New Metro.co.uk Interview

Metro.co.uk has a pretty picture to go along with their new interview with Damian Lewis:

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.’

Read the rest of the interview here.