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

When it counts, however, he knows how to play the meetings, winning over Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks for his breakthrough role in Band of Brothers, against the cautions of all those who thought him too untested and the wrong nationality. Playing the quietly indomitable Major Richard D Winters in the £80m second world war epic, with perfect pitch and a creditable American accent, was the high point of his career. He has been watching the recent reruns on late-night TV, even calling his friend and fellow cast member Rick Warden to congratulate them both on good work. “We were in something brilliant. I’m not one of these neurotic actors who watches everything, thinking how shit I was.” The accent was no doubt helped by childhood holidays and cousins in America, but mostly by his regular ritual before the bathroom mirror as a 10-year-old, pretending he was being interviewed on Wogan. “He’d ask me about being a famous actor, and I’d always answer in an American accent.”

After that triumph, the Hollywood on dit on Lewis was buzzing. Rumours started flying that he had turned down an offer to talk about playing James Bond, laughingly refuted: “I don’t think so, do you? ‘The name’s Bond, Ginger Bond.’” Does he fret about looking good in case such a chance arises? He snorts: “I worry that the creases around my mouth will get so deep that eventually I won’t have a mouth at all.” He hung out by LA pools, flicking through scripts, for a while, but became so dis- appointed by the “big project, bad part” syndrome that he came home to make The Forsyte Saga, the second series of which he is currently filming.

Lewis’s expansive, expressive personality is part of the reason he loves playing the opposite in the austere Soames. “It’s all beneath the surface with him, and repressed emotion in acting is more interesting. It’s far more moving to see someone trying not to cry than sobbing.” The down-to-earth quality of a solid period piece also appeals to him. For all the glitz of his Golden Globe nomination, in England, where he intends to remain, he insists he was just a bloke inside a helmet who played an American well. The Forsyte Saga, by contrast, is coming home: quintessentially English upper-class, a milieu he understands all too well. “I grew up in it, albeit 100 years later. I understand the formality, the structure, the codes of behaviour, the bearing, how one holds oneself in a room, even down to wearing a stiff collar and bow tie, which I spent five years doing as school uniform.”

His mother has always longed for him to star in a sumptuousMerchant Ivory production. “‘Darling,’ she’d say, ‘why can’t you wear lovely suits and be at Oxford in the 1920s?’ Ironically, people like Rupert Graves grumble about how they’re cast as posh boys and they’re not posh at all, but I spent a long time finding other facets of my character.” Indeed, until he reprieved the villainous Soames, he had done little to draw on his decorous background — quite the opposite — and in the future, one can’t see him specialising in drawing-room bounders and debs’ delights. There is a restless, reckless quality to Lewis, the sort of daring that no doubt has him riding his motorbike too fast, and has inspired comparisons to Steve McQueen. When he raves that The New York Times devoted a whole page to the thrilling stage fight in his Broadway Hamlet with Ralph Fiennes, you sense he’d like to do it all again — right now! — the urgency of the boxer to get back in the ring.

For now, though, there is a major motion picture to await. Thanks to Band of Brothers, he won the lead, alongside Morgan Freeman, in Lawrence Kasdan’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher. The veteran director traditionally hires the first person he sees for a role, and Lewis happened to be at the front of the queue for his part. “So I could have been the tea boy.” He plays one of a group of friends whose weekend trip to a hunting lodge mutates into an alien horror movie. “There’s a guy in the bathtub with his backside blown away, and this alien shit-weasel has exploded out from him and is coming towards us… and at the same time we are trying to sustain the integrity of a character-driven piece!” As there is such a premium on young actors having “weight”, which Lewis has proved without breaking a sweat, the comedy of the Archer drama was a relief — especially for one who finds even Soames funny in his crippling gaucheness. On the Archer set, he was laughing out loud, until he realised that if he allowed himself to find it side-splitting, the audience probably wouldn’t, and stopped. Humour is not a quality much shared by his subject, of course, a man utterly devoid of irony.

“He may well think this is an honest appraisal of his character,” giggles the actor. “There is a danger he will be deeply flattered. I’m gonna send him a video in prison anyway.”

Jeffrey Archer — The Truth, BBC1, early December