Categories Homeland Print Media

Homeland Series Finale Acknowledges Brody – April 26, 2020

Arm in Arm in Espionage: Series Finale Recap

by Bill Keveney | USA Today | April 26, 2020

When “Homeland” grabbed the public’s attention and six Emmys, including best drama series, for its spellbinding first season in 2011, the relationship between CIA super spy Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and military hero and suspected terrorist  Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) took center stage.

Over eight seasons, many ups and some downs and the death of Brody in Season 3,  the central dynamic shifted to Carrie, a brilliant operative struggling with mental illness, and her savvy CIA mentor, Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin).

That bond frayed at times, as Carrie broke every rule in the book twice, but never has it been as endangered as it was going into the series’ final episode, which aired Sunday, after Russian agent Yevgeny Gromov (Costa Ronin) gave Carrie only one way to secure the black box flight recorder, evidence that can prevent a possible nuclear war: “Kill Saul.”

Here’s how the finale played out:

Continue reading Homeland Series Finale Acknowledges Brody – April 26, 2020

Categories Homeland Print Media

Homeland Declassified: An Oral History of Never Told Tales – Jan 16, 2020

Battles, Backlash, CIA Meetings

by Michael O’Connell | Hollywood Reporter | January 16, 2019

Claire Danes, Mandy Patinkin, Damian Lewis and the creators of the era-defining Showtime drama — now entering its eighth and final season — reveal in The Hollywood Reporter’s oral history never-told tales of a show that smashed records, captivated presidents and predicted everything from terrorist attacks to Russian election hacks.

“What keeps you up at night?” That’s the question Homeland showrunner Alex Gansa annually posed to Washington insiders before putting fingers to keyboard on a season of his Emmy-winning Showtime drama.

What began as a slick spy thriller driven by a potent sexual chemistry, courtesy of leads Claire Danes and Damian Lewis, evolved into an exposé on the greatest dangers to an America that finally had some distance from 9/11. Threats from ISIS, the surveillance state and Russian interference punctuated clandestine meetings with the intelligence community — part of a yearly writers and cast symposium in D.C. affectionately dubbed “Spy Camp.”

The series, loosely developed from an Israeli format by Gansa and longtime collaborator Howard Gordon (24), became an instant and bona fide success when it premiered in 2011 to 2.8 million viewers and unanimous critical acclaim. Boasting a murderers’ row of writers, each a showrunner at one time, the drama catapulted Showtime and studio Fox 21 to an echelon of prestige TV they previously couldn’t reach. It swept its first Emmys (with six awards total) and those first seasons had both the Obamas and Clintons soliciting screeners.

Continue reading Homeland Declassified: An Oral History of Never Told Tales – Jan 16, 2020

Categories Appearances Media Print Media

Damian Lewis Talks Career and Craft at SAG-AFTRA, Fan Fun with Damian Lewis, May 4, 2016

Damian Talks Career and Craft at SAG-AFTRA

by JaniaJania, Fan Fun with Damian Lewis, May 4, 2016

source: Getty Images

Creativity is a strange beast. At its narrowest definition, it is the skill of creating something original and new using nothing but one’s imagination. But that would exclude a lot of us from the act of creativity, wouldn’t it? How many of us are capable of conjuring up some idea, art, or thing completely from scratch? An impossible task, even for the creative geniuses among us. Nothing is truly original. It’s all about processing what has come before and presenting it in new and “creative” ways. “Creative problem solver” is one of those phrases you see on resumes a lot. Try telling a mathematician or a software engineer that what they do doesn’t involve creativity and you’re bound to get an earful in exacting detail of just how wrong you are. Thus, not an easy thing to get a handle on, creativity.

Read the rest of the story at  Fan Fun with Damian Lewis

Categories Band of Brothers Billions Homeland Media Personal and Family Life Print Media Theatre

Blue Blood, Blue Collar: Damian Lewis’ Transformations, The New Yorker, January 18, 2016

The actor probes his characters, but his method isn’t Method. “I’m Damian Lewis, not Daniel Day-Lewis.”

 Photograph by Pari Dukovic for The New Yorker

At a corner table in the dining room of Marea, a restaurant on Central Park South, the conversation was smooth but disputatious. Three men in suits were drinking red wine and eating pasta that cost thirty-four dollars a serving. One of them was a hedge-fund manager, a famous short seller. Another was the financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin. The third man, in from London, was the actor Damian Lewis.

Sorkin had made the introduction. The hedge-fund manager and Lewis were doing most of the talking. “Does your business have a societal benefit?” Lewis asked. He wanted to know what made a hedge-fund manager more than “a paper shuffler.”

The hedge-fund manager said that he and his peers basically function as market-based regulators—that they have a financial incentive to expose wrongdoing. Sorkin had set up other audiences for Lewis with financial machers. One of them urged Lewis to consider an underperforming company with entrenched management or a sclerotic board: an activist investor, even if he came in and cut things and fired people—well, that’s capitalism.

Continue reading Blue Blood, Blue Collar: Damian Lewis’ Transformations, The New Yorker, January 18, 2016

Categories Homeland Print Media

Damian Was Third Choice to Play Homeland’s Nick Brody – Jan 12, 2016

Damian Lewis had to fend off Ryan Philippe and Patrick Wilson to play Homeland’s Nicholas Brody

by Sarah Doran – RadioTimes – January 12, 2016

Source: Showtime

Showrunner Alex Gansa reveals the British actor wasn’t top of the list of Showtime’s potential leading men for the espionage thriller.

He may now be one of TV and film’s most famous redheads but did you know Damian Lewis very nearly missed out on his role as Homeland’s Nicholas Brody?

 When casting for the US show began, Lewis wasn’t Showtime’s (the network Homeland debuted on) first choice for the role. In fact, he wasn’t even the second, despite showrunner Alex Gansa’s determination to see him step into Brody’s shoes.

“When we first brought him up, everyone was very negative about the suggestion,” Gansa told The New Yorker. Their hesitation had a lot to do with the failure of Life, a cancelled NBC police procedural drama in which the British actor had played the lead character.

“That carries a pretty big stigma,” Gansa said. “The network really wanted Ryan Phillippe; Patrick Wilson passed. I kept talking about Damian until I got a call from the head of the studio saying, ‘Look, Alex, please do not bring up Damian’s name again.’ Hanging up the phone in my office – I think we were two weeks from the start of principal photography – I was like, Are we going to cast Ryan Phillippe in this role?”

That’s right. A non-Lewis Brody very nearly happened. We know, you guys. We know.

Continue reading Damian Was Third Choice to Play Homeland’s Nick Brody – Jan 12, 2016

Categories Homeland Media Print Media

Damian Lewis on the Season Finale of ‘Homeland’, New York Times, December 16, 2013

 Damian Lewis on the Season Finale of ‘Homeland’ (Spoiler Alert!)

Dave Itzkoff, New York Times, December 16, 2013

Nicholas Brody, the Marine and prisoner of war turned sleeper agent turned congressman played by Damian Lewis on “Homeland,” was all but a ghost in the most recent season of this Showtime thriller. Having gone on the run at the end of Season 2, Brody was largely absent from Season 3 — except for one episode, in which he resurfaced in Caracas, Venezuela — and then in the year’s final arc, he proceeded to make up for lost time.

Continue reading Damian Lewis on the Season Finale of ‘Homeland’, New York Times, December 16, 2013

Categories Homeland Media Print Media

Damian Lewis Examines Homeland Season 3, AssignmentX, November 10, 2013

Interview: Damian Lewis examines HOMELAND Season 3

The actor talks about how he views Brody – and what HOMELAND has in common with Shakespeare

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Contributing Writer
Posted: November 10th, 2013 / 10:34 AM

Damian Lewis in HOMELAND – Season 3 | ©2013 Showtime/Kent Smith

Damian Lewis in HOMELAND - Season 3 | ©2013 Showtime/Kent SmithBritish actor Damian Lewis won an Emmy for his first season as prisoner-of-war-turned-terrorist/Congressional candidate Nicholas Brody in Showtime’s CIA thriller HOMELAND, which airs Sundays at 9 PM. Lewis was nominated again for his second year on HOMELAND, when Congressman Brody is proved to be a terrorist by CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes, who won Emmys for both seasons), then is turned into a double agent by the CIA, then resumes his affair with the very conflicted Carrie, then is apparently framed for blowing up the CIA and ends the second season on the run.
Continue reading Damian Lewis Examines Homeland Season 3, AssignmentX, November 10, 2013

Categories Homeland Media Print Media

Homeland’s Damian Lewis on ‘Tower of David’ and Brody’s Very Bleak Future, Vulture, October 13, 2013

Homeland’s Damian Lewis on ‘Tower of David’ and Brody’s Very Bleak Future

By 

After being MIA from Homeland for two weeks, tonight’s episode finally shed light on what Nicholas Brody has been up to since being dropped off at the Canadian border following the CIA bombing last season. He’s been running non-stop thanks to what appears to be Carrie’s global network of people who owe her a favor. But the slums of Caracas, Venezuela appear to be the end of the line for him. We spoke to Damian Lewis about what’s next for Brody, what it was like to shoot in a tower without walls (scary!), and what he meant when he told Men’s Journalthat keeping Brody alive was “compromised storytelling.”

Continue reading Homeland’s Damian Lewis on ‘Tower of David’ and Brody’s Very Bleak Future, Vulture, October 13, 2013

Categories Homeland Media Personal and Family Life Print Media

Damian Lewis: Homeland’s Dark Heart, Men’s Journal, July 2013

Damian Lewis, the Dark Heart of Homeland

by 

Photograph by Mark Seliger

There are 316 million people in the United States of America. About six million of them watch ‘Homeland,’ Showtime’s thriller about world terror, paranoia, and bipolar disorder. That’s about 2 percent of the population; roughly what the guy with the beard running on the Libertarian Party ticket gets when he runs for Congress. Continue reading Damian Lewis: Homeland’s Dark Heart, Men’s Journal, July 2013

Categories Homeland Media Print Media

Interview: Homeland Actor Damian Lewis on Season 2 and More, AssignmentX, December 10, 2012

Interview: HOMELAND actor Damian Lewis on Season 2 and more

The Emmy-winning actor talks about Brody’s choices

Damian Lewis and Claire Danes in HOMELAND - Season 2 - "Two Hate" | ©2012 Showtime/Kent Smith

Damian Lewis and Claire Danes in HOMELAND – Season 2 – “Two Hate” | ©2012 Showtime/Kent Smith

British actor Damian Lewis took home this year for Emmy for Outstanding Actor in a Drama for his portrayal of Nicholas Brody, American war hero turned secret terrorist in Season 1 of Showtime’s HOMELAND. The show also won five other Emmys, including Outstanding Drama and Outstanding Actress for Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison, the CIA agent who is onto Brody – but also carries a torch for him.
Continue reading Interview: Homeland Actor Damian Lewis on Season 2 and More, AssignmentX, December 10, 2012

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Damian Lewis: Making it Big on Small Screen, The Irish Examiner, October 14, 2012

Making it big on the small screen

It’s been a slow and steady rise to stardom for Damian Lewis. But now he’s hit the jackpot with an Emmy win for his role in Homeland. He talks to Craig McLean about fame, fatherhood and fan clubs.

Continue reading Damian Lewis: Making it Big on Small Screen, The Irish Examiner, October 14, 2012