Damian's Dominion: The Damian Lewis Digest

THE DAMIAN DIGEST
A Library Of Excerpts From Articles About Damian Lewis
Each passage, I believe, reveals at least a little something about the man.

FINANCIAL TIMES, 06/17/94:

As for young Damian Lewis (just a year out of drama school) as Hamlet, everything he does has the audience firmly held. Strikingly equipped with a tide of Tudor red hair, burning blue eyes, heroic bones and good build, this Hamlet works hard to win his authority over the play, but win it he does. He speaks the lines "with good accent and good discretion," and he has both virility and stillness. He is a Hamlet both Romantic (frozen in melancholy, vivid in action) and modern (playing at crude aperies in his "madness," sardonically rude). He manages both to relate freshly to everyone else onstage and to suggest that Hamlet's mind is always at one remove from everyone else around him. Remarkably, he achieves this by working within very narrow confines. His vocal register is seldom more than a minor third, he makes no particular play between piano and forte, he employs no great contrasts of speed during his soliloquies. Yet one attends to him. He has not yet bent the role to his will, has not relaxed within its rigours so that we trust his command of it, is still shifting in his way of addressing the audience -- and yet one attends to him.

LONDON TIMES, 02/11/95:

"I wasn't aware of my hair until critics started talking about it as part of the performance," says Lewis good-humouredly. "Maybe there's a whole play going on on top of my head."
He was acting with his siblings at about five, then realised he wanted to do it professionally at 16 when he and school friends set up a company. ... [He was] talent-spotted before he had finished at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
What's it like as Laertes? "It took quite a time," says Lewis, "to stop seeing Laertes judgmentally from Hamlet's point of view. I drove the director mad."
"Camera acting uses a very different muscle. I thought it might be oppressive, but I found it focusing and liberating," says Lewis with articulate enthusiasm. "But I certainly don't regard film as where I want to end up. I don't have any great crusade tucked away in my folder, but the importance of theatre lies in the audience's ability to listen and work. Cinema is far more passive."
"I still sing Elvis Presley songs in the mirror: that's as bad as I'm getting."

PLAYS AND PLAYERS, 04/95:

Lewis has none of his imperious stage airs in life, but a languid demeanor and charm that they say comes from growing up amongst the rich and famous at Eton, where he was primed for thespian success at an early age. Lewis is the first to admit that he's been "incredibly lucky" but by that he means in doing so well at Guildhall, where "everyone starts on the same footing and if you're good you just hope you get noticed."
He was good and he got noticed by top agent Pippa Markham, playing the lead in League Of Youth, in his final year. He never had to finish his diploma.
"I used to think I was immune to critics, but I was wrong. I don't read any of them now because if you can't believe the bad ones how can you believe the good ones? Once when I was playing Romeo's death scene, a man stood up and cheered. I felt like getting up again and saying, 'You bastard, do you know how much time I've put into this?'"
"I treat acting as an ongoing English Literature exercise, but I'm not happy with the [classical actor] label. Why should a classical actor be distinguished from a stand-up comedian? He must have the same rapport with his audience and his enthusiasm must be just as infectious. Anthony Hopkins has had a great effect on me, but then so has Stan Laurel, while I think Gary Glitter's the greatest showman of all time."
"Acting is a representation of honesty and truth; you can't get up there and bluff in performance. You have to become that person."
"I say yes, yes and yes to Broadway. I'm not a career obsessive, but the chance to live in New York at this stage in my life is massive; after all, the success of the actor is contained in the baggage of his personal experiences."
"I'm not afraid of type casting and what I'd really like to do is play a variety of roles like Daniel Day Lewis. [But] they wouldn't want a pale, red-headed Indian in Last Of The Mohicans for example. I don't think I'll come across any real discrimination. There was one critic who said of my psycho role in Rope that I couldn't hurt a fly. I suspect he was colourist."
"At the moment I don't have to make financial choices, so I can make artistic ones, which is great, but it won't last. As an actor you are your own businessman."
"I'd like to stay in England because we have the healthiest theatre in the world and we're envied for it, but we have to keep it strong; underfunding could kill it. Film and TV are passive entertainment -- there's nothing like the theatre to challenge the status quo."
He bursts into "Well she goes out with other guys," as Run Around Sue comes on the jukebox. He's pretty good, too. "I guess I'm just a frustrated rockstar," he jokes.
Lewis is already building up a small fan club with a Danish girl who sends him watches and a mysterious sonnet-writer. He is not bothered at all about the possibility of becoming a sex symbol; he simply strokes his eyebrows and says with a Hollywood drawl, "My vanity leaps up instinctively."

(PUBLICATION UNKNOWN AND DATE UNKNOWN), 1999 OR 2000:

"I don't know why, but I seem constantly to be cast as a soldier. Damian Lewis, rent-a-soldier! The ironic thing about my part in Band Of Brothers is that I would have been a really terrible paratrooper because I hate heights."

HEARTS AND BONES PRESS KIT (BBC), SPRING 2000:

Damian grew up in London and went to boarding school in Sussex, which is where his love of acting began. "From the age of eight I started acting in school plays and Gilbert and Sullivan musicals," he recalls. "My first role was as a policeman in The Pirates Of Penzance and when I was twelve I played Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream," he says.
"School was very structured and they were keen to drum into everyone how to behave well in any situation, which is a very British upper class way of thinking. I used to get sick and tired of all the culture at school and rebelled against it, although at boarding school if you are caught having as much as an illicit cigarette you might be asked to leave. The most rebellious things I ever did always involved girls. I used to get caught in girls' dormitory in the middle of the night, which was a caning offence when I was there. I got caned an awful lot for other misdemeaneours like talking after lights out, which the headmaster just wouldn't tolerate. He thought it kept others awake, and tired pupils made the school function less well."
As a teenager Damian went to Eton, but had decided when it came to leaving, that he wanted to become an actor. "Everyone else was off to Oxford and Cambridge and other places and I had already been in a theatre company with friends and had made up my mind that acting was what I wanted to do. Fortunately, my parents were very supportive and they said they'd help me out if I went to drama school."
Damian went to Guildhall School of Music and Drama, with Joseph Fiennes and Ewan McGregor included among his contemporaries. Until Hearts And Bones most of his work has been in the theatre, including spells with the Royal Shakespeare Company and appearing in Hamlet with Ralph Fiennes. The role of Mark is Damian's biggest television role to date, although he did star in last year's award-winning BBC drama Warriors, set in Bosnia.
International fame is likely to follow now as Damian has just started work on Steven Spielberg's £70 million 13-part television series Band Of Brothers, a spin-off from the World War II epic Saving Private Ryan. Damian has landed the coveted lead role of American soldier Richard Winters in the series, which follows the real-life exploits of an elite rifle unit.
"It's very exciting," he says. "We're going to be filming for eight months and it's real boys and toys stuff. It's being filmed at Hatfield Aerodrome in Hertfordshire, where they filmed Saving Private Ryan. The sets they built there are incredible and include a whole Normandy town which doubles as a Dutch and German town. They've even built a replica of the Rhine to size -- including bridges."

THIS IS LONDON, 05/16/00:

Hollywood doesn't intimidate him but neither does he relish the prospect of "being sold over there like the newest sports car."

LOS ANGELES TIMES, 08/20/00:

[Tom] Hanks concedes that Winters was the hardest character in "Band of Brothers" to match with an actor: "The trick was casting this very enigmatic man, of whom there's a substantial amount of mystery involved. You never know where you stand with Winters. But when we heard Damian read, we'd found our guy. Maybe it's his delivery, a kind of 'less is more' thing."

ST. PETERSBURG TIMES, 09/07/01:

To prepare for the ordeal, actors underwent their own two-week boot camp before the 10-month production began filming -- supervised by retired Marine Capt. Dale Dye, who also plays regiment commander Col. Robert Sink -- with the men required to live as their characters while enduring 5-mile runs, foxhole digs, guard duty, weapons training and physical conditioning. "Nothing prepared me for being up at 5:30 a.m. with Dale Dye shouting at you as you get to your 80th sit-up," Lewis said. "It was like something out of the movies. I thought I was in Full Metal Jacket." So how did a British actor wind up playing an American soldier fighting German soldiers? "In casting, especially in film, they cast for qualities," said Lewis, who spent three months auditioning for the role. "It's that abstract quality they see in people that corresponds to what they see in the character. Accents are secondary ... (but) getting to the soul of this guy was like climbing Mount Everest." ... Strayer also takes issue with some of the soul searching in which characters seem to indulge -- particularly scenes in episode five where Winters remembers killing a young German soldier while leading an assault on an enemy stronghold. "I won't say you get used to (the killing), but you do become inured to it," said Strayer, who said he never realized how evil Hitler was until he helped liberate a concentration camp at Landsberg, Germany. "I guess when I was involved with it, I was scared. But I was so damn busy, I didn't know I was scared." ... Lewis sees the situation a little differently. "What (the veterans) might say, is "We're not heroes ... We're ordinary men who did extraordinary things,'" Lewis said. "But having studied it and acted it, I'm here to tell you that people make choices in situations like that. And people (in Easy Company) made heroic choices." ... Lewis hopes Band of Brothers helps bridge that gap, outlining World War II's horrors and highlights in a way that makes the experience both profound and personal. "It's only natural to have so many retrospectives on the last great war of the century," he said. "The big (question) is: Will Band of Brothers be one too many or just enough? I guess we'll all find out soon enough."

USA TODAY, 09/13/01:

As the seemingly stoic Winters, Lewis accomplishes one of an actor's hardest tasks: He makes virtue seem appealing, and even sexy -- and in case you're wondering, you'd never guess he isn't American.

TIME OUT, 09/19/01:

[He is] articulate, funny and, unusually for a young actor, quite outspoken.

THE TIMES, 09/29/01:

On the buzz around him in conjunction with Band of Brothers: "It's come at a good time in my life. I'm 30 and not 23 so I feel sanguine about it, and to be honest I feel quite ready for it. I know that may sound cocksure, but I've done quite a lot now in acting and in life so the glitz and glamour of LA isn't blinding and it isn't overwhelming. It's exciting but I feel I'm kind of in control of it, should it happen. And frankly, bring it on."

RADIO TIMES, 09/29/01:

Dye confesses that he "was worried that Steven and Tom cast an Englishman in the lead role. Then I met him. He's an impactful young man. We've seen loudmouths before, but he's in a Gary Cooper mould. I had trouble catching him out. He was terrific in training, busted his butt. I admire his stamina. He just goes. He's like a wind-up toy ... there's something in that little ginger shit's eyes."
Over a three-hour lunch in London a couple of weeks after the [Normandy] premiere, Lewis reveals himself to be an engaging 29-year-old. Full of lively anecdotes about the production, he makes for sparkling company. He is far removed from the sometimes sombre and taciturn man we see in Band of Brothers -- which only goes to emphasize what a consummate actor he is.
"I concentrated on being watchful and listening. That's what makes Robert De Niro so fascinating as an actor. You really feel he is listening to the other actor. It was hard because in real life I'm bad at listening -- I'm much better at talking! Of course, there were times as Winters when I was dying to burst out. I was thinking, 'I need histrionics here -- can I tap dance?' But the skill comes in knowing when the tap dance is needed, and with Winters there was no tap dance."

THE GUARDIAN, 09/30/01:

Five things you need to know about Damian Lewis: (1) His favourite actor is Robert de Niro. (2) The first time he met Spielberg he had a terrible hangover. (3) He objects to theatrical types calling him darling or sweetheart. (4) He spent a week in Paris with the war veteran whose part he plays in Band of Brothers. (5) He thinks Band of Brothers will be seen as one of "the most significant undertakings of the decade."

SUNDAY TIMES, 09/30/01:

"There's nothing more boring than an incredibly successful film actor going: 'Oh God, I can't wait to get back to the theatre.' Do they go back? Do they fuck. They're earning too much money. But I really do want to go back. It's just squeezing it all in."
On staying at Helena Bonham Carter's home in LA around the time of the Golden Globes: "She was renting Anthony Andrews's house in the Hollywood Hills, with a pool looking over LA, and I just lived there for a month on my own -- hot tub, steam room, big shag pad," he chuckles. "The sort of place you know was designed for shagging in: That was a lot of fun. I certainly did the LA lifestyle in that respect."
"So much crap is made in movies. I'd much rather be doing quality television if the films we're making aren't very good. But I'd love to work in America because I'm a megalomaniac. I want to be able to do television here, theatre here, film there." The new Steve McQueen? "I'm the Ginger ninja," he declares. Pause. "Actually, I'm slightly embarrassed I've just said that."

ASSOCIATED PRESS, 10/04/01:

As a result of a "silent look" from Lewis that Hanks called "unequivocally evocative," the series decided not to rely on voice-overs from Winters. "It wasn't better than what (Damian) was doing with his face," he said.

ASSOCIATED PRESS, 10/05/01:

Scott Grimes, from television's "Party of Five," was among the American actors whose initial skepticism [over the casting of a British actor as Winters in Band of Brothers] was allayed. Playing an Oregonian infantryman named Don Malarkey, Grimes admitted that, "I was like, this is an American accent, we should have American guys do it. I was the hardest to win over." Grimes ended up impressed: "Damian is terrific, man. Sometimes, he's got to talk us into (the fact that) he's British. It's not just about the accent; it's about an American way of holding yourself -- totally no frills. (Damian) is going to be a big star, I hope."

DAILY TELEGRAPH, 10/05/01:

"I was coerced into having a publicist, but I don't I suppose is what I'm doing now." Though not averse to publicity, he does not seem hungry for it. "At first I was fascinated by how I looked in photographs, but publicity soon becomes just a necessary tool."
It doesn't seem fair to tout him -- and some have -- as the new Hugh Grant. Despite an Eton education, there is little foppishness about him. "I used to keep my school very quiet because I thought it was damaging," he says, in an accent that sounds studiedly rough around the edges. "I think you can't be really posh and be an interesting actor. I'm a bit of posh rough. At school I didn't play the beautiful raven-tressed characters. I was a redhead so I played the comedy parts. I've never been asked to play good-looking toff lovers." Lewis pauses, his hand freezing en route for his coffee. "Come to think of it," he says, "why not?"
Such is the volume of his fan mail that he says he now replies only to letters that come with a stamped addressed envelope.
I ask him whether he could ever see himself as a fully fledged Hollywood star: the house in Bel Air, the personal attorney, the lot. Lewis pauses for a moment, contemplating his semi-peeled banana. "The short answer," he says, "is yes."

BBC, 10/05/01:

Lewis joked that when he was in character as Dick Winters, he felt that "anything was possible," but that when he reverted back to being Damian Lewis, he was "crying in the corner of the dormitory."

DAILY MAIL, 10/06/01:

"DAY 8: We move into our week of jump training today. There's one major problem. I'm scared of heights." ... "DAY 9: We visit RAF Brize Norton for a day in jumping school. Today, I'm going to jump off a 60 ft tower screaming from the top of my lungs 'One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand.' After this, you're supposed to open your chute. Looking up, the platform doesn't seem so high. Looking down, I want to cry. I can't hold on to anything because I can't get any grip. My palms are sweating too heavily. A jump trainer edges me out. I look straight ahead at the horizon and leap into the void. I land about five seconds later. I've done it. Parachuting becomes addictive. Apparently."

DAILY TELEGRAPH, 10/08/01:

Lewis's success in the multi-million pound mini-series [Band of Brothers], which began on BBC2 last Friday, is observed with an amused eye by his comrades in another field -- the Old Etonian Football Club. "You'd never know what Damian does from speaking to him," says one. "Obviously he can only play for us when he's not filming, but he's a very useful player -- a midfield general who gets from box to box and scores goals."

MIRROR, 10/13/01:

His excitement over the premiere has been put into perspective by a personal tragedy. While on holiday in India in February, his father Watcyn and mother Charlotte were in a car crash and his mum was killed. "My Dad had to pull Mum from the car. So that's what this year has been about. I've got a sister and two brothers and we've all tried to be strong. Mum was a beautiful, gorgeous woman and a very loving and giving mother, and we all miss her terribly. She was very proud of what I was doing and I'm just sad she's not around to see it all now. She came up on set when we were filming and she was tickled pink by the whole thing, although she didn't really want me to go off to Hollywood. She was keener for me to do work in the theatre." It was Charlotte who encouraged him to act. "She said to me: 'Look, don't go to university and chase girls, play sport and do no work and come out with a nothing degree. Go to drama school, and we'll support you if you get in.'"
Acting apart, he didn't enjoy [boarding] school. "They were keen to drum into everyone how to behave well in any situation, which is a very British upper-class way of thinking. I used to get sick and tired of it. The most rebellious things I did always involved girls. I often used to get caught in the girls' dormitory in the middle of the night. I got caned an awful lot for other things, too, like talking after lights out."

US, 10/15/01:

It was a cold winters night in London when Damian Lewis crashed, face-first through a car's windshield and almost died. That evening, in 1998, the actor had been buzzing along the chilly, dark streets on his Honda VFR 750 motorcycle, heading home from the Royal Shakespeare Company's Barbican Theatre, where he was playing Don John the Bastard in Much Ado About Nothing. Suddenly, a car veered into Lewis's path. His bike rammed the car's front bumper, and he flew over the handlebars; Lewis broke the car's windshield with his chin. "Thank God I had a full-face helmet on. If I hadn't, I'm not sure I'd be here now. Or at least my acting career would be very different." Lewis survived, but he lay unconscious for five minutes and woke up with a serious concussion in his brain's frontal lobe, the region that controls emotions. For the next three months, the normally cheerful Lewis became "irascible and irrational," he recalls. "I would get into arguments with people at the video store for no reason. Or I'd suddenly feel like crying." At first, he wasn't able to do much more than sit at home and do jigsaw puzzles. But he began to get restless, and just three weeks after the crash, he rejoined the cast of Much Ado. On his first night back Lewis abruptly sat down onstage in the middle of a soliloquy. "I gave the rest of my speech from there," he says. "If I hadn't sat down, I would have keeled over. I probably wasn't ready to go back."
Lewis has a way of pushing himself to the limit, even in good times.
"They were looking for someone who has a moral uprightness without being uptight," says Brothers costar Ron Livingston. "Damian has that. There's something anachronistic about him. Like Henry Fonda."
On Abbey Road: "I used to take my shoes off to cross the street so I'd look like Paul [McCartney] on the record."
At Ashdown House School, ... Lewis studied Latin and ancient Greek and stared in the annual Gilbert and Sullivan production. He also played sports and, after graduating from Ashdown, went on to play varsity soccer, cricket, golf and tennis at Eton, England's most prestigious preparatory high school. "I was bordering on what you Americans would call a jock."

NOW!, 10/17/01:

Just months after filming [Band of Brothers] finished, his 63-year-old mother Charlotte died in a car crash while on holiday in India.
Then Damian was given the lead in ITV's remake of The Forsyte Saga. But on the first day of filming, he was rushed to hospital with appendicitis, which put him out of work for two weeks.
"I haven't had a lot of luck this year. It was horrible when Mum died. It was on Valentine's Day and I was in LA at the time. My sister rang and I flew back immediately. When I got appendicitis, I began to think I was fated, that maybe The Forsyte Saga wasn't meant to be and it was all a bad omen." With the support of his family -- dad Watcyn and his three siblings -- Damian has learned to cope with his mother's death. A seat in London's Royal Court Theatre, where his mum used to work, has been dedicated to her memory and, with an optimistic laugh, Damian adds that the producers of The Forsyte Saga decided not to recast his part.
There was a time when he thought he'd never get a job on the small screen. "I was out of work for months and feeling really down. I had a glut of really good TV auditions, but didn't get anything. I thought I was just meant to be a big, poncy stage actor. I had a girlfriend in New York and I was living in south London, being a very jealous boyfriend and reading The End Of The Affair on a bench in Clapham Common in howling gales and rain. I was also listening to a lot of Radiohead, which doesn't help. God, I was so self-pitying." Then along came ... Warriors ...
"I was living with my younger brother, who's just got married, and I've had to move out."

DISH MAGAZINE, 10/01:

He stands out. Not just because he plays Major Richard Winters, the leader of Easy Company, who is a significant presence in each episode of Band of Brothers. Damian Lewis grabs your attention even when he says nothing -- the mark of an actor who knows that even when there are no words for you to say on the page, your character can still leave his mark.
The British actor moved through an intense three-month audition process to win the pivotal role of Dick Winters. "Anyone [in England] who was under 35 and still had both legs was being seen," he says. Lewis submitted a tape, but didn't hear anything for a month, so when he got the call "to read for the main guy," he admits he was stunned. He was asked if he would like to fly to LA to meet Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. "Then the Hollywood machine took over," Lewis says with a laugh. "I'm a Londoner so I have to refer to things like the Hollywood machine. It's the epitome of things that work slickly. "Two days later, Lewis was in California, reading for the part of Winters, opposite Hanks, who read all the other parts. "I can say I acted with Tom Hanks, so that was quite nice." Since he didn't expect to meet Spielberg at all on this trip, Lewis "celebrated" that night, not getting to sleep until the wee hours. No sooner did he crash than he got a call that the famous director did, indeed, want to see him. "I had about three showers, and drank a gallon of coffee, and I went to see Steven." Lewis recalls that Spielberg talked about his son's soccer match, and when Hanks joined them, they talked about Christmas tree shopping. The two Hollywood titans left the room, and Tony To, the executive producer, returned to say, "Hey Damian, how'd you like to go to boot camp in March?" Ten days of boot camp, to be exact. I looked a little like a rice pudding before," Lewis says, "and afterwards, like a stick of celery, the love handles went, the flabby arms went." The actor, who says his knowledge of WWII before Band of Brothers was "the ten greatest hits," soon got a taste of what these soldiers went through to prepare for battle. He remembers one day hanging in under the watchful eye of Captain Dale Dye, doing 70 pushups, and then felt his arms go to Jell-O. "I'm watching you, Winters," Dye bellowed, "You better not give up on me, Winters." Lewis says it took him as long to get to the requisite 80 pushups as it had taken him to do the first 70. I felt like I was in 'Full Metal Jacket,'" he adds ruefully.
"I think one of the most interesting things to watch an actor do on screen is to watch them listen. Robert DeNiro has that quality. You always feel like he's listening, or he's going to kill you."

BBC, FALL 2001 (exact date unknown):

Tom Hanks reveals that he knew instantly Lewis was the right man for the part. He says, "We were looking for an enigmatic leader, a guy you can't explain, but who explains himself by his mere presence. We wanted someone with a certain air about him that comes across even before he opens his mouth. Lewis had that without question, as soon as he sat down we knew."

THE TIMES, 11/10/01:

Ironic confession: "Actually I would have been a really terrible paratrooper because I hate heights"

NEW WOMAN, 11/01:

At the beginning of a relationship, do you aim to stay the course, or trip over your laces at the first bend? "Honest open relationships are the only way forward for men in the Nineties, so I stay the course. That said, I trip at every hurdle, stagger to the next, bundle myself over that and maybe have a swift ale on the way."
What was your earliest hurdle? "Mine was when I was little and on holiday in America. I realized after we'd left that I would never ride my lovely little white horse, Smokey, again. I wept."
What's the dirtiest trick you've ever pulled on a woman? "Faked an orgasm." "Okay, how about giving your new girlfriend the presents the previous one gave you back when you split up?"
Ever had to tread carefully through a situation? "Telling my brother that I'd accidentally flushed his hamster down the loo. We had such a bad fight."
What's the most heroic thing you've done for a woman? "I was walking along the beach in Spain with a girlfriend when she twisted her ankle. So I carried her through the sand dunes to the car park. It was a half-hour walk, She was almost too heavy, but that says more about my strength than her weight."
Ever walked a tightrope between two women? "Not without a safety net. Only as a calculated risk, never a blind gamble."
Ever been wounded by a woman? "I've had someone throw things at me. She was so good she could have been a pitcher for the New York Yankees. I was only just quick enough to get out of the way."
What situations do you bolt from? "Usually ones involving arguments in the kitchen. There's always a fall-out over the fact I like to put sultanas in my shepherd's pie."

ARENA, 11/01:

On the Band of Brothers jump scene: "I couldn't do a jump because of the insurance! But they did hang me upon this crane 150 feet up to make it look as if I was leaping out of a plane. I'm not so good with heights, I get sweaty palms and dizzy, and there I was with this panoramic view of the Home Counties. All I could hear was the wind whistling in my ears."
On meeting Tom Hanks: "I went into the room and he said: 'Damian thanks for coming. I hope you're not tired after all that flying.' I stuck my arms out and said: 'Well it was a long way,' and started flapping them up and down. The whole room just went silent. Tom just looked at me and said: 'OK, OK. Funny guy.' So I wanted to leave."

GQ, 11/01

"British women are just the best." ... Moments later, he ruminates about getting to grips with his first pair of fake breasts in LA. "I almost let out a yelp. I thought, 'These are like footballs!'"
"Dye said to me on the first morning, 'Don't give up on me. Your ass is mine. Get used to it, horse cock.' I'd never been called horse cock before. Well, only by a few girlfriends."

ST. PETERSBURG TIMES, 12/23/01:

Briton Damian Lewis was particularly compelling as American Capt. Dick Winters, an average Joe whose composure under fire made him a born soldier.

DAILY EXPRESS, 2001:

Meeting Lewis, it's good to see that his taste of working with the cream of the acting industry hasn't gone to his head. It's not that he's not ambitious -- he is -- but he remains down-to-earth while at the same time loving all the adulation being heaped on him. ... Refreshingly, he doesn't mind admitting it's the kind of attention he's dreamed about since he was a kid. "I've done Wogan in the mirror late at night when I can't get to sleep."
Lewis says he was bitten by the acting bug when he was just eight. At 16, and still at school -- Eton, where he regularly took part in Gilbert & Sullivan productions -- he decided he'd act for a living.
His mother Charlotte, who sadly died in a car crash in February, worked at the Royal Court, and his father Watcyn took the children to the theatre when they were young. "The most exciting feeling was when the house lights went down and there's the last rustling of crisp packets. It was magical."
Clinching this role of Winters took three auditions and four screen tests in London -- and then a nail-biting trip to LA to meet Hanks and Spielberg in December 1999. "I made a really crap remark as I walked in. Tom went, 'Gee Damian, thanks for flying all the way from London, you must be tired ...' And I said, 'Yeah, my shoulders are really stiff' and there was this deathly hush! I thought, 'Oh, I've blown it!' Tom just said, 'OK, sit down, let's do the scene.' Afterwards, the producer said, 'Damian, great work, you've got nothing to worry about,' so then I went out drinking with a mate until 5 am." Just three hours later, a hungover Lewis got a phone call from Spielberg's office asking him to meet the man himself at noon. "I had four showers and I was chucking coffee down, then I went in and met Steven and Tom. We just had a chat. Steven said his kid had a soccer match and we just talked about football. And Tom was going, 'My wife is fed up 'cos I'm supposed to be getting Christmas trees,' so it was all really normal. Then I was left with another of the producers, called Tony To, and one other guy that looked exactly like the pictures of Winters I'd seen. I thought, 'Oh damn, he's got it but it's been a great weekend.'" Minutes later, Lewis was put out of his misery when Tony said: "So Damian, how'd you like to go to boot camp in March?" "I jumped up and kissed him and everyone in the room."
Everything you do is a stepping stone to something bigger, but you have to be careful because if all you're worried about is stepping stones you never stuck around to enjoy the moment. You see people who are in a hurry to get somewhere and they are just not having a good time. I used to be like that, and it's a killer. You have to really enjoy this, and not think, 'I wonder what this will lead to' too much, which inevitably you do, lying awake at night and staring at the ceiling."

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