Damian Lewis Webchat: Your Questions Answered – April 19, 2017

I read a lot of literature about schizophrenia, I read a lot about homelessness, and went to a home up in New York and met people there who were suffering from mental illness and/or had been homeless. I spent a lot of time in Port Authority bus terminal, hanging out with homeless people – one woman believed she was Tina Turner and would tell me every morning about her gig the previous night with Ike at an imaginary club, and how she slept on the subway every night in the parked trains in the tunnels. She’d get up, use the public showers, and take up her position on the sidewalk directly outside the terminal every morning.

19 Apr 201709:56

LinaGr asks:

For you, what is the biggest difference between film and stage acting?

Guardian contributor

Damian Lewis

19 April 2017 2:49pm

Volume. In the olden days, when lighting was less sophisticated, as was makeup, one needed to make adjustments to one’s performance physically, so that all 900 people could see it. It’s less necessary these days. It’s also tempting to be more presentational when you have 900 people sat in front of you, and ignore the fourth wall of your set, if you’re inside. But I have found that the work in front of the camera I’ve done for film and TV has made me more specific and more detailed on stage. But I’ve always enjoyed the stage, for its greater physicality, athleticism. It feels more like sport than film or TV.

I’m quite interested in the diesel ban in Paris. I wonder if we could follow suit here. The gentrification of world cities is not unique – it’s happening in New York too. I’m in two minds about change – the romantic, the nostalgic me, longs for things not to be lost. But one of the great things about London is its ability to change, morph, and become different cities for different eras, in a way that some European cities don’t. And interestingly, they can feel quite provincial when you visit them as a result. Albeit beautiful. But I think London’s ability to be a constantly changing, breathing organism is a good thing. We have to protect its soul, that’s true.

Paul Giamatti is a teddy bear.

That sounded a little bit like one of my children’s maths problems…

I’ve never been to Australia, but everyone loves it! I’d need quite a lot of suncream. And aren’t there more poisonous animals in Australia than any other country in the world? But I’m open to persuasion.

I think The Goat is a modern American classic. I think it’s a play about love and tolerance, and I think an exploration of different expressions of love, different manifestations of love, and what we’re prepared to tolerate and accept seemed apt for now. We’re surrounded by examples of rejection at the moment, on the macro, and on the micro level. A retrenching; a resurgence of nationalism. I think there’s a degree on unease, of uncertainty around – I think that always makes people feel anxious. I think building bridges with Europe is preferable to taking them down, but we’ll have to see what it means in actual terms over the next couple of years. I resent the amount of political time, space and money it’s going to take up – I think that’s unnecessary. In terms of what’s going on in America, whilst it can be frustrating when we feel politicans don’t say anything of consequence, or seem to obfuscate always,s we’ve seen how damaging and dangerous it can be when someone uses language irresponsibly. And we’ve seen it really does matter what you say. Words have power; they are what give meaning to our experience. It’s how we understand, shape and recount our experiences, collectively. Which is another reason this play is so good to do right now, because in it, words as used as weapons. Language is of paramount importance in the play. There’s a pedantry in the play about language and how it should be used. It should be used with precision. The Goat, as a metaphor, represents other. For Albee it was his own homosexuality as a young man in the 1950s, but it can be taken to mean anything that we don’t understand or are ignorant of.

It’s also a brilliant theatrical experience, both to perform and to watch – it’s laceratingly funny, sad, and totally absurd at times.

No. We need a world-class centre half, and a holding midfielder, and left-back, although I love James Milner but he’s not playing in his natural position. I love Klopp too.

Thank you. At the time it was the most expensive TV show ever made, and it was a labour of love by Tom Hanks and HBO. Interesting bit of trivia: after they had made Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg and Hanks decided they wanted to make a TV series, and Steven Spielberg had read another book he said he wanted to turn into a TV show, but Tom said to him, you’ve got the wrong book, read Band of Brothers. And in Band ofBrothers there is a four line reference to a private Ryan, who is extracted from the second world war, and so Band of Brothers was made instead.

Dick was quite a difficult person to get close to. He was suspicious of Hollywood, rightly so, that they would in some way bastardise the story. And grew in confidence when he realised how sincerely Tom and HBO were approaching it. I went and stayed with him on his farm in Pennsylvania, where he lived in great comfort because he used his agricultural science degree which he had already got before D-Day – he was 26 when he jumped, a lot of the other boys were only 19. And he came back to America after the war and developed a recipe for chicken feed which made him a lot of money. He was not given to long emotional anecdotes about his experience of the war, he was unlikely to sit in a bar with you til 3 in the morning drinking whisky, unlike Wild Bill Guarnere. His recollections of the war were more tactical, more dry. Which is why in my view, the single most moving moment of the entire series is when you see Dick recounting a letter than one of his soldiers gets from a grandson who asks: grandpa, were you a hero in the war, and the grandfather replies no, but I served in a company of heroes. And Dick’s lip quivers and his voice breaks, and it’s the closest I’ve ever seen him to showing real emotion.

I don’t have a favourite character. All reveal themselves in interesting ways

I put on the Homeland boxset, “From one Muslim to another”. And the president of the United States was tickled by my message, but I did lose confidence a couple of weeks later and contacted his press secretary at the time to check he had got the joke. And I received word that he had. And I obviously haven’t upset him too much, because he’s now a huge Billions fan.

Well, I hope to play Henry VIII one more time, because I believe Hillary Mantel is writing the third instalment of Wolf Hall, and Thomas Cromwell’s still got four years left to live. But when, I don’t know. There will be a third series of Billions later this year.

The role is tiring to play because in different ways Martin is a tragic centre of a comic situation. And so I have to remain absolutely true to the heartbreak of hurting my wife, the grief of losing my lover, and the personal dislocation and the exhaustion of having a divided self, for two hours on stage. Having said that, it’s one of the most fun and energising roles I’ve ever played, if that’s not a contradiction.

It’s not as tiring as Hamlet.

I get asked to stop a lot and have a photo, and sometimes it’s impossible to stop – usually because I’m running slightly late, and I have to get somewhere on time. And so when I stop I’m afraid really depends on my mood and my circumstances. I like to stop for people if I can. If you had stopped me and said something sincere and heartfelt that would have been a very pleasant chat to have had, so I’m sorry you didn’t.

Never say never.

I’m the best actor on the planet.

I think the important thing for any actor in any role you play is to elicit some empathy from the audience, not sympathy, but empathy – an understanding of why the character behaves the way he does, however malevolent he is. What drives the malevolence, the desperation, why he feels so compromised. And why would he feel so compromised. So getting an audience to understand that, I think puts them in an interesting moral position, which is what interests me as an actor. Every good script has an argument in it, and the characters represent different sides of the argument. So that’s what I try to do – and that’s very different from wanting to be liked. I think if you want to be liked as an actor, you’ll never be interesting.

In terms of idiosyncrasies, there’s a funny story behind the rigidity and stiffness to Soames. On the first day of filming in Manchester, my appendix ruptured and I was admitted to the Manchester General Hospital, where I remained for over a week and I couldn’t come back to work for two weeks. When I did return to work, I found they’d shot some wide shots, and used a background artist dressed up in a tailcoat and top hat to walk up to Irene’s mother’s front door, and initially I was incensed that they would have done that. And then I grew so fascinated with this background artist’s walk that I stole it for Soames, and so some of the idiosyncratic stiffness in Soames, and his inability to express himself, comes from that extra. So thank you!

Yes, often when I’m in America I use my American accent all weekend when I don’t need to – I go to the grocery store and ask for eggplant and zucchini. I can go a whole day like that. It confuses people when I switch mid-conversation, which I’ve done.

Helen and I always talk about doing something together, but we have two young children so bedtime is still important. I’m sure we’ll work something out soon, I hope.