Damian Lewis: ‘The Homeland writers are desperate to kill Brody’
For five months of the year, Damian Lewis lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, where his hit TV series Homeland is filmed and where, after taking a break between seasons, he goes through the same acclimatisation routine. “The first week you think: I may never go home, this is amazing. The second week, you think: right, now I can get over my jet lag, this is really good fun. And then, after the second week, it’s a disaster. I have kids and a wife; you spend a lot of the time quite homesick.”
He is at home in London, gearing up for last weekend’s UK launch of Homeland season three, which has some ground to make up after a disappointing second season. Lewis is at the zenith of his fame, ebullient with success and exposure, and throwing out an energetic charm that rests, one imagines, on a firm faith in his own likability. (“Where is your dress from?” he asks. And, later, exhibiting high-level surveillance skills that feel, as in Homeland, mildly operational: “You bite your fingernails, but not all of them.”)
He is in a jacket and tie, and has come straight from tea at the Ritz with a couple of bankers who won him in a charity auction. It’s an odd sort of duty, but two years into his post-Homeland celebrity, the 42-year-old is getting used to it, as well as to furtive stares in public places. (Sergeant Brody or no, a 6ft 1in redhead is hard to miss.) “I think we’re OK,” he says, sliding into his seat at a restaurant in Piccadilly, while a ripple of recognition moves through the room.
The problem with Homeland season two was that, after a solid start, it rapidly descended into a series of Houdini-like escape scenes and ludicrous strands of coincidence. The show’s premise – CIA operatives battle terrorist sleeper cells on US soil – suddenly looked absurd. “Yeah, I’m aware of the criticisms,” Lewis says. “People feel betrayed. It’s like football matches. There’s a sense of betrayal if it doesn’t live up to expectation. We gave all our time to this shit.” He grins. “People get irate.”
It’s hard to imagine getting this kind of assessment out of his co-star Claire Danes. Lewis’s Britishness gives him a certain licence, perhaps, and he is almost ostentatiously robust about the show and his own prospects within it. The success of Homeland took everyone on the production by surprise, and the success of the Danes/Lewis love affair upset the writers’ planned trajectory. Lewis is pretty sure they had intended to kill him off by now, and had to change direction when the public responded to their weird chemistry. His strength as an actor has always been his ability to play ambiguity, particularly the bad behaviour of men in torment. (Think of Soames in the 2002 ITV remake of The Forsyte Saga, a monster for whom one nonetheless felt sorry.)
As Sergeant Brody, Lewis has undergone more twists and turns of character than he ever did when he was doing Shakespeare. The appeal of the character lies in his cold, clear intelligence and inscrutable motivation, although it must be said I know a lot of women who enjoy watching him for less elevated reasons. If season two went off the rails, he says, it was because everyone was caught on the hop by the success of season one. “I think we had second novel syndrome. Second album syndrome. They ended up having to make melodramatic leaps and start using coincidence, which is never good. That’s where the criticism was; that it wasn’t quite as taut, psychologically, as season one. Suddenly characters were doing all sorts of extraordinary things. In its defence, Alex Gansa and the writers have always maintained that this is a fictitious world, not least because the CIA don’t operate on home soil. So the whole thing is spurious. And second, look, we’re not making a documentary.”
Read the rest of the article at the Guardian
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For a long time Lewis wasn’t interested in doing television. After Eton, he went to the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and for six years worked exclusively in the theatre. He had grand notions, which he looks back on with a mixture of nostalgia and derision: “You’re passionate and earnest and young, and you want to talk about the theatre and acting all night long; the romance of being on stage and the shared experience of fellow actors and rehearsal rooms.”
He has one particularly embarrassing memory. “When I was at drama school, I remember going to Amsterdam for new year and sitting with friends on the front of a P&O ferry in the wind, having some sort of Titanic moment, declaring ourselves to be the new kings of theatre.” He makes a face. “But that’s the image.”
He had been taken to the theatre a lot as a child. His father worked in the City and his parents sent him to boarding school at the age of eight, so that North Carolina homesickness is nothing to those early years at school. He remembers the first term vividly. “I ran around like a headless chicken, full of nerves, for two weeks. And then I cried for a week. There was still caning when I was there. We were caned for the greatest sin there was, which was talking after lights out.”
Seriously?
“Yeah. Because it made everyone tired.” He raises an eyebrow. “And if the school was tired, it couldn’t operate well.”
So that happened to you?
“Yes. Regularly. Until my mother complained. It was the end of the 70s. Things changed massively through the 80s. That was the end of a more Dickensian way of schooling.”
What did she say to the school? “Well, my mum being my mum, she didn’t complain because she thought it was being cruel to me, but because it was clearly not working. Which was brilliant. Because I was being repeatedly caned. It’s shocking to Americans – of course they can’t believe it.”
He eventually came to enjoy Eton and, on the occasions he’s been back, has always been struck by the privilege of having been there. “I remain sort of interested and slightly befuddled by my five years there. It’s such a rare existence. It feels a little bit like another time, another world.”
Lewis isn’t surprised people are so curious about old Etonians, not least out of a revived hostility towards them for their over-representation in the Cameron government. When he was at school, he says, he felt harshly judged for different reasons. “With the promotion of the middle class, being privileged was a mark against you. Thatcher was a grammar school girl and surrounded herself with those people in her cabinet – obviously there were exceptions such as Douglas Hurd. But the emphasis was on the ordinary man, working. And I can remember being very aware of the feminist movement in the 80s; Andrea Dworkin, people like that, who were incredibly ferocious. And we all ducked down under the parapet. It felt like the start of new man-ism, and everyone had to be more sensitive, and certainly you didn’t shout about your accent too much, or your male, privileged credentials. Because you might get a punch in the gob. That’s what I felt.”
This carried on into the Major government, and then, “with the Labour government coming in, even though Blair had been privately educated, it felt as if the old Etonian thing had been put out to pasture. And so for 20 years it had novelty value. It wasn’t in the spotlight at all.” And now, once again, and to the annoyance of liberal Etonians, it’s a byword for unearned privilege. “With these guys suddenly back in power, it feels as if we are going back to the days of Lord Douglas Home, when Etonians were running the country, the time of empire – a somewhat patriarchal time.”
Lewis was a fish out of water to some extent, in that he didn’t want to go into the City, the law or the army. “There are always writers coming out of these places, but fewer actors. There are one or two older actors – Hugh Laurie, although he won’t thank me for calling him that – but a generation ahead. Then myself and Dominic West, and below us Tom [Hiddleston] and Eddie Redmayne.”
He was raised in a home where he had to knock on the living room door before entering if his father was in there. “Ha! My kids don’t do that. But I believe in good manners and structure, and sometimes a bit of formality. I believe in honour. There’ll be plenty of times in your life – I was saying this to my son the other day – when you’re going to be really challenged. And there’s going to be an easy way to deal with it, but it may not be the honourable way. All you should try to do is behave with honour. If you can. At all times.”
What triggered that lesson? He laughs. “I had probably done something dishonourable myself.”
When he graduated from drama school, a lot of Lewis’s peers got off to a very quick start and “were suddenly making rather glamorous movies: Joseph Fiennes, Ewan McGregor“. But for years he was happy with the RSC. Then the hours started to pall. And something else: “I started to feel that the theatre world was rather a small one. I’ve always equated life with travel, with places to see and go. Theatre takes away your evenings and weekends. And after six or seven years, it really started to bother me that I was going to work when everyone else was coming home. I was dying to just get up in the morning and live the day.”
What does that say about him? “I don’t know. It might mean that at heart I’m quite conventional. Maybe yearning for something that was a bit more structured. But, of course, preferable to getting on the tube at 7am to go to an office and turn in a full solid day.” He worried that he was backing his career into a corner. “The idea that I would be one of these slightly over-the-top, fruity actors who would have an illustrious career on stage, but wouldn’t start getting any kind of film work until I was 50 and then start playing wizards.”
By the time Lewis was invited to audition for Band Of Brothers, Steven Spielberg’s second world war mini-series, in 2000, he was aching to get on to bigger things. (He nearly messed up the second audition by going on a massive bender the night before. “I’d already seen Tom Hanks, and didn’t realise they were going to want to see me again. I had quite a sweaty meeting the next day. They videoed me the whole time. Gaunt and sweaty.”)
He got the part, and the exposure led to film offers. At that stage he could have dropped everything and done what many British actors do: sit in LA for a year, attending every movie audition going and having a miserable time. He was cured of the desire to go down that road by the experience of shooting a Hollywood movie in Canada. “A film called Dreamcatcher, arguably one of the biggest turkeys ever made. Poor Larry Kasdan [Body Heat, The Big Chill] didn’t make a film after that. He went into a long depression. It had good ingredients: it was from a Stephen King novel, and with a thrusting young cast. But I found it a bloated and corrupt and lonely experience.”
Why corrupt?
“Corrupt because of the length of time it took to make, and there was just this acceptance that we would keep spending millions of dollars to slowly churn out 30 seconds of film every day. It was my first experience of a slow-moving studio film, where I had to try to keep my marbles to do one line on Friday.” Afterwards, he “slightly ran away”, returned to England and did The Forsyte Saga.
Since then, Lewis has worked enough in the US to feel no particular culture gap with the American cast of Homeland. One of his favourite co-stars is Mandy Patinkin, whose brooding, agonised performance as Saul Berenson is perhaps as large a part of the show’s success as the Carrie-Brody dynamic. Patinkin is a legend of musical theatre, and Lewis has modest ambitions in music; he likes to form amateur bands on set and has hung out with Patinkin, whom he finds “funny, sincere. Outrageously talented. Hyperactive. And enjoying the time of his life. The sound recordist recorded us doing an a cappella version of Bohemian Rhapsody. We were supposed to be doing some gritty interrogation scene and suddenly found ourselves singing show tunes.” Patinkin kept correcting him. “No, no no no, that third note’s wrong. Da-DA-da.” He laughs. “I realised I was with the master. It wasn’t just a singalong.”
When Lewis’s wife, the actor Helen McCrory, and their two children fly out to see him, they get out of town and do all the touristy things or hang out by the pool. “It’s a country club life. Pools and barbecues.” It must be tough, the separation, but he says McCrory has been very good about it. “Helen is incredibly generous and happy for me. She’s phenomenal.”
Presumably the deal is that he would do the same for her?
“Weeelll… I’m still the man of the house.” He laughs. “Helen is in fact about to do a Showtime series called Penny Dreadful. And her involvement might be substantial. Don’t know where they’re filming yet, and she will go to it. We decided it was a great thing, by John Logan, a fabulous writer, and Showtime is a fabulous place to be at the moment. She says no to a lot of things in order to be around as a mum. We both say no to more than we say yes to. But then you have to figure out a time when you’re both around, otherwise you’re always single parents. Quite difficult.”
The couple were living separately when she got pregnant the first time. “I never wanted to live with anyone,” Lewis explains. “I had never lived with anyone. So there was a lot of double toothbrushing. We had our two separate places. We should’ve kept them!”
They wouldn’t go the Helena Bonham Carter-Tim Burton route and have adjoining houses?
“I wouldn’t want that. Well, sometimes. No. It’s important to have a big enough house in order to have space. And we’re very lucky in that we were able to do that. Let’s find a place and have a baby; we did it all at the same time. That’s a little bit the way our lives are.”
He is locked into Homeland for seven seasons, which doesn’t mean anything in terms of security. “You have to sign up for a long time, then they’ll kill you at their leisure.” In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if he got the chop relatively soon. “I think the writers are desperate to kill me. I’m a pain in their arses, because Brody is quite a difficult character to write. There’s a high head count on Homeland. Any one of us could get it at any point.”
A pair of girls who have been watching him come up to the table and shyly ask for an autograph. Lewis obliges. The owner of the restaurant then asks if he wouldn’t mind taking a picture with one of the servers, his daughter. Lewis jumps to his feet. “It’s the celebrity version of doing the washing-up!”
• Homeland season three is on Channel 4 at 9pm on Sundays.
Main image: Lewis wears coat, £635, by Kenzo, from liberty.co.uk. Shirt, £150, by APC, from Mr Porter. Stylist: Aradia Crockett. Stylist’s assistant: Frederika Lovell-Pank. Grooming: Ciona Johnson-King at aartlondon using L’Oréal Paris Men Expert Skincare and L’Oreal Paris Studioline hair.
• This article was edited on 14 October 2013. In the interview, Lewis described being caned while at boarding school. This was not at Eton, as the original standfirst had it, but at his prep school. This has been corrected.
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