Press Archive

NCRV GIDS
21-27 February 2004
by Koen Kleijn
Source
Translation by Milou

Nobody is all that bad

So much did the humorless, emotionless, and norrow-minded Soames from The Forsyte Saga got into actor Damian Lewis’ bones, that at the end of each day of recording he had to take of few drinks to lose the character. But still, “I didn’t hate him”. A talk about acting, making war and the dark side of the human spirit.

For whom doesn’t know the British actor Damian Lewis, should watch him carefully, because he is booming. Lewis (1971) was just a fairly unknown actor about 4 years ago with Warriors and Hearts & Bones, when opportunity rose to play the lead part of Major Winters in WWII-drama Band of Brothers. This Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks production gave him a Gloden Globe nomanition and also the key to a Hollywood career. Movies with such names as Morgan Freeman, Robert Redford and Jennifer Lopez are on it’s way and a project with Steven Soderbergh is in the making. After just finishing Band of Brothers he started making The Forsyte Saga which will air on NCRV next week… In London Lewis can still do his grocery-shopping without difficulties, but that will soon change…….

AMSTERDAM

When Damian Lewis was in his second year of drama-school, he and two fellow-students took the boat to Amsterdam. Lewis (laughing); “Guess what we did there…I still remember on the way over there we were sitting all three on deck in the middle of the night gazing at the stars and we shouted in a romantic way that we were the new generation of actors and we were going to change everything, stuff like that. I would like to say that that really happened, but I think it didn’t quite went that way..”

Well, we like to think it sure looks to go that way… Damian Lewis belongs to a new generation of young brilliant actors who are going to go very far with their career. He is self-confident,sexy and certainly not afraid of Hollywood but doesn’t want to be “sold as the newest sports car”! He refused a nice role in Black Hawk Down in favor of The Forsyte Saga.

In the saga he is Soames Forsyte, son and heir to a very wealthy family of lawyers and soliciters obsessed by money and consideration. Soames is the stiff, materialistic nineteen-century guy all the way.. Whithout emotion, without humor and stuck in shackles of the narrow-minded hypocrite Victorian moral. Under stiff plastrons (?) and cracking corsets beats the passion and boils the lust. He marries the beautiful, artistic but poor Irene, a marriage that will soon end in a bitter feud.

ENORMOUS OBSESSION

For an actor it is always fun to play the bad guy. Was this also the case?

“Soames has something petty and ugly, something I could only shake of with some alcohol at the end of the day. But I didn’t hate him, if I did I couldn’t have played him. In the book he is a complex personalty; in the BBC-series from 1967 he was evil and Irene was only the victim. We wanted to show some more sides to him. Even if no one likes Soames-he is a bastard, a racist, a sexist, a snob-then still you should be able to understand his obsession for that woman and how it destroys his life.”

So, there is still some good in him?

“Soames is evil, but I think, even he, has the right of some form of forgiveness. But saying that, I do believe that absolute evil does exist. I used to think that there was always an explanation that would justify or make it understandable why someone does something, how bad it was. But take Eichmann for instance…how logical his development was, in the end he does something pure evil in biblical sense. Soames isn’t like that. His problem is that he only understands the world in terms of “possession” and “material wealth”, not in emotional or spiritual sense. That’s how his relationship with Irene is. He builds a house for her; he tries to buy her love. He thinks it works that way, because he thinks it is the proper way to handle things. But she rejects him from the beginning. She doesn’t love him, she should have never married him. Out of frustration he forces himself to her. That’s called rape in a marriage, but in those days it wasn’t seen that way. A man had the right to force himself to his wife; it was the duty of the wife to have his children.”

MATERIALISTIC MENTALITY

The set of the Saga is historical flawless, but the language sounds modern. Someone says; “Hello, dad!” to his father. Why is that? “I think Soames is an absolute modern figure in a modern play. It is the end of the nineteen century, there is an industrial boom, the British Empire is at the peak of it’s power. Everybody is busy making money an real estate is the way. It’s just like the yuppie in the 80′s and 90′s, the same materialistic mentality. “Hello, dad!”, is very modern and we all had to laugh when we first read it, but I do think it’s right. With a costume-drama like this everyone tries to avoid it becoming a museum-piece… but there is always a pressure to get it historically correct but still relevant for this day and age.

You come from a good background, you were at Eton, where prince William and prince Harry had their education. A cricketball broke your nose. Did you learn the Forsyte world there?

“Eton has the reputation to be the center of everything of wealth, power, nobility and privilege, but Eton isn’t that at all. It’s a boarding-school, so your life and time is strictly in order, but otherwise I thought it to be a free space, with liberal ideas, not at all Victorian. I did lots of theater there, even performed Nicholas Nickleby there, started my own group and that was stimulated by the school. It was at Eton that I decided to become an actor. I think the princes did like it there. Besides I don’t think they were bothered with a shilling or two more, like I did…As for the cricketball, yes I did break my nose..”

FRUSTRATED, TANGLED LONERS

Soames is just like Major Winters in Band of Brothers an introvert, closed man. Is that a coincidence, or do those roles just fit you?

” I think I’m much more extrovert than Soames or Winters, but I do have the urge to bottle everything up, so maybe there is that similarity in my play. It’s obvious that acting is a form of free therapy. You sure learn a lot about yourself by acting. Maybe I am the right man to play frustrated, tangled up loners!”

You met the real Major Winters, now 85. How was he, and what did he say about your role?

“He is a simple and very direct man. Winters has a religious background; he was very suspicious from the beginning; had to be re-assured that Spielberg wasn’t going to Hollywood or sugar his story. Everything is realistic, from Normandy to Berchtesgaden. I thought it was brilliant. Winters did loosen up along the way and we he saw the result he loved it!”

BOSNIAN WAR

The war didn’t get out of Lewis’ system. In Warriors he played a young officer that faces the horror of the Bosnian war and the powerlessness of the UN-troops. The series brought in Britian the discussion of the use of British UN-mission, who (just like Dutchbat) had to watch helplessly how the two battling sides committed cruelty. For Band of Brothers he walked around in army-clothes for almost a year. These experiences were astonishing. In one of the last episodes, Winters and his men, discover a concentration-camp. “It was unbelievably reconstructed and awful, very shocking-and that shock came directly on camera.”

How much has this affected your view on war and military in general?

“Warriors is maybe my favorite piece, a fantastic example of how drama can work at it’s very best-on a low fire, slow with slink camera work in a semi-documentary style. It strengthens your believes that war has to be avoided at all costs, because the human price is to high. It doesn’t matter how many strategies, rules and systems you make, when you find yourself in the middle of it, it’s always chaos! That was sure the case for the soldiers in Bosnia where their instructions were not really clear, they didn’t know what and what not to do. All of those young men who were send there, had to watch while the most horendous cruelties were made. Most of them came back with a huge trauma. Warriors also tells how they were let down and abandoned by the army when they came back, because the army refused to acknowledge that there was a problem.”

A REAL FIRE-EATER

“I met the former commanding officer of the UNHCR in Kosovo, general sir Michael Jackson (?) a few times. A fascinating man, a real fire-eater! We now get along friendly, but when we first met we both had a few drinks to much and almost got into a fight! He attacked the movie vigorously; ‘Artists! You don’t know really what it is like…’ Because of Warriors and Band of Brothers I thought I did know how it really is and we got into a heavy discussion. Jackson said;’I'm a soldier. I know what war is. I know what it costs.’ Meanwhile the army does recognize post-traumatic stress syndrome and that people have to be treated for it. ‘But it’s still the cruel reality’, said Jackson, ‘that you should not care for those people to much, acknowledge that they could develop a trauma. You have to deny it for the moral and the self-confidence of the soldiers still on the battlefield.’ Astonishing, that with these roles I played I could talk to him about this. I just knew how ‘the soldier’ changed since WWII. It has become a different specie.”