget closer to £1million. Shooting is scheduled to start next year, with Band Of Brothers star Damian Lewis.

The film, which Leon will direct alone, is set in 1989 against the backdrop of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It tells the story of a young man facing the moral dilemma of whether to follow his family into crime.

“You work so hard for such a long period of time then inevitably it all starts to happen at the same time,” said Leon.

David Leon: A whole new ball game

He failed as a footballer, but David Leon will be playing to millions in new primetime TV series Vera

Northumberland in November can be bleak, but a more perfect backdrop for a crime drama you will not find. Happily for local lad David Leon, his days off from filming Vera here provided the opportunity to introduce his dog to the wild, empty beaches of his childhood. This is the lull, you sense, before prime-time ITV drama makes him famous.

In Vera, based on Ann Cleeves’s Vera Stanhope novels, Brenda Blethyn plays the dishevelled but brilliant detective inspector; Leon is Sergeant Joe Ashworth, her young colleague. “They have this mother-son dynamic,” he says over tea in the Savoy hotel in London. “They bicker, but there’s a mutual respect.” Blethyn is as marvellous as you would expect, her accent perfected by watching Cheryl Cole on The X Factor; Leon is her quieter, thoughtful anchor. Now 30, he has appeared in Cutting It and Clapham Junction on TV, and got good reviews for Mark Haddon’s play Polar Bears at the Donmar in London last year. “Quite often, you do a piece of work you’re proud of, but nobody really sees it. Then you do a piece of television and 10 million people see it … or so you hope.”

Leon grew up in Newcastle, where his mother was a secretary and his father worked in a power station. As a teenager he was on the books of Blackburn Rovers, but the club let him go when he was 19. “It came very easily, and I thought, ‘This is just going to happen’,” he says. “Then you get to 16 and other things come into your life. It was a big wake-up call when I was released, because I had pissed it all away.”

Articulate and open-minded, it’s hard to imagine Leon as a professional footballer, though his looks may have propelled him into Beckham-style sponsorship deals. His other obsession was films. “I vividly remember being 16 and seeing Trainspotting. I remember thinking just how cool it was. It wasn’t the drugs – it was the music, the way it looked, the dialogue.” He had done a bit of drama at school, “but it was like Billy Elliot syndrome: you just can’t get away with [enjoying it] in a working-class environment.” With few qualifications and his football career over before it had begun, he wondered about acting. “I didn’t tell anybody, because I knew what people would say. I auditioned for the National Youth Theatre, and when I got a place it was like a huge weight had been lifted – somebody saying this was a possibility for me.”

One of his first roles was as Colin Farrell’s page in Oliver Stone’s film Alexander. “I got a phone call on the Friday, and then I flew out on the Monday. This blacked-out Jag turns up and there’s a script on the back seat with my name on it, and I just thought, ‘This is amazing.’ Six weeks later, the Jag dropped me back at my flat, and I couldn’t get through my front door because it was rammed with bills.” He had turned down a place at drama school to take the job. “At the time, I was dubious that I had made the right decision, but it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I was only in the film for two minutes, but I learned so much.”

Since then, he has made two short films; one of them, Man and Boy, about the death of a suspected paedophile, was a selection of the Tribeca film festival in New York last week. This year he hopes to direct his first feature film, Driven, a crime thriller set in Newcastle in the late 80s; Damian Lewis, star of the Forsyte Saga, is confirmed as the lead. Despite this, Leon insists he doesn’t harbour Hollywood ambitions. “All I’ve ever wanted to do is challenging projects,” he says. “If that takes me to America, fantastic, but I don’t think I’d ever really want to leave England on a permanent basis. This is where my roots are. What I’m really drawn to is, not arthouse necessarily, but the more independent, European-feeling films.” See? He would have made a terrible professional footballer.

• Vera is on ITV1 on Sunday at 8pm.

Damian Lewis interview

The ex-Etonian talks schooldays, silly movies and choosing his own career

Although he must be fed up with every interview ever written about him mentioning his red hair – often in tones that suggest he was born with a third leg – today it’s not Damian Lewis’ hair that first catches the eye. It’s what’s on top of it. This is a small red and black-checked trilby hat. It’s the sort of headgear only an actor, or possibly an unusually flamboyant butcher, would ever dream of wearing.

We’re meeting in an engagingly sleazy theatrical club on the Charing Cross Road, a place where the walls are hung with pictures of actors and actresses in a variety of exotic costumes. There’s also a wafty scarlet satin curtain screening us off from the rest of the place. None the less it’s Lewis’s hat that I keep glancing at as it sits on the table between us. Is it a joke? A touch of absurdity to quell any suggestion of vanity? Or is it the opposite? Something he actually thinks looks good on him?

After an hour in his company, I’m still not sure. All I know is that Lewis probably doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks of him or his hat. More than any other actor I’ve ever interviewed he seems entirely contented in his own skin. Admittedly, this isn’t saying much, but in Lewis’s case the self-assurance seems to come off him in waves.

Perhaps this is why he doesn’t seem remotely protective of his image. In his new film, Your Highness, Lewis may make his entrance dashingly mounted on top of a horse, but it’s not long before he – along with everyone else – is reeling beneath a seemingly endless barrage of fart jokes, dwarf jokes, chastity belt jokes and so on. “Basically,” he says, “It’s a Stoner Frat Boy movie crow-barred into a medieval fantasy.”

One of the many odd things about Your Highness is that you practically need a jeweller’s eye-glass to find Damian Lewis’s name on the credits. It’s true that he’s not on screen for long, but as I watched his name appear long after those of Danny McBride, James Franco, Natalie Portman. Zooey Deschanel, Justin Theroux and Charles Dance had swept away, two things struck me. Either Lewis’s career is hopelessly on the slide, or else he’s not bothered about how many lights – if any – his name appears in.

Patiently, he explains how it’s all to do with the American studio system and how British actors “are really just hired as local talent… so they don’t have to pay us as much.” All this is perfectly plausible, but by the time he’s finished, I’m still wondering if there’s a part of Damian Lewis that regards striving too blatantly after stardom as being just a bit… vulgar.

“Vulgar….” he repeats in a ruminative sort of way. “Mmm. Maybe with my upbringing, that might be so. It’s not strictly true to say that I don’t care, because I do care enormously, but I find that what I am ambitious for changes quite often. Possibly that might have something to do with my education…”

Ah, his education. This is the other thing people always mention about Damian Lewis – thus cramming him into yet another half-exotic, half-freakish pigeonhole. The son of an insurance broker father and a mother who served on the board of the Royal Court theatre, he was sent to Eton after prep school in Sussex.

“It’s certainly true that I was brought up in that British amateur tradition, the one which always held that if you were reasonably good at cricket, knew one or two Latin texts and a few zingy Oscar Wilde quotes for dinner parties, you were pretty much ready to go and run some outpost in Hindustan. But do I regard ambition as vulgar?” he wonders, still ruminating away. “No,” he concludes, “I’m sure I don’t. However, I think I have an ear for outright vulgarity as far as scripts are concerned and I try to avoid that.”

Apart from this one, of course?

“Well, this is a silly film and sometimes it’s quite nice to make a silly film.”

There had been Etonian actors before Lewis – Hugh Laurie, Christopher Cazenove – and there have been Etonian actors since – Dominic West, Will Keen – but for some reason Lewis’s old school ties have seemed stronger than most. Perhaps it’s because he appears to embody so many traditional Old Etonian qualities.

Along with the confidence, the conspicuous charm and the air of effortlessness, there’s something that, in certain lights at least, could convincingly pass as a sense of entitlement. And that’s not all. Rather weirdly under the circumstances, he can seem – literally – to have a stiff upper lip. It’s never long, however, before it starts to quiver with amusement.

Lewis is understandably keen to play down his educational credentials – along with any suggestion that they might have affected his career. “Even though I went through that system, I’m not disproportionately moneyed and titled. I also went into a profession where no amount of old school ties could help me.”

While his upbringing may have been privileged, it plainly wasn’t at all desiccated. I once read that, aged 10, Lewis used to stand in front of his bedroom mirror pretending he was a guest on Wogan – then a five-nightly BBC1 chatshow – and answering imaginary questions in an American accent. Was there, I wondered, any grain of truth in this?

He grins, not remotely abashed.

“It’s all true! I’ve always been a narcissist.”

He was, he says, very quiet until he was about seven or eight. “My little brother Gareth (who directed him in the 2007 feature film, The Baker) was much more outgoing and noisier. Then all that disappeared and I was noisy thereafter.”

He’s not kidding here. Lewis’s normal conversational voice could blow your ear muffs off at 20 paces. Even when he’s in one of his introspective phases, the decibel counter never drops far below the red.

At Eton he once played in a production of Nicholas Nickleby – he was Wackford Squeers – alongside Jeffrey Archer’s son, James. This, in retrospect, was a peculiarly portentous moment, given that not-so-many years later Lewis appeared as Archer Snr in a TV spoof biography, Jeffrey Archer: The Truth.

“I remember when I was doing Nicholas Nickleby, James Archer came to see me at the interval and said “my father would like to see you after the show.” It felt rather as if I had been summoned by the Queen and I was cocky enough to think, ‘Who the hell is he to summon me?’ But anyway, I went, of course, and he said, ‘You are going to be a star and I want front row seats to your first performance in the West End.’ And, of course, I did play him later on. It was rather weird.”

At Eton, he was clearly a glamorous figure – not necessarily a complete stranger to self-doubt, but far from paralysed by it either. “I was, if you like, a successful schoolboy in that I had a degree of talent in all the required things that make you a success at school. I suppose other boys would look at me and say, of course, he did great at school. He did this and he was captain of that…”

Were you very confident with girls as a teenager?

“God no!” he exclaims. “My face expanded in about 13 different directions when I was about 16. I looked quite odd and I also had red hair, of course. I relied on making girls laugh. Perhaps I appeared confident, but I was like a hamster on a wheel, endlessly scampering round and round to stay on the same spot.

“It was probably the same when I went to drama school. If you were to ask anyone who was there with me [he was at Guildhall] they’d probably say I was boorishly confident. Certainly I always spoke too much when in retrospect I should just have shut up and listened. But in a lot of respects being there did me a lot of good. It wasn’t cool to be posh – quite the reverse – and for the first time in my life, I was in a minority.”

Lewis left drama school early because he was offered an acting job – and he’s never really looked back. At 23, he was playing Hamlet in Regent’s Park. “Tim Pigott-Smith (who directed it) always says he gave it to me because I shouted better than anyone else.”

His big break came when Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg – against a barrage of advice from casting directors – picked him to star in the epic HBO series, Band of Brothers. Based on the history of the 101st Airborne Division during WW2, Band of Brothers was the expensive TV mini-series ever made – with a budget of around $125 million. Lewis, whose command of American accents hadn’t moved on that much from his imaginary days on Wogan, effectively had to carry the whole thing.

“It was pretty daunting. Normally, I never go to a gym, but before we started shooting, I thought I’d better. I reckoned I was in really good shape, and then I looked around and I was half the size of everyone else. A lot of these American actors have this – in my view – misplaced view that they have to look like Action Man. The trouble is, they all run the risk of being interchangeable.”

The series went on to win six Emmys and a Golden Globe. Yet even then, Lewis says, life didn’t change that much afterwards – mainly because he decided not to live in LA, but to stay put England.

“I was just wary about it. I had a feeling that if I committed to being in LA I might have been sucked into big budget films and found myself there 10 years later, single and unhappy. That said, Band of Brothers opened lot of doors for me. For instance, I’ve gone on to play Americans in five or six jobs in the last few years – films with Robert Redford, Jennifer Lopez and Morgan Freeman. Sadly, none of them has been a big hit – but who knows, the next one might be. It’s also afforded me the opportunity to do the little films that I much prefer. They’re just much more stimulating from a creative point of view.”

Work has never been in short supply. He appeared as Soames in the revival of The Forsyte Saga, went back to LA to star in the NBC series Life and, in 2009, played opposite Kiera Knightley onstage in The Misanthrope. Perhaps his finest performance – and the work he’s most proud of – came in the 2004 film, Keane, in which he played a mentally disturbed man trying to come to terms with the abduction of his daughter.

Back in his wild tempestuous youth – “Possibly I was wilder than some and not as wild as others,” he says with uncharacteristic primness – Lewis stepped out with actresses Kristin Davis and Sophia Myles, as well as the Channel 4 news presenter, Katie Razall. Now, at 40, he’s married – to actress, Helen McCrory and they have two children – a girl of four and a boy of three. The two of them met in 2004 when they starred opposite one another – as lovers – in a play at the Almeida.

“Mmm,” he says. “Bit cliched, isn’t it? But I suppose we at least knew there was a chemistry there. At the time I was sitting – in LA actually. Reading a lot of uninspiring words and I was sent this script for this play. I thought it was rather brilliant, muscular and poetic. I said to the producer there is only one person who should play the female lead and that’s Helen McCrory. I didn’t know her, but I called her up and tried to persuade her to do it. I remember her saying, “It’s very unusual hearing from you”, and I just kept saying, ‘You must play this role, you must play this role.’

“She called me back when she’d read the script and said, ‘Don’t you think this might be better on the radio?’ And again I kept saying, ‘No, no, it’s wonderful, it’s muscular, it’s exciting, we’ll have a great time doing it.’ So eventually she said yes – and it was universally slammed by every critic. Helen always says that it’s the worst reviewed production that she has ever been in, and she blames me entirely.”

Meanwhile his career chugs steadily if unglamorously along – a good part in a small film here, a brief yet lucrative tussle with a chastity belt there. “I suppose where I am sort of reflects the work I have chosen to do. Are there occasional frustrations because I can’t work with a certain director because it’s a big studio movie and I don’t have enough of a studio profile? The answer is yes. But generally… generally I have the career I have chosen myself.” His upper lip gives one of its amused little quivers. “I really can’t complain too much.”

Your Highness is on Nationwide release

Interview w/ Howard Gordan, of new TV show ‘Homeland’

CLT Blog: Damian Lewis is playing the lead character that has come back and recovered, is that correct?

Gordon: Exactly.

CLT Blog: It’s kind of interesting because his character in Life he was in prison for 12 years and kind of had to come back and readjust. There’s a little similarity. How did Damian Lewis come to be a part of this show?

Gordon: I’d always admired him tremendously and when you think about a returning American hero you don’t think about British actors at first blush but Damian is someone who does this impeccable American accent and has kind of oddly enough an American face, too. What really sold it for us was believe it or not, neither Life or Band of Brothers, but this amazing movie he did called Keane.