Bond – Damian Lewis

Vote for Damian to be the Next Bond – Jan 11, 2020

On January 11, 2020January 14, 2020 By Gingersnap Comments Off

Who Will Actually Be The Next James Bond? An In-Depth Analysis

by Tom Nicholson | Esquire | January 11, 2020

Who’s going to take over from Daniel Craig as James Bond when he swaps his Walther PPK for a P45? Who knows. This far ahead of Bond 25’s 2020 release you might as well get the Ouija board out to ask the spirit of Cubby Broccoli what he reckons.

Nonetheless, there are a few orthodoxies to point the way. Traditionally, it’s been a role which elevates actors to the A-list rather than being an A-list vehicle. Look at where past Bonds were in their careers when they got the gig: Sean Connery was an undistinguished jobbing actor best known for fighting leprechauns in Disney’s begorrah-and-blimey Irish tale Darby O’Gill and the Little People; George Lazenby was a car salesman turned chocolate advert mascot who bumped into Broccoli at the barbers; Pierce Brosnan had a perm.

You’ll need a history of hefty, critically respected film parts these days too. Daniel Craig had Layer Cake, Munich and a role as Ted Hughes in Sylvia on his showreel before Bond, and the next will need a similarly solid CV as well as having convinced when jumping out of helicopters and the like. Then there’s the general sense of Bond-ishness: Connery “moved like a panther”, as Cubby’s wife Dana Broccoli put it, and that sense of muscular virility has been an essential part of each Bond actor on screen. These are the 12 frontrunners:

Continue reading Vote for Damian to be the Next Bond – Jan 11, 2020

Radio Times Magazine Interview – Oct 2, 2019

On October 2, 2019July 12, 2020 By Gingersnap Comments Off

Could the Next James Bond Be Ginger? The Famous Redhead Rules Himself Out

by Kristy Lang | Radio Times Magazine | Issue: October 5-11, 2019

In a five-star hotel suite high above the City of London, Damian Lewis and I have a ginger bonding moment. As a fellow redhead, I’ve long admired his rise through the acting world. Not many gingers get leading-man status, but after starring in series such as Band of Brothers, Homeland and Billions, Lewis is big in American.

We’re meeting to discuss his first venture into the world of documentaries, fronting and producing a series about spies on the History channel.

Lewis, now 48, was born in London but was sent to boarding school at a young age, which, he thinks, would make him a very good spy.

“If you are sent away from your family at the age of eight, it gives you a rigor, a dissociative quality that is extremely useful for spies because they have to be able to shut down parts of their emotional life. That’s why the British secret services actively recruited public schoolboys. Guy Burgess is the most extreme example of that. He was flamboyant, charming and mostly drunk – how he didn’t reveal what he was doing is a mystery to me.”

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Damian Lewis: Financial Times Interview – April 5, 2019

On April 5, 2019September 18, 2019 By Gingersnap Comments Off

The ‘Billions’ star on schooldays with David Cameron, playing conflicted characters — and rumours of 007

by Janan Ganesh | Financial Times | April 5, 2019

“What am I?” demands Damian Lewis, in the Yonkers vowels of Bobby Axelrod, the hedge fund manager he plays in Billions. “Chopped liver?” We have not fallen out. It is the presence of the item on the menu that sets up his riff on the Americanism.

The actor you also know as a Renaissance king (Wolf Hall) and an al-Qaeda convert (Homeland) is seated under a wall-mounted ram’s head in Fischer’s, a portal into antiquated Mitteleuropa on London’s Marylebone High Street, where it all but heckles the modernities around it. From a room that suggests an Orient Express dining carriage, Lewis looks out on to a Diptyque, an Aesop and a Bang & Olufsen as I ask him why British actors do so well in America. “It’s luck, it’s innate, it’s a bit of hard work,” he guesses. “It’s nothing to do with being classically trained.”

He admires Christian Bale (“There’s something quite extreme innately in him”) and vies with Tom Hiddleston and Idris Elba in the bookies’ guesswork as to the next James Bond. Politely, he smiles through my thesis that Brits grow up hearing more accents than almost any other nation, honing an ear for them that amounts to a thespian advantage. If he is not quite sold, he is at least open to the idea of performance as a national trait. “Is there a clown in the British character that there isn’t in America? I think there is. There’s a clown in us somewhere.”

Continue reading Damian Lewis: Financial Times Interview – April 5, 2019

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Interview: The Charmer, The Times / Sunday Times, November 17, 2002

On November 17, 2002October 8, 2017 By Damianista Comments Off

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