Press Archive

Marmalade Magazine
Winter (?) 2006
Issue 11

Think Damien Lewis and you think sexy posh rogue… or at least that’s what most of the women I informed I was meeting the man had said about him. I’m not sure if I should be intimidated by the knee wobbling effect he has on women, or the overflowing passion he spills on audiences with every role. I find him relaxed and confident, articulate and friendly. I ask if he knows the effect he has on the women in my life? “No, that’s nice to hear, it’s nice to be desired, but really, I resist labels.” He ducks the complement with sliding modesty, a modesty that has seen the stage actor comfortably take on William Keane, a schizophrenic father trying to come to terms with the loss of his abducted seven-year-old daughter, in the forthcoming independent film, Keane. Veering between relentless days compulsively returning to the place of his loss, Keane’s desperate downward spiral is curbed when he helps out a financially strapped mother with her own seven-year old in toe. Over a couple of meetings, he gains trust enough to pick up his new friend’s daughter from school when she is in a tight spot with her estranged husband. As Keane gets close to the girl, he’s forced to begin to deal with his own loss. Masterfully directed by Lodge Kerrigan and set in New York City, the film has the grim yet poetic reality of early Ken Loach and Mike Leigh.

Damian’s career began at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where discipline contributed to an effortless transition onto the small screen with passionately played characters like World War 11 Platoon leader, Richard Winters in Spielberg’s excellent true story, Band of Brothers and solicitor Soames Forsyte in the BBC’s mammoth adaptation of John Galsworthy’s novel, The Forsyte Saga. “I try to be diverse in the roles I choose, there are too many limitations on what it means to play a lead role. Actors who are less conventional end up playing the smaller character roles, when actually it would be far more interesting to see those sorts of actors and actresses in the lead roles.” We then agree that lots of women have far wider taste in men than they are being offered. And similarly for guys, its not so interesting looking at generic, pretty actresses.

Damian goes on, “it’s always considered, I choose roles that challenge me as an actor. The best scripts are always hard fought over and money is always a factor.” For Damian, who he works with is important too, he tells me about working with Lodge Kerrigan on his forthcoming role as William Keane. “Lodge was very concerned if we’d get on. He came to London and stayed in my house after he..d offered me the role, we went out and had a few beers and we talked through the script and just made sure we were on the same page. It was a luxury to have time to do that. That rarely happens.” The result is an intense and intimately honest portrayal of a man in despair as he teeters on the edge of his sanity.

“Acting can be very therapeutic, like meditating. You go somewhere and you imagine yourself as part of a world that is not yours. You escape. Even if it’s into a chaotic or tragic world, it still has a meditative quality. It still has the quality of removing yourself from the realities of everyday life.”

Sometimes the best way to fix something is to break it he explains, “I think it’s essential. There can’t be too much form. In order to be creative you’re constantly breaking in a constructive way. Anarchy is fine as long as there’s a doctrine in place for something else. If it’s smashing things for smashing sake then, I have no time for that.”

Damian doesn’t have an ultimate role, he choses each for its own reasons. enjoying Hamlet particularly from his RSC days he tells me. “Once you’re in character you’re so focused and blinkered it’s like playing football, you zone out everything around you and you just concentrate for ninety minutes. When I worked with Larry Kadsdan on Dreamcatcher, he said actors were like athletes, you sit around in trailers for a long time and then you come out after being delayed for six or seven hours, it’s quarter to midnight and you might have been sleeping, but you have to be primed. Like a hundred meters sprinter, you’ve just got to hit it and be focused and concentrated.” It’s a good analogy. “Band Of Brothers was like a marathon, filming for eight months.” He laughs.

Damian’s work so far is probably quite an accurate reflection of who he is. “Because the choices I’ve made,” he says “There are celebrities and actors and I consider myself the latter.”

Finally our full fat cokes arrive. We did order them half an hour earlier, but Damian doesn’t seem to mind. Neither do I and we as we smoke a fag while we wait for the Marmalade photographer to begin his shoot. “I think Philip Seymour Hoffman is a really interesting actor, I’d love to work with Al Pacino and Merrill Streep. I don’t think I’d shy away from anything; Ian McKellen did Coronation Street and loved it! It didn’t do his reputation any harm!”

Keane opens 22nd September 2006