– Just Do It –
by John Blow | The Yorkshire Post | September 14, 2026
Damian Lewis is one in a long lineage of actors who have incorporated music into their established creative paths.
It can be a trajectory booby-trapped with snark from the general public, but as Lewis says, it is not actually a surprising or strange move for people involved in the performing arts.
And when it comes to his own music, he has found that people are ready to listen.
“Music fans are overwhelmingly, I think, generous and open-hearted and curious because they’re always looking for new music,” he tells the YP over the phone.
“So they always come with a curiosity and with a generosity because they want to like it. It’s always been a total pleasure playing the gigs for people who show up. In terms of doing one thing and then doing another, some people struggle with that just as an idea, and there’ll always be someone who sneers at the person that does more than one thing. If anyone sneers, I try to ignore them on the whole because I think they’re sort of… well they’re anti-fun and they’re anti-adventure and they’re anti-creativity on the whole.
“And that’s what I say to young people. If anyone ever asks me about getting into music or acting, I just say, ‘Just do it. If you’re passionate about it, do it, and don’t let the person sneering at you stop you, because they’re dangerous, those people, they should be ignored’.
“But from my point of view, I feel like people with imagination and curiosity are just open to anything. There’s such a long history of people going from acting to music and music to acting, and musicians who paint, and then people like David Bowie, who do everything. It’s very natural, actually, and so people, on the whole, have responded really well. I think it’s harder if you get very well known for something – people get used to you as one thing, then I think it’s a bit more of a leap in people’s imaginations. But the truth is, it’s really not that weird or strange or unusual that someone does.”
Father-of-two Lewis, 55, has built a career of esteemed acting roles: as Henry VIII in the television adaptation of Wolf Hall; Nicholas Brody in political thriller series Homeland (winning him a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award in 2012 and 2013); playing another actor, Steve McQueen, in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood; and, early in his career, as US Army Major Richard D Winters in HBO’s Band of Brothers. He was recently on the big screen in war film Pressure, starring alongside Andrew Scott and Brendan Fraser.
Music had always loomed large for London-born Lewis, however, as he idolised rock and roll icons such as Elvis Presley, and in his 20s motorcycled around Europe with a guitar for busking – an adventure charted in his song Zaragoza, from first album Mission Creep in 2023.
He had always been in bands and performed at wrap parties, but songwriting became a more serious ambition during the coronavirus lockdown, a time which coincided with the death of his wife, the actor Helen McCrory, in April 2021, to breast cancer at the age of 52.
Lewis wrote of his grief in songs on Mission Creep and, in June this year, he released his second album, Sweet Chaos, which strikes a different tone.
“The first album was quiet and tender, and a bit sad in places,” says Lewis, who is now the partner of American musician Alison Mosshart, frontwoman of The Kills and The Dead Weather. “And this (album) isn’t sad so much as just being a bit more… there are a couple of songs which are a bit angrier, which I like. I like anger as a positive energy.
“The way it was produced, I got together with Guy Chambers. Guy was brilliant at layering the music and giving it this lush, slightly more produced sound. I never wanted my music to feel overly produced because my background is really riding motorbikes through Europe with a guitar and a tent and busking, which is what I did a lot of in my 20s.
“I’ve always wanted, I suppose, the immediacy of that – that you just get some guy thrashing on an acoustic guitar and shouting at you in the street. So I’ve wanted that from both records, but there’s no question that this second record is layered in a slightly different way. It’s got a few more bells and whistles on it.”
Chambers is best known for working with Robbie Williams, co-writing mega hits such as Angels, Millennium and Let Me Entertain You. As well as releasing his own music, he has also collaborated with the likes of Tina Turner, Kylie Minogue, Will Young, Diana Ross, Tom Jones, James Blunt, Rufus Wainwright, and Mark Ronson
Lewis says: “We’re talking about a man who’s written some of the biggest pop songs ever recorded. So the man knows how to put together a song. That’s actually where his ruthlessness comes out – not as a producer, but as a songwriter.
“He might just say, ‘Why are we going back to the verse? I’m bored. I want to go to the chorus’. I say, ‘Well, because I’m saying lots of nice things in that verse, and I like it’. He says, ‘I don’t care. I’m bored. I want to go to the chorus’. He was very matter of fact about song structure. It’s what you’d expect from a man who writes very successful three-minute pop songs.
“But in terms of when it came to him producing and layering and creating a sonic world for each song, he was very respectful of the song that I’d written, and just did everything he could to enhance that,” he says.
Sheffield legend Richard Hawley was another musician who influenced Lewis, providing some support and recommendations for the latest record after they were introduced at one of the former’s gigs.
“He’s been brilliant. His music is an influence. I’m always listening to his music, trying to steal it,” he jokes. “He’s got such a different-sounding voice – I would never attempt to make his kind of music, anyway, but he’s just been a brilliantly generous, I guess, fellow traveller.”
Damian Lewis plays Picturedrome in Holmfirth on Sunday, October 25.
Read the rest of the original article at The Yorkshire Post.