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
For me the rehearsal period is the part I most enjoy. It's the creating of the story.
We are not telling Tudor history; we are creating ' Wolf Hall ' from novels, which are already a rereading of Tudor history.
Writing and directing might be a red herring, and really I'm just re-examining what it is to act, to do it well and do it properly.
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.
L.A. still ranks as one of my guilty pleasures, along with butter-pecan ice cream and Coldplay albums.
You can't be sent away to prison for life and feel OK about it.
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've discovered just how symbiotic the relationship is between writers, directors and actors. They ask the same questions and strip down texts in exactly the same way.
Quiet people, people who aren't given to emotional outbursts, people who are economic with words - they're also fun to play, but you find yourself needing a laser precision in those roles. Otherwise you just sort of stand around, looking slightly brain-dead. You worry about being uninteresting.
Producing is a world of compromise and actors are utterly spoiled all the time.
What I do believe in is the moral code of Christianity.
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.