Damian Lewis
Actor, Dad, Redhead, and Ping Pong Champion
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Stolen on Amazon Prime

Television Film: Global Child-Trafficking

by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | November 17, 2021

Finally! Ten years after it’s release, Stolen starring Damian Lewis, Vicky McClure and Jo Hartley is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime here.

A fast-paced thriller about child trafficking in Britain. Anthony Carter (Lewis) is a detective inspector battling to make a difference to the plight of exploited children smuggled into the UK.

When Anthony encounters Rosemary, a terrified 10 year old girl from West Africa, sold as a house slave, he vows to keep her safe from the traffickers, but in doing so, Anthony risks his own and his child’s life.

Full storyline: D.I. Anthony Carter works in the police Human Trafficking Unit and on his office wall he has photos of children brought into the country under false pretenses and subjected to slave working conditions. Rosemary, aged 10 – the same age as Anthony’s daughter – arrives from Lagos believing she will be afforded an education so she destroys her passport to avoid repatriation. She will be sold as a house servant and forced into submission by her handlers.

Fifteen-year-old Kim Pak from Vietnam, whose gardening skills are exploited, is made to grow cannabis in an artificially-lit factory. And Georgie, a fourteen-year-old Ukrainian works as a sandwich-maker. Anthony’s job is not only oppressive, but it can be dangerous. His wife is threatened by traffickers and sadly, at least one of the trio will never see freedom and their homeland again. An end title dismisses any false optimism as it reports the lucrative turn-over in global child-trafficking.

View photos in our Gallery here.

Below is Director Justin Chadwick, writer Stephen Butchard and Damian discussing the television film Stolen at the May 9, 2011 BFI screening and Q&A:

Continue reading Stolen on Amazon Prime

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Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis in Stolen – Jan 18, 2018

Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis in Stolen

by Damianista – Fan Fun with Damian Lewis – January 18, 2018

Source: BBC

Human trafficking is nothing but modern day slavery. It is a multi-billion dollar crime industry where, according to The International Labor Organization estimates, 24.9 million people are deprived of their freedoms globally. What makes this even worse is that 1 in 4 of the victims are children.

Stolen is a harrowing TV drama, made in 2011 for BBC One, that focuses on the problem of child trafficking. Written by Stephen Butchard, directed by Justin Chadwick, and filmed in Manchester, the movie stars a number of very talented first-time child actors along with our own Damian Lewis. The movie received a BAFTA TV nomination for Best Single Drama in 2012.

Here is the official trailer:

Stephen Butchard tells The Telegraph how a 60-second real-life news bulletin on the radio inspired him to send an email to BBC drama department and start writing the screenplay:

“I was listening to the news on 5 Live and they had a report about an African child who had been trafficked into the country to work as a domestic slave. I thought, ‘Surely that can’t be happening in this country?’ But they said it wasn’t a one-off; it happens again and again.”

Source: BBC

And this is exactly what Stolen brings us in its opening scene: Rosemary (Gloria Oyewumi), an 11-year old girl from Nigeria, lands at the Manchester airport. She walks out of the plane, alone, directly into an airport bathroom to do what she was instructed before she boarded the plane: She flushes away her passport. Rosemary is not traceable now.

Continue reading Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis in Stolen – Jan 18, 2018

Categories Media Print Media Uncategorized

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

Categories Homeland Media Print Media

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

Damian Lewis in Homeland

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.’
Categories Media News Print Media Stolen

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

Damian Lewis

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.

Continue reading Damian Lewis on the Misery of Human Trafficking Exposed in New Manchester TV Drama – July 4, 2011

Categories Print Media Stolen

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.

Continue reading Stolen: Damian Lewis Investigates the UK’s Secret Slave Trade – June 30, 2011

Categories Media Print Media Stolen

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.

Damian Lewis, the most famous screen redhead since Shirley Temple
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.

Continue reading Damian Lewis: Back in Britain and Starring in Stolen – June 29, 2011

Categories Interviews Stolen

New Guardian Interview: 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 with Maddy Costa

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.

Some of this internal tussling stems from his turning 40 this year. This has, he says, encouraged in him “a new-found seriousness about what I do”, as well as a desire to “explore more than just the showing-off element of acting”. His latest film, Stolen, which screens on BBC1 on Sunday, is visibly the work of a man muzzling his ego. Stolen revolves around three children who have been trafficked to the UK; Lewis plays Anthony Carter, the detective inspector attempting to trace their whereabouts. Though Carter is central to the narrative, the character’s range is limited. “He needs to be undemonstrative and unshowy,” explains Lewis. “The focus needs to be on the children.”

What grabbed him about this part was the story’s political dimension and the promise of the director, Justin Chadwick (who made The Other Boleyn Girl), that the finished film would be visually arresting. Usually, Lewis says, he likes working in TV, despite the lower wages, because “narrative is everything. I like the precision of the storytelling, and that it’s done through characters.” Stolen was an opposite experience: he is proud of the film because of the way it looks – there is a poetic quality to the camerawork that raises it above a bog-standard issues drama.

 

Read the rest at The Guardian.

Categories Interviews Media Personal and Family Life Print Media Stolen

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

Damian Lewis
 ‘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.

Continue reading Damian Lewis: Top of the Cops – June 27, 2011