Press Archive

Radio Times
13-19 April 2002
by Andrew Duncan

The redhead bound for movie glory

Andrew Duncan meets Damian Lewis

With Shakespearean roles, Warriors, Band of Brothers and now The Forsyte Saga on an impressive CV, Hollywood beckons. Does this mean Damian Lewis is selling out?

Life can be disappointing if you’re yet another ‘most promising’ actor of your generation. He was on the brink of international fame when he starred as an American Second World War hero in the $120 million TV epic Band of Brothers, co-produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, but audience ratings didn’t live up either to its hype or quality.

Now has has hopes as Soames in The Forsyte Saga on ITV1, as well as co-starring with Morgan Freeman in Dreamcatcher, an $80 million Hollywood film. “It’s really A-list,” he says. He’s grown a red beard, to match his hair, for the part. “ No one is ambivalent towards a redhead. They like it or don’t. Tom Hanks joked I could become the world’s first red-headed film star, which is now my ambition. “There’s a distinction between acting and being a star, though. Tom Cruise is a classic example. He can act well enough to be enjoyable - he wouldn’t survive if he was bad - but his innate charisma and pizzazz prevail. My vanity is that I act rather than turning up, being lazy and doing ‘Damian Lewis, star’ - but of course you see aspects of me in every part I do.”

He’s wearing a blue jacket with a badge of the Academie Culinare de France, lent to him by the smart London restaurant where we meet for lunch because he arrived without one, an unusual sartorial faux pas for an Old Etonian. He is quick-witted and humorous, aware his enthusiasm can spill into self-parody. “I’ve been pretentious,” he admits. “Self-preservation has taught me to moderate what I say. I communicate my passion in a way that takes me on the express train to Pseuds Corner in Private Eye. Acting indulges me. It’s my mistress. It’s with me in the morning and puts me to bed at night.” [Dammmmmmmm]

Stop immediately, I urge, and he smiles. “There you go,” he says. “Actors can be so florid in their enthusiasm its’ risible. If you’re felling cynical and grown-up, it’s natural to have an advers reaction when some luvvie tells you about the beauty of theatre.”

Maybe, like many of his ilk, he wants to hide behind invented characters, fearful of his own true personality. “I’m perhaps an anomaly as an actor in that I do quite like myself. I think I’m disciplined enough to immerse myself in roles. I hope Soames will seem radically different to Richard Winters and Winters was different to my part in Hearts and Bones.

He was 31 a few days previously. “I looked forward to becoming 30 because I assumed, from the age of 12, that I’d be married when I was 29. I’m not, but I’ll do it at some point. I’m sold on the idea of family.” He lives with Katie Razzall, a Channel 4 producer, after his previous relationship with an actress, Elli Garnett, broke up, partly because of stress during the ten-month filming of Band of Brothers. “A relationship stagnates if you’re away from the person you love for long periods. At some stage, I suppose, you make a choice between work and commitment. Women are just as likely to say, ‘I don’t want to marry. I’m chasing a career.’ Then they reach a crossroads - ‘have I got where I want by 35? If the answer is yes, they look for an appropriate man to have a baby with before it’s too late. It’s a biological inconvenience.”

Granada’s six-part dramatisation of the first two books of The Forsyte Saga chronicles the lives of three generations during 34 years at the end of the 19th century. Soames is a 31-year-old partner in the family law firm, a role made famous by Eric Porter in the BBC’s seminal 1967 marathon.

“Acting is less easy but more rewarding the longer I do it.” He pauses, and looks embarrassed. “I never thought I’d hear myself say that. It’s so pretentious, but if you play a repressed, fastidious, emotionally barren solicitor like Soames, it affects you in the same way as real people - editors or bankers - are worn down by office politics. I’m more ebullient and gregarious than most of the uptight characters I play. I think I’m chosen for them because of my background, although it’s wrong to assume all public-school boys are the fifties idea of repressed Englishmen.”

It was during a school play when he was 16 that he decided to become an actor. “The onus is to go to university as a safety net, but it seemed to me a continuation of cocktail parties and hanging out with Sloanes. I needed an alternative experience.

Mum said if you’re going to chase girls, play sport and get a third, don’t bother. If you really want to act, go to drama school.

In moments of preciousness I think with typical upper-middle-class guilt, I should be doing something more useful with my life, but communication through artistic forms is important. All civilisations should have paintings on walls, people standing on stage shouting, and others behind a camera having their photos taken.”

He’s the third child of four, all by the same mother, Charlotte. Her first husband died when her daughter, Amanda, was three and her son, William, was one. She married Damian’s father, Watcyn, five years later and had him [“the ham in the sandwich”] and younger brother Gareth, a scriptwriter.

It’s clearly been a happy, successful family - Amanda, organised the Prince’s Trust and was awarded an MVO. She now runs a pub in Bristol. William is a wealthy stockbroker. Watcyn, of Welsh descent, worked in re-insurance. “My grandparents paid for Eton. They’re Bowaters on my mother’s side, whose newsprint firm sold lots to Rupert Murdoch’s father.” Both parents were keen on the theatre. “Our holiday treat was a West End show. Dad has a beautiful voice. He lived in Chicago for five years and was dancing in a bar when a Hollywood producer invited him to be in a chorus line. He never quite had the balls, and it’s a huge link between my parents and myself that I give them that show-business element.”

Tragically his mother was killed last year in a car crash in India. “That makes time seem important. I wasn’t to use it better, although I can’t say I’ve succeeded. It also makes you honest, suddenly. You tell people things you wouldn’t have before - how much you love them. The clinical explanation is ‘post-traumatic stress disorder.’

“For Warriors we researched what happens when you undergo extreme stress - like getting a phone call saying your mother has just been killed in a car crash. You think you’ve experienced something no one else can understand, and that you’re justified, because of your pain, in wrecking a car, screaming out loud in a supermarket. I’m not saying I did any of that when Mum died, but it made me feel I didn’t need to pussyfoot around. Life has an urgency.” He pauses, and adds, “ I haven’t said this before, but Dad is my hero. He’s been the most remarkable and positive force in my life. He spent 31 years with Mum. The crash was horrific, unfair and cruel, but it’s happened and you don’t get over it. He’s distraught.”

He auditioned for five drama schools and was turned down by three, including the Bristol Old Vic, “which was my idea of a romantic time - students in corduroy jackets and cloth caps. Instead I went to the Guildhall, in the Barbican, a concrete compound with a collegiate feel that I thought was sterile at first. But my year had Joe Fiennes, and Ewan McGregor was in the year above. Drama school can’t teach you how to act. All it does is hone your talent.”

At first he worked mostly in theatre, spending seven years at the RSC. “I can stand on stage, shout, and be full of energy, but I was too manic for TV and film. I had to learn. At the moment I say, crudely, I’m on a financial curve, which is seductive. I don’t want to do Ibsen and Chekhov all my life, but I do want to do them - in the same way as I want to jump out of helicopters and shoot people.”

He was surprised to be chosen by Spielberg for the lead in Band of Brothers. “I knew they wanted some English actors - mainly for tax breaks that they get if 75 per cent of the budget is spent on English resources. I was concerned no one would say, ‘Hey, that Limey does a good accent.’ I wanted them to believe I was American.” They did, so much so that he was offered - but turned down - a part in Black Hawk Down.

“Band of Brothers was hard work, bed at ten and up at 5.30 for a five mile run before breakfast, like a Method rehearsal, which seems a bit bonkers. Luvvies talk about ‘Dr Theatre’, but it’s true. You prance around, often in tights, as someone else, and it doesn’t matter if the audience claps or boos - by the end you’ve lifted yourself from any gloom. It’s a chemical reaction in the brain - which is a great reason not to take acting too seriously. At heart, it’s just playing games.”

He’s about to return to Canada to finish filming Dreamcatcher, from a Stephen King novel. “The rewards are exponentially greater than theatre, so there’s this question: ‘Am I selling out and making a crappy Hollywood movie?’ I never had a problem with that because I don’t see it as selling out. I’m clear about when I’m making something worthy, or fluffy and superficial. I enjoy both equally. A large part of me is fluffy and superficial, as well as worthy.

I’m over the moon about the film. It’s going to be remarkable or atrocious, and you never know. I’m told the trick is to book your next one before this one comes out, in case it’s a disaster. I exercise quality control and don’t like to think I’m a hired hand. Although that, of course, is exactly what I am.”

Damian Lewis on…

The Forsyte Saga
There’s a parallet between Band of Brothers and TFS in that critics had preconceptions. They wondered if Band of Brothers was revisionist American history glamorising violence - and it wasn’t. And viewers of TFS needn’t worry that the sex is explicit, or relationships portrayed with vulgarity. The rape scene was famous because it was shocking to show a rape of any kind on TV. It’s still powerful - because rape is shocking.

The first dramatisation was groundbreaking for a whole generation. I heard it was wonderful, but had no inclination to see it because televsion dates so quickly.

Band of Brothers
It was fun - boys with toys. We stayed in boot camp for ten days, which I enjoyed, although being in dormitories was a bit of a scary flashback moment. We were regimented, which was seductive and liberating at the same time because I didn’t have to make a single decision for myself.

Thanks to bransgore2001.