There are A-listers, and there are stars so powerful they trump even the alphabet. Damian Lewis is familiar with plenty of the former. The Londoner worked with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg on his breakthrough mini-series, 2001’s Band Of Brothers, Natalie Portman on last year’s medieval romp, Your Highness, and Mickey Rourke on teen spy yarn Alex Rider: Stormbreaker.

He went to school with one — he and Dominic West were contemporaries at Eton — and studied with two — Lewis was an undergrad at Guildhall School of Music and Drama alongside Ewan McGregor and Joseph Fiennes. The 41-year-old is even married to a top-drawer star: wife Helen McCrory is one of our greatest theatrical talents.

But all those pale next to Lewis’s newest fan: Barack Obama. Last year, the President of the United States outed himself as an enthusiastic follower of Homeland, the smash American TV series that has made Lewis a star in the US.

“Fantastic,” smiles the actor currently playing the complex lead character in the drama, an American Marine imprisoned in the Middle East by jihadists for eight years. Homeland was a ratings and critical smash when it broadcast across the Atlantic last year, and Obama’s endorsement propelled the show, and its English leading man, onto the op-ed pages of one of the country’s most august newspapers.

“I hate this word but I can’t think of anything else to say — you know you’ve hit the zeitgeist when the piece of entertainment you’re a part of has made the political pages of something like the New York Times. It’s had that crossover.

“The piece was talking about the withdrawal of troops,” the actor tells me when we meet in Kentish Town, not far from the family home he shares with McCrory and children, Gulliver, five, and Manon, four. “And about the way in which Obama has had to finish a shitty job started by the Bush administration. It said that he actually wasn’t doing it that well — but even so, he was doing it. And it talked about the paranoia that still exists in our foreign policy, and at home in the US — and that this was comparable to what we were seeing in Homeland.”

The St John’s Wood-raised, Dartmouth Park-based actor was pipped to a Golden Globe earlier this year by former Frasier star Kelsey Grammer. But even though his co-star, Claire Danes, won the award for Best Actress in a TV Drama, Lewis can perhaps still claim the greater accolade: new pal Obama invited him and McCrory to the White House for last month’s state dinner in honour of David Cameron’s visit.

Lewis isn’t about to start spilling the beans about his very own special relationship with the Leader of the Free World, but he’s more than happy to talk in impassioned detail about the drama that is the must-watch show of the moment — a perfect Sunday-night thriller keeping audiences on tenterhooks week-in, week-out.

“When I read the script it was a no-brainer,” he states. “I loved it and I wanted to do it.”

Read the rest of the article at the Evening Star

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Freed by US special forces, his character, Sergeant Nick Brody, returns home to a hero’s welcome — but also to suspicions from obsessive CIA analyst Carrie Mathison (Danes) that he was “turned” during captivity. Is this exemplar of American military patriotism actually a sleeper hellbent on perpetrating a terrorist spectacular on US soil? Or is it Mathison — who struggles to keep her bipolar disorder under control and under wraps from her spymaster superiors — who has lost her grip on reality in her paranoid pursuit of Brody?

So far in the intricately plotted first season, viewers are still guessing, even as it is revealed that Brody has at least one secret: he is now a follower of Islam.

It’s a brilliant role for any actor, but why did Lewis take it? After all, he turned down a part in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down because he felt he’d played too many soldiers in his career.

“For a Marine to have converted to Islam, found Allah, I thought was compelling,” he replies. But before committing, he adds, he wanted reassurance from the show’s producers that Brody had “chosen to convert out of some positive place. And that his faith would sustain him, nurture him, nourish him in a positive way …

“And certainly,” he continues carefully, mindful of not giving away any plot-spoilers, “in the early parts of the show there’s nothing to suggest that he’s a terrorist just because he now worships Allah.

“And of course, because it’s a thriller, and the DNA of the thriller genre plays on paranoia and suspense — and because he’s praying to Allah in his garage on his own — people will make the connection. And of course the writers want people to make those connections, because it feeds the suspense.

“But I thought it would be irresponsible just to connect Islam with violence in a lazy sort of way. That’s dangerous and feeds people’s ignorance too readily.”

Another plotline appealed: whether his and Danes’s characters would embark on a relationship beyond that of the hunter and hunted.

“It was explained to me that the characters of Brody and Carrie would dovetail,” he says. Indeed, in the episode the weekend before last they did  “dovetail” — on the back seat of a car.

“The way in which someone with bipolar disorder self-medicates is not dissimilar to the way someone with post-traumatic stress disorder self-medicates. I thought from an emotional, psychological point of view, to have your enemy that close always, because you’re compelled to be with them for some reason, was going to make for potentially really exciting drama,” says Lewis.

For the Lewis-McCrorys, his taking on Homeland — for all the brilliance of the script — was by no means a done deal. The family had already spent time living in America between 2007 and 2009, when Lewis was filming the two seasons of detective drama Life.

“We’d had conversations about what it means to take a long-running gig and where do you live and all those things. And we just felt we’d settled in London now, having done our two years [in LA], and that’s where we wanted to be. So it was really for more personal reasons that I needed to think about it, because it was a big commitment.”

Accordingly, in time off filming Homeland in North Carolina, Lewis jetted in and out of the UK. Family downtime was what mattered most. For all the richness of the circles in which he and McCrory move, and notwithstanding his position at the head of the currently dominant Old Etonian pack (from Cameron to West and Eddie Redmayne, to name a few), Lewis works hard to maintain a normal domestic life in north London.

He was born in St John’s Wood, his father an insurance broker and mother a patron of the arts, but Lewis was sent away to boarding school at the age of eight. It was only when he returned to the capital, at 18, to attend Guildhall that he felt like a Londoner.

So, even though he won’t forswear his lifelong allegiance to Liverpool FC, he’s encouraging son Gully’s budding enthusiasm for Arsenal, their local team.

“I see London through my children a lot now. I feel keen to establish a community for them actually in London, that they feel part of. And where we live is like that. It’s very family-orientated, and a good mixture of interesting people. So London is now synonymous with my children growing up in it. When I’m away I very much think of where we are now more than where I grew up.”

Lewis will be repeating the transatlantic commute next month, once filming on season two of Homeland starts.

But his new buddy might be able to help him out on that one: the Democratic National Convention — part of this year’s race to the White House — takes place in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the middle of shooting. The whole area will be on security lockdown, meaning a pause in the filming schedule.

“That’s when I’ll be rushing home to sit on a rainy beach in Cornwall,” he laughs. This down-to-earth Old Etonian wouldn’t have it any other way.

Homeland is on Channel 4 at 9pm on Sundays

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