Damian Lewis
Damian Lewis
Damian Watcyn Lewis, OBEis an English actor and producer. He is known for portraying U.S. Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody in the Showtime series Homeland, hedge fund manager Bobby "Axe" Axelrod in another Showtime series Billions, Soames Forsyte in the ITV remake of The Forsyte Saga, Detective Charlie Crews in the NBC drama Life, and U.S. Army Major Richard Winters in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. He appeared as Henry VIII in Wolf Hall, which earned him his third Primetime...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionTV Actor
Date of Birth11 February 1971
CityLondon, England
L.A. still ranks as one of my guilty pleasures, along with butter-pecan ice cream and Coldplay albums.
I'm sponsored by Audi, so I have this rather lovely rather arrangement where they just insist that I'm always in the latest model.
When I'm working in America, I wake up with an American accent and stay with it all day till makeup comes off. I just want everyone to be at ease, and not have the show's creators think, 'Oh my god, he's so English, why did we hire him?'
There's something important, as an actor, about allowing yourself to be approached by people to do roles. People see different things in you.
I'm no more or less antisocial than the next person.
The lesson I learned is that sometimes the task you have at hand needs all of your concentration and focus.
You have to go where the good writing is.
In the end, there's something of the puritan work ethic about me that roles really must sustain me on an intellectual level.
It's an unfair comparison because when things are developed in the UK, they're developed at script stage only.
I've always had a 'Work hard, play hard' attitude to life - I still do - but sometimes you get involved in something that needs a calm, methodical approach.
It was pretty daunting. Normally, I never go to a gym, but before we started shooting, I thought I'd better. I reckoned I was in really good shape, and then I looked around and I was half the size of everyone else. A lot of these American actors have this - in my view - misplaced view that they have to look like Action Man. The trouble is, they all run the risk of being interchangeable.
I always resented Tom [Hardy] for turning up on Band Of Brothers and getting the girl — in fact, the only girl in a cast of hundreds of smelly men! I, on the other hand, spent eight months with my face squashed up against someone else’s backside in one sodden trench after another. And it looks as if Tom might have got the girl again [in Colditz], damn his eyes.
The best shows succeed because they tap into a national conversation,
Temperamentally I'm not a natural producer, because I don't have the patience.