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Written By GingersnapComments Off on Damian Lewis on the Misery of Human Trafficking Exposed in New Manchester TV Drama – July 4, 2011
‘It’s heartbreaking’: Damian Lewis on the misery of human trafficking exposed in new Manchester TV drama
Damian Lewis stars in Stolen a distressing new TV drama filmed in Manchester and Salford which is based on the work of a police unit combating human trafficking.
by Ian Wylie – Manchester Evening News – 4 JUL 2011
Once upon a time, each and every day in fact, children are being trafficked into the UK and put to work. Unpaid, unprotected, unseen. So begins a shocking, disturbing and sometimes distressing TV drama. Filmed in Manchester and Salford, Stolen is a gripping thriller based on a reality hidden away from our everyday view.
“It’s absolutely heartbreaking,” reflects Band of Brothers star Damian Lewis, who plays Det Insp Anthony Carter, head of a human trafficking unit racing against time to save child slaves.
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Written By GingersnapComments Off on Stolen: Damian Lewis Investigates the UK’s Secret Slave Trade – June 30, 2011
A Gripping Thriller Based on the Real-Life Child Slaves Still Being Smuggled into Britain
by Olly Grant | The Telegraph | June 30, 2011
Ultimately, every fictional drama gets its inspiration from something real. In the case of BBC One’s new thriller, Stolen, it was a 60-second radio bulletin, way back in 2003. “I was listening to the news on 5 Live,” explains writer Stephen Butchard, “and they had a report about an African child who had been trafficked into the country to work as a domestic slave.”
It made him do a double-take. “I thought, ‘Surely that can’t be happening in this country?’” he recalls. “But they said it wasn’t a one-off; it happens again and again. So I fired off an email to the BBC drama department…”
Eight years on, the result of Butchard’s email is about to make it to the screen. Stolen, starring Damian Lewis, takes the idea behind that report and spins it into a multi-stranded thriller about the scandal of modern-day slavery.
Thematically, it’s treading similar ground to Channel 4’s Bafta-nominated 2010 drama, I Am Slave. Yet Stolen broadens the canvas by following three children in very different forms of British-based slavery – an African girl and two boys from Vietnam and Ukraine – with Lewis as an anti-trafficking detective and a kind of lynchpin character, drawing their stories together.
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Written By GingersnapComments Off on Damian Lewis: Back in Britain and Starring in Stolen – June 29, 2011
Damian Lewis: Back in Britain and starring in Stolen
The actor has no regrets about leaving Tinseltown for the mean streets of Manchester — and a spot of fishing.
by David Hayles – The Times –
Damian Lewis, the most famous screen redhead since Shirley Temple, BBC
It’s given that most actors don’t have two ha’pennies to rub together. The London-born actor Damian Lewis seems keen to show he’s not one of them – during the interview he holds two pounds coins, clicking them together to punctuate points he is making. It might be a nervous affectation or a show of ostentation. Given the shiny blue suit and polished brogues that he is wearing at BBC TV Centre, it might well be the latter. This is after all, the actor who was thrust into the spotlight in the epic Spielberg- produced mini-series Band of Brothers in 2001, became an overnight sensation, the most famous screen redhead since Shirley Temple, and was whisked off to Hollywood in the wake of that show. But Hollywood didn’t quite work out, and after some dud films and a cancelled TV series, he is back in Britain, his latest role in a BBC TV film Stolen, an earnest, quietly moving film about child trafficking.
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Written By GingersnapComments Off on Damian Lewis: Top of the Cops – June 27, 2011
Damian Lewis: Top of the Cops
He made his name playing troubled soldiers and driven detectives. Why has success left Damian Lewis so unsatisfied? He talks heroism and home life.
by with Maddy Costa – The Guardian – 27 June 27 2011
‘I wasn’t humble enough’ … Damian Lewis. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
Subtlety and restraint are Damian Lewis’s hallmarks as an actor. His ability to convey a character’s innermost thoughts with just a flicker of an eyebrow is even more impressive when you discover how animated he is in real life. When we meet, in a chi-chi members’ club in west London, he has a pint of coffee working through his system, and that natural energy is comically amplified. His accent careens from Prince Charles to Jamie Oliver, as he talks about his guilt at not doing more theatre, the appeal of playing policemen and soldiers, and the satisfactions of domesticity; he alternates between supreme self-confidence and genuine horror at what he thinks is coming across as his own solipsism.
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Written By Site AdministratorComments Off on Damian Lewis: I split my eye open while duelling with Ralph Fiennes, Metro, June 21, 2011
Original article at Metro, corrected here for many technical typos
Andrew Williams, Tuesday 21 Jun 2011 2:08 pm
Actor Damian Lewis talks to Metro about the worst job he’s ever had, starring in a musical and anti-ginger prejudice. The 40-year-old stars in the forthcoming BBC drama Stolen.
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Written By DamianistaComments Off on Red Hot: The Irresistible Rise of Damian Lewis – Sept 8, 2006
Damian Lewis: The Chameleon Performer
by Liz Hoggard | The Independent | September 8, 2006
Damian Lewis is an intense chap, capable of conveying a huge range of emotions with the smallest gesture. He’s hotly tipped for an Oscar for his new film. And he’s a real gent. Just don’t call him posh, whatever you do.
“Ask him about that intense thing he does with his eyes,” a female journalist suggested when she heard I was interviewing the actor Damian Lewis. What’s striking about Lewis is how much he manages to convey by doing so very little. There is stillness about him on screen, a faraway look that can evoke anger or desire or – if you saw his rollicking performance as Benedict in BBC1’s modern-day version of Much Ado about Nothing – sheer hilarity.
The press love to brand Lewis as an arrogant posh boy. Like David Cameron, he went to Eton. But, among his generation of actors, no one does grief and repressed emotion so well. In Spielberg’s Second World War epic, Band of Brothers, he played an American soldier facing up to fear with a quiet certainty (it won him a Golden Globe nomination). He was the bewildered newlywed who doesn’t understand why his marriage is falling apart in Hearts and Bones. And in the remake of The Forsyte Saga, he did the unthinkable – making the brutal Soames sympathetic.
For several years now, 35-year-old Lewis has been a successful actor on the verge of becoming a major star. Unlike Ewan McGregor or Joseph Fiennes, his contemporaries at London’s Guildhall drama school, you might still walk past him in the street. But all that should change with the release of his new film Keane: his performance is already sparking Oscar rumours in the States.
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Written By DamianistaComments Off on Interview: The Charmer, The Times / Sunday Times, November 17, 2002
The Charmer
by Lesley White, The Times / Sunday Times, November 17, 2002
Smooth, confident and raring to reinvent himself, Damian Lewis is just the chap to play Jeffrey Archer, says Lesley White
When we meet on the Pinewood set of the slapstick satire, written by Guy Jenkin, creator of Drop the Dead Donkey, Lewis’s flaming red hair is dyed brown, the make-up department has achieved a not totally streak-free job with the fake tan, and, with his funky shorts, he is transformed not into Jeffrey, but a cross between an Ibiza raver and a boy scout. As Greta Scacchi is playing Margaret Thatcher, we can assume no attempt at impersonation is being made.
In some ways, Lewis, 31, and the celebrated fantasist have more in common than it might first appear. While the latter has spent his adult life embellishing his biography for public consumption, the actor went through a period of reverse self-invention. Rather than admit having attended Eton, for example, he told early interviewers that he went to boarding school, then changed the subject before they could ask which one. “I tried to sever all ties to my posh upbringing. It made me feel as if I couldn’t be a genuine moody actor. I’m desensitised to that now.” Continue reading Interview: The Charmer, The Times / Sunday Times, November 17, 2002
