He’s swapped cracking the United States to star with
Keira Knightley in her West End debut, but that’s Life for actor
Damian Lewis.

Damian Lewis gives up Life to make Knightley appearances
Damian Lewis

The pint-nursing pensioners in the spit-and-sawdust north London boozer barely turn a hair as Damian Lewis heads for the bar.

Perhaps it’s because his own hair, a flaming copper-blond, blends into the apricot mousse walls. Or maybe it’s down to the fact that, though he’s a larger-than-life character in the flesh, he’s happy to dissolve into a corner with a pint of Guinness.

He’s been rehearsing all afternoon – with Keira Knightley! – and he looks knackered. Then again, the Band Of Brothers star is used to working pretty hard.

‘In LA, they exist to work: I would regularly work a 75-hour week,’ he says, in rich, muscular tones that betray his Eton education.

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He’s just got back from two years in the US filming NBC show Life, in which he played a policeman newly released from prison after serving 12 years for a murder he didn’t commit. He’s the latest British actor to make it big in America but he found the experience culturally dislocating.

‘I enjoyed it enormously but it was never my intention to be an LA TV actor jumping from one show to the next. It’s a luxurious living but it’s also rather deadening.’

And so he and his family (he has two small children with the actress Helen McCrory) swapped sunshine for the rain – and now Lewis is about to appear in an updated Martin Crimp version (opposite Knightley) of Molière’s 17th-century satire The Misanthrope.

‘I just called up a bunch of people and asked whether anyone wanted to do a play with me,’ he says, which sounds both sweet and staggering.

Is that really how actors get work? He laughs awkwardly.

 

‘No no, not really. But you have to seek variety, particularly if you want to do theatre, which is the thing that drives me and which is somehow lacking when I’m doing these other things.’

In The Misanthrope, Lewis plays Alceste, a man determined to live honourably and sincerely in a world full of fakery and flattery.

Seizing on the idea that 21st-century Soho is a modern version of the 17th-century Parisian salon, Crimp has turned Molière’s flirts and fools into playwrights and agents, and, in a mischievous case of art imitating life, turned Knightley’s character Jennifer (Célimène, in the original) into a Hollywood film star.

Lewis has nothing but praise for his co-star (whose debut West End appearance may be responsible for Misanthrope tickets hitting £300 on eBay): ‘She understands theatre instinctively. I hope the critics are kind and recognise that she is doing really good work.’

The play mirrors a world Lewis semi-inhabits.

‘I was at a posh party last night and it was fascinating to be with people whose ambition has obscured any instinctive, honest response they may have once had,’ he says.

‘And I feel split in two. I had an education that promotes that but I chose a profession that is rabidly anti that. So I live in both, sometimes unhappily.’

On stage and screen (The Forsyte Saga, Band Of Brothers), Lewis is known for a quiet understated beauty – and his last stage appearance, in Ibsen’s Pillars Of The Community, was a masterclass in the use of silence and stillness. Yet in person he oozes boyish confidence.

‘I had no notion of success when I was younger but I also never thought I would fail, either,’ he explains.

‘I chose to do drama, and then I thought: I’m at drama school and presumably the next thing that happens is I get a job and work.’

And yet there’s always a niggling itch of guilt. ‘I always wrestle with the fact that actors don’t live a normal life like everyone else,’ he says.

‘There’s no real contact with “the very day”. I always find myself being drawn to experiencing that in some way. Because we actors are essentially childish and spoilt.’

The Misanthrope runs until March 13 at London’s Comedy Theatre.

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