Soldiering on: Damian Lewis in Homeland
After his breakthrough 10 years ago in Band of Brothers, Damian Lewis’s finest work has been for television, his latest role that of a US Marine held captive for eight years
After his breakthrough 10 years ago in Band of Brothers, Damian Lewis’s finest work has been for television, his latest role that of a US Marine held captive for eight years
by Jay Rayner | The Guardian |
Watching Damian Lewis leading the men of Easy Company to victory in Spielberg’s WWII epic Band of Brothers, you’d never guess he went to Eton and attended drama school with Ewan MacGregor. Now, though, he is returning to more familiar territory as the iconic Soames in The Forsyte Saga.
The middle-aged Italian waitress clearly does not recognise the actor she is shouting at or, if she does, she has had enough experience at being a sour-faced waitress not to show it. This is the second time she has asked Damian Lewis to choose what he wants for lunch and it is the second time he has asked for a few more minutes. ‘Look,’ she says, with a fearsome shrug, arms spread wide. ‘We are busy. You don’t order now, then the kitchen, it become busy. You wait too long for your food. You get cross.’ There is a convincing logic here: the small, smokey cafe in London’s St James’s is indeed already crammed with people.
Continue reading Guardian Interview: Shooting Star – March 10, 2002
The mud-spattered Lewis, in a World War II paratrooper uniform, has spent the morning shooting blanks (24 for each take) from an M-1 rifle at a crowd of extras dressed as German soldiers.
It is a deafening business, and everyone else on set either wears earplugs or covers their ears whenever director Tom Hanks yells “action!” Continue reading This American Platoon is Led by a Brit, Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2000
By Matt Wolf, theater critic and journalist in London, New York Times, July 2, 1995
LONDON— “A HIT, A VERY PALPABLE HIT!” cries the courtier Osric during the climactic duel of “Hamlet.” And in the Broadway production now at the Belasco Theater, those hits are palpable indeed.
Productions of “Hamlet” are often distinguished by verse speaking or physical design. Jonathan Kent’s current staging, imported from the Almeida Theater Company in London, offers an additional virtue in the face-off between Hamlet (played by Ralph Fiennes) and Laertes (Damian Lewis). Beginning on a white rectangular fencing mat, the fight soon spills beyond it, weaving among the chairs of Claudius’s dismayed court as the two combatants become increasingly fevered.
Continue reading Hamlet: Swordplay the Serious Way, New York Times, July 2, 1995
By Matt Wolf – New York Times – January 1, 1995
This most excellent canopy the air, look you . . . It makes a difference to when you can see the firmament Hamlet is talking about, and here is one of the gains of watching Hamlet in the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park. With the sky above he counts himself king of infinite space; amid the theatre he might be bounded in a nutshell. Continue reading Hamlet in the Park – June 17, 1994