Homeland’s Damian Lewis on Researching His Next Big Role
Hedge fund managers and intelligence officers? Damian Lewis has been there, played that.
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If there’s one good thing about being an actor – aside from securing the best tables in restaurants – it’s who you meet when researching a role. Take Damian Lewis, the 45-year-old British star of Band of Brothers, Homeland and Wolf Hall. For his new TV show, Billions, he hung with financial aficionados, while prep for Our Kind of Traitor, a new movie adaptation of the John le Carré novel which launches in Australia on July 14, saw him lunching with real-life “spooks”. Money talks, it seems… and so does Damian.
on the job that these hedge fund guys really feel set apart from Wall Street. The conventional CEOs of the big banks, they have bat phone protocols – a shiny red telephone! If they get a phone call from an activist, a hedge fund guy who says, “We’ve been analysing your company and we think your share price is under-valued and we don’t think you’re performing well,” within an hour – or that day at least – there will be an emergency board meeting. These guys aren’t set up in Wall Street; a lot of them are mid-town, the rest of them are out in Greenwich [New York]. And they’re sort of like snipers.