Damian Lewis’s new mission: John le Carré
The Homeland actor tells Jasper Rees why he decided to record A Delicate Truth for Radio 4.
‘It would be so brilliant if I was actually a spy!â€Â Damian Lewis is in a basement somewhere under Soho. There’s a new le Carré out and when Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime was casting around for a reader, who else could they turn to but the Emmy-winning star of Homeland? “My front as an actor,†he adds, “is going really well.â€
It really is. Lewis was by no means the first to be cast as a spy, but more than any actor apart from Daniel Craig, he is now indissolubly linked with espionage. It seems to have infiltrated his manner of interacting with the world. “We’re being monitored in a bunker,†he says, as a BBC publicist sits down to listen in.
We edge into a discussion of le Carré’s A Delicate Truth, the abridgement of which Lewis has just spent three days recording. The story, he advises, “has a terrific opening which happens in a little bit of British soil somewhere else not in Great Britainâ€. As in Gibraltar? The plot précis is all over the media, I tell him. “Gib,†he confirms, tersely.
Lewis came to le Carré through boys’ own tales. “My first recollection was sun-stained copies of Smiley’s People and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold at home. I flicked through them as a follow-on from Fleming and Franklin W Dixon’s The Hardy Boys and Desmond Bagley, Alistair MacLean and Willard Price. I really had not had anything to do with him for about 20 years and then, doing Homeland, it was clear there were many similarities, so I’ve just been dipping in and out on the loo.â€
Is the actor who plays the war hero who would be US vice-president sure that he wants to reveal where his reading takes place? “I don’t see why not. Whether David Cornwell [le Carré’s real name] will be happy with people thumbing his texts while in the throne room I’m not sure.â€
Change the subject. What does he reckon Cornwell/le Carré would make of Homeland? “Well, I think he would think what most of the rest of the world thinks. That’s it’s a superior piece of television, well executed, brilliantly performed. We would all concede that at times it stretches the boundaries of credibility. There are times when you can hear everyone trying desperately to keep it going somehow at this extraordinary high level.
“I think the end of season two came at the right point, giving everyone a break to go away and recalibrate a bit.â€
That sounds almost critical, yet he’s about to go back and spend five months filming the third season of gripping intrigue and febrile atmosphere. He elaborates: “What they decided was to effect the element of surprise as often as they could. What that risks is chewing up plot at such a rate that plot ends up taking over character precision.â€
Ah yes, character. You wonder if, in casting sessions, they were swayed not just by Lewis’s screen presence, seen early on in Band of Brothers and Warriors and The Forsyte Saga. Might he also give off a suitable whiff of swaggering Etonian confidence? Lest we forget, Ian Fleming and Guy Burgess also went to Eton.
Unsurprisingly, Burgess didn’t come up much. “There are plenty more people that that school has reason to celebrate. I suppose you might argue that a young boy who has been sent away from home at the age of eight learns to compartmentalise quite adroitly from an early moment. Whether that would make him a good spy or not I don’t know. Possibly.â€
And anyway, Brody is an everyman, he says, just like le Carré’s complex protagonists. “They’re all casualties, as they should be in this genre, who fall victim to the Machiavellian nature of those around them.â€
Coincidentally, Lewis is soon to follow up A Delicate Truth by playing Machiavelli on the radio. “Am I?†He keeps a poker face. “I just don’t know that’s been confirmed yet.†The person from the BBC confirms it’s been confirmed. “No,†he says. “I am.â€
‘A Delicate Truth’ begins on Radio 4 on Monday May 13.
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