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Written By Site AdministratorComments Off on Soldiering on: Damian Lewis in Homeland, The Telegraph, February 4, 2012
Soldiering on: Damian Lewis in Homeland
After his breakthrough 10 years ago in Band of Brothers, Damian Lewis’s finest work has been for television, his latest role that of a US Marine held captive for eight years
By Craig McLean
7:00AM GMT 04 Feb 2012
Photo: Channel 4
Damian Lewis opens our conversation with a sheepish mention of his ardent admirers. ‘I’ve a set of fans who call themselves – you’re not allowed to laugh – Damian Bunnies.’ Their name seems to be a reference to those other copper-top characters, the Duracell Bunnies. They have been following him since his 2001 breakthrough in Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed Second World War series Band of Brothers, ‘and they’re absolutely lovely. In the end, I realised they knew so much about me, I let two of them run a fan site.’
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Written By Site AdministratorComments Off on Damian Lewis Interview, Channel 4, February 2, 2012
Damian Lewis interview
02 FEB 2012
You WILL answer our questions, Lewis…
The following feature is available free for reproduction in full or in part.
Damian Lewis is sitting opposite me, drinking tea in a wood-panelled library in a discreetly opulent Central London hotel. With his clipped Old Etonian accent and understated self-confidence, he seems the epitome of Englishness. Which is why it’s surprising that so many of his highest profile roles have been Americans.
Damian Lewis is making me a cup of tea. Dressed in Ugg boots, a checked shirt and a stylish knit cardigan, he’s every inch the metrosexual, cool guy about town: down with the kids in more ways than one, he has to head off after the interview to read his children a bedtime story.
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Written By DamianistaComments Off on Damian Lewis Interview for The Misanthrope, The Telegraph, November 24, 2009
Damian Lewis Interview for The Misanthrope
By Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph, November 24, 2009
Damian Lewis talks about appearing with Keira Knightley as she makes her West End debut in an updated version of Moliere’s The Misanthrope.
Damian Lewis could well be the luckiest actor in London. Or the unluckiest. Luckiest in that he’s about to play the lead in The Misanthrope, which – with tickets flying out of the box-office at record-breaking speed – must be accounted one of the most eagerly awaited West End openings of the year. Unluckiest because the main reason for all the mounting hullabaloo is his co-star – Keira Knightley.
While there’s no disputing the combined allure of the assembled cast – Tara Fitzgerald and Dominic Rowan are also names to conjure with – when it comes to added spice, Knightley’s promised theatrical debut is eye-wateringly hot stuff. The prospect of a live encounter with the ravishing Pirates of the Caribbean star, recently ranked the second highest paid actress in Hollywood, has tipped the internet exchange price for tickets into triple figures. We’re potentially in the same realm of hysteria as that which enveloped Jude Law’s Hamlet, when fans queued through the night for a chance to bag a day-seat.
If the flame-haired Lewis, 38, feels any anxiety or concern about the fact that Knightley looks set to be the centre of much frenzied attention in the coming weeks, he’s not confessing to it when we meet. His last stage appearance, as the inwardly tortured businessman Karsten Bernick in Ibsen’s Pillars of the Community earned him rave reviews at the National in 2005. The part of the people-hating Alceste – the biliously witty anti-hero reconceived as a hip playwright in Martin Crimp’s smart update of Moliere’s 1666 classic comedy – should cement his reputation as one of theatre’s finest talents. But will he get his chance to capitalise on the opportunity?
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Written By GingersnapComments Off on Damian Lewis: Life, The Telegraph, October 25, 2008
Damian Lewis: Life
By Michael Deacon – The Telegraph – 25 October 2008
Damian Lewis, star of ITV’s new US series Life, tells Michael Deacon about his role as an ex-convict, being a British actor in America and his love of bicycle
Charlie Crews, the character Damian Lewis plays in Life – ITV’s new drama import from America – is perpetually defeated by modern technology. Lewis isn’t too hot on it himself. The London-born 37-year-old can’t stand Facebook, worries that video games are a threat to the film business and struggles with text messages. When we meet he is wrestling with his mobile phone: ‘Sorry, I’ve just got to text my sister-in-law, who’s a tyrant – if I don’t text back within half an hour she shouts at me,’ he says. ‘My text response time is usually about two days.’ His mobile, grey and chunky, is a model so antiquated that most teenagers would probably mistake it for a TV remote control.
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Written By GingersnapComments Off on Damian Lewis: Slow Cooking, The Independent, February 26, 2008
Damian Lewis: Slow Cooking
Seven years after Tom Hanks told him he’d be the first red-haired movie star, Damian Lewis is making his mark in ‘The Baker’.
By James Rampton – The Independent – 26 February 2008
Damian Lewis is deep in conversation with his brother Gareth, who has just directed the actor in his latest film, The Baker. So how was it for the actor working with his younger sibling? “We’ve actually had a ball working together,” Lewis declares, as Gareth bids us farewell. “Maybe at the end of each working day, the Coen brothers throw knives at pictures of each other when they get home, but Gareth and I had such fun. It was like being kids again, only more sophisticated.” He stops and grins. “Perhaps I should say, ‘only marginally more sophisticated’! We certainly have more expensive toys now.”
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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 Move Over Coen Brothers For the New Kids on the Set
Lewis Filming Duo
by Claire Hill | Western Mail | May 6, 2006
Move over the Coen Brothers, there’s a new film making duo in town, and this time they’re Welsh. Actor Damian Lewis has teamed up with his baby brother Gareth to make their first film together. Claire Hill joined them on location in their beloved Wales
Damian Lewis’s legs are half sticking out of a makeshift vent shaft as the actor attaches knee pads underneath his all- black ensemble.
A gun is visible and is just peeping out from the band of his trousers. Next to his feet, rolls of silver gaffer tape and wires are scattered on the floor. Directly in front of him, in the old paper mill, tucked at the back of a Cardiff industrial estate, someone fashions a gun holster out of an old yoga mat.
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Written By DamianistaComments Off on Band of Brothers 2: This time it’s personal, The Times, April 20, 2006
Band of brothers 2: this time it’s personal
by Kevin Maher, The Times, April 20, 2006
Kevin Maher discovers why Damian Lewis got on really well with the director of his new film
Damian Lewis is jumping out of his skin. On the Cardiff set of the high concept dramedy The Baker, the 35-year-old great white hope of British screen acting has just been prematurely peppered by a troika of explosive squibs that have shredded the back of his black leather armchair and sent him to the floor of a slickly designed loft apartment.
“Er, think the timing was a bit off there,” whispers one of the concerned grips while Lewis, who famously starred in the Spielberg-produced TV series Band of Brothers, is dusted down and readied for another heart-stopping take.
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Written By DamianistaComments Off on Damian Lewis Interview, Sunday Express, May 25, 2003
Damian Lewis looks terrible. With his copper-coloured hair slicked back and his fair skin etched with lines, he could pass for 60. Which is a tribute to the make-up artists who have just aged him for 30 years for his part in The Forsyte Saga. Continue reading Damian Lewis Interview, Sunday Express, May 25, 2003
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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
