THE DAMIAN DIGEST
A Library Of Excerpts From Articles About Damian Lewis

Read more of The Damian Digest:
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | Page 6 | Page 7 | Page 8

BROADWAY.COM, 01/06/10:

• "[West End] theaters are squarely and firmly in the commercial sector, so it has a different dynamic to it. When I was growing up and was taken to the theater by my dad and grandmother, the traditional end-of-holiday before going back to school theater trip was to go into the West End and usually see an American musical revival like On Your Toes. My dad had lived in Chicago for five years and he loved all those American musicals."
• "I do feel very comfortable in the theater having spent three years training as an actor: like it’s the place you should rightfully be. All my aspirations when I was young involved theater, so it still has a tremendous romance in that respect. I feel utterly at home in the theater and love it. It’s that curious paradox: it’s as enlivening and liberating as it is terrifying."
• "I think when you’re in the business and you’re doing well and you have a modicum of fame yourself, you sort of lose sight of how famous people are around you. And you lose sight of the way the public and the media continue to respond to famous people around you. I’ve sort of removed myself from all that: I don’t have a publicist myself, I don’t read glossy magazines, I don’t read the tabloids. That’s the sort of clutter I try to clear away."
• "I went to L.A. for the duration of that job [Life] and absolutely loved my two years there, but the show has been canceled and two years playing the lead where everything revolves around that character meant it was really enough for me anyway. People expect you to go the full six years because that means it’s been the biggest success it can possibly be: that’s a very American view of it. But I was very happy with the two years and am very happy that I’ve been freed up to do things subsequently like this play. Certainly, in terms of the content, the skill of Life, it never should have been canceled. But from a personal point of view, I wasn’t unhappy for it to be canceled."
• "My son was born in America. I’m looking forward to him being president of your country."

JONATHAN ROSS PROGRAMME, BBC RADIO 2, 01/16/10:

• "I was in a band: The No Names. We were 16. All I wanted to do was covers of Elvis and The Cars, and the lead guitarist wanted to do Bob Dylan covers."

ROAD CYCLING UK, 02/04/10:

• "I live in North London and I can get to Soho on bike routes in 15 minutes and I love it. It's a fantastic way to get about. We also ride a lot together as a family. I love having my son and my daughter on the back of my bike. Cycling through London [during the Prostate Cancer Charity London Ride in September 2009] with all the roads closed and seeing all the sights was too good to resist. It was fabulous -- feeling like a pro for a second. Anyone taking on this challenge in 2010 will also be cycling to show their support for a great cause. I feel passionate about supporting The Prostate Cancer Charity in improving the lives of the 35,000 men, and their families, who are affected by the disease every year."

JOHN LEWIS EDITION, ISSUE 3 (WINTER/SPRING 2010):

• "I find the South Bank infinitely more glamorous than L.A. There's no more fantastic sight in the world than crossing Waterloo Bridge on your bicycle, with the London Eye one way and St. Paul's the other."
• "I love going to the theatre. I didn't grow up watching a lot of TV, and the theatre still has a romance to it that neither film nor TV has. You might ask me why I don't do it more? It's because there's so much to discover. ... Hopefully you can do a bit of everything. But I find London's West End a very glamorous place."
• "I take great pride in the fact that, on the whole, people think I'm American."
• "I had no expectations of doing a TV show in L.A. because I'd always said I'd never go and do a TV show in L.A. But when Life was offered to me, it was so good and it offered such a possibility for adventure that off I toddled."
• "There's no question that Helen followed me to L.A. because of the job. But it coincided with a point where she would have been off on maternity leave anyway, so it wasn't a time in her life when she was burning to work because she was wanting to spend time at home with the children. The downside to that sort of honeyed scenario was that I was working 75-hour weeks, so Helen was left at home with the children more than either of us had bargained for."
• "As a family we really missed England and we were really looking forward to coming home. And being in the New World, you don't just miss England; you miss Europe as well. When we got back, we went to Italy, we went to the South of France. It was great."
• "The experience of being on stage is just an entirely different sensation if you're used to being in front of the camera. It's terrifying, it challenges you, and that challenge is partly what's appealing about doing theatre."

TIMES 2, 06/01/10:

• "I used to be a bit of a party animal. These days I can't go out relentlessly and be a father as well. I have two children, aged 3 and 2, so instead I tend to do silly 'dad' things such as going on 150-mile bike rides with my friends just to prove that we can do it. We did a ride in the Cambrian Mountains and Brecon Beacons over three days at Easter out of a sense of adventure, but we've all been in physiotherapy ever since."
• "I've got my own five-a-side football team called the Tufnell Touch. It's just me and a few mates: five fit, handsome men struggling with mid-life crises. There aren't any other celebrities in the team: they can be temperamental, and you need a strong mind to play with me."
• "I started playing football aged 6, but back then, I was just banging footballs over the playground netting and getting into trouble with the nuns."
• "I'm naturally a pale, skinny Englishman, so if I need to get some muscles, I go on little fitness regimes. Sometimes I'll get a personal trainer, other times it will be weights in the trailer. There are very few sports that I won't do. Though you'll never see me curling."
• "Maintaining my 'girlish' figure is a constant worry. But really, if you've ever played competitive sport to a half-decent level, you get used to being in shape. I don't do it for work, I do it to be healthy."
• "I ride my bike like a 12-year-old. I love having a bike and bombing around the city. It's by far the best way to get around. I'll ride to rehearsals, I'll put my kids on the back and take them to the park, I'll go to the pub to meet my mates and I'll cycle to meetings. Although it's difficult if you've got to look smart: you turn up dripping sweat in your Prada suit with wet patches under the arms of your Armani shirt -- no one wants to see that."
• "I've had two health 'scares'. The first was when I was 11. I was playing cricket when I missed a full toss and the ball shattered my nose. They took me to the hospital, but I still can't really breathe through it. The other was on the first day of filming The Forsyte Saga. I got chronic appendicitis. It turned out I'd had it for a week previously, but I put it down to a bad stomach ache. But the pain became so excruciating that I doubled up on my hotel room floor, wearing a bathrobe, calling reception to ask for an ambulance."
• "Almost everything stresses me out, but sitting in a traffic jam is my idea of hell."
• "You have to learn to contrive spontaneity. Spontaneity is difficult when you have a family. I'm a restless character and I'm not one to rest on my laurels, so I'm always looking for new challenges and ways I can do things better. My philosophy is that you only get out of life what you put into it."
• "The most difficult moment in my life was the death of my mother."
• "I instinctively like healthy food, but I eat puddings galore. Fortunately, I have quite a quick metabolism, but it does get to the point where, if I keep drinking beer and eating puddings, it starts to show."
• "As a child, I ate endless fishcakes or battered cod with ketchup and mash. My mother wasn't that interested in cooking but she had a few staple recipes: navarin of lamb, a cracking macaroni cheese, shepherd's pie and fish pie."
• "My favourite quotation is by the writer Kenneth Tynan: 'Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds'."
• "If my friends were to describe me, they would probably say I was forgetful, scatterbrained, unfocused -- all the things I strive not to be."
• "My most enviable feature? Well, that would be my red hair."

TELEGRAPH, 04/18/11:

• "It's certainly true that I was brought up in that British amateur tradition, the one which always held that if you were reasonably good at cricket, knew one or two Latin texts and a few zingy Oscar Wilde quotes for dinner parties, you were pretty much ready to go and run some outpost in Hindustan. But do I regard ambition as vulgar? No, I’m sure I don’t. However, I think I have an ear for outright vulgarity as far as scripts are concerned and I try to avoid that."
• "I remember when I was doing Nicholas Nickleby, James Archer came to see me at the interval and said 'my father would like to see you after the show.' It felt rather as if I had been summoned by the Queen and I was cocky enough to think, 'Who the hell is he to summon me?' But anyway, I went, of course, and he said, 'You are going to be a star and I want front row seats to your first performance in the West End.' And, of course, I did play him later on. It was rather weird."
• "My face expanded in about 13 different directions when I was about 16. I looked quite odd and I also had red hair, of course. I relied on making girls laugh. Perhaps I appeared confident, but I was like a hamster on a wheel, endlessly scampering round and round to stay on the same spot. It was probably the same when I went to drama school. If you were to ask anyone who was there with me [he was at Guildhall] they'd probably say I was boorishly confident. Certainly I always spoke too much when in retrospect I should just have shut up and listened. But in a lot of respects being there did me a lot of good. It wasn't cool to be posh -- quite the reverse -- and for the first time in my life, I was in a minority."
• "Possibly I was wilder [in my youth] than some and not as wild as others."
• "It [Band Of Brothers] was pretty daunting. Normally, I never go to a gym, but before we started shooting, I thought I'd better. I reckoned I was in really good shape, and then I looked around and I was half the size of everyone else. A lot of these American actors have this -- in my view -- misplaced view that they have to look like Action Man. The trouble is, they all run the risk of being interchangeable."
• "I was just wary about it [he prospect of relocating to Los Angeles after Band Of Brothers]. I had a feeling that if I committed to being in L.A. I might have been sucked into big budget films and found myself there 10 years later, single and unhappy. That said, Band of Brothers opened lot of doors for me. For instance, I've gone on to play Americans in five or six jobs in the last few years -- films with Robert Redford, Jennifer Lopez and Morgan Freeman. Sadly, none of them has been a big hit -- but who knows, the next one might be. It's also afforded me the opportunity to do the little films that I much prefer. They're just much more stimulating from a creative point of view."
• "I suppose where I am sort of reflects the work I have chosen to do. Are there occasional frustrations because I can't work with a certain director because it's a big studio movie and I don't have enough of a studio profile? The answer is yes. But generally ... generally I have the career I have chosen myself. I really can’t complain too much."
• On having met Helen when they performed together in Five Gold Rings: "Mmm... Bit cliched, isn't it? But I suppose we at least knew there was a chemistry there. At the time I was sitting -- in L.A. actually. Reading a lot of uninspiring words and I was sent this script for this play. I thought it was rather brilliant, muscular and poetic. I said to the producer there is only one person who should play the female lead and that's Helen McCrory. I didn't know her, but I called her up and tried to persuade her to do it. I remember her saying, 'It's very unusual hearing from you,' and I just kept saying, 'You must play this role, you must play this role.' She called me back when she'd read the script and said, 'Don’t you think this might be better on the radio?' And again I kept saying, 'No, no, it's wonderful, it's muscular, it's exciting, we'll have a great time doing it.' So eventually she said yes -- and it was universally slammed by every critic. Helen always says that it's the worst reviewed production that she has ever been in, and she blames me entirely."

CHERWELL (OXFORD UNIVERSITY), 05/16/11:

• "At drama school, all my influences were in the theatre, not in film and TV. I remember standing on the prow of a ship one year heading over to Amsterdam with one of my best friends, and talking about how we were going to be the next generation of theatre actors. It was all very romantic -- all we wanted was to be at the National, the Donmar, The Royal Court. And romantically theatre still holds a place in my affections, but after Band of Brothers I got invited into this world I knew very little about, and that went on for the next ten years. And the roles I was being offered and the people I was being asked to work with were so exciting that I continued to take work in film and TV, and I look back and wish there'd been more time for theatre."
• "Some of my biggest heroes are Jack Lennon, Laurel and Hardy, Carey Grant.... I'm equally proud of being part of that [Hollywood] tradition, but it's not in me in the same way [as theatre]."
• "I stay American all day when I'm playing one, I don't feel comfortable switching accents. When I was living in LA, sometimes I'd wake up and find myself talking American to people subliminally. It affects the way you move, and your response to things."
• "I'd sort of stopped working by that point [at age 16, when my friends and I started a theatre company at school] and decided I didn't want to go to university, I was doing lots of sport and acting instead."
• "I like long-form drama, you can risk being a bit more subversive and intellectually provocative, telling a story over 12 hours instead of two. You get the script about a week in advance, so it's a bit like reading a novel, which you're inside."
• On choosing projects: "It's just an instinctive feeling about how I think the film will end up looking. There have been films where I've known there's very little hope of its having a longer commercial life, but ... art for art's sake."
• "Small films are more intimate experiences, you get involved earlier and they're much more collaborative. I'm frustrated by how difficult it is to get intelligent material made, but success in Hollywood is measured by the dollar, and so many films are aimed at the 15-24 demographic who'll go and see them multiple times. We put ourselves in a position where we don't believe there's an intelligent film-going public. It's a problem about not having students of film in positions of power -- instead there are businessmen who haven't had a lifelong passion for their industry. Execs in LA come out of business school and say (American accent) 'I'd like to be in the movie industry, that'll be groovy' -- and there's not much more thought gone into it than that."
• He has to head off after the interview to read his children a bedtime story. ... The tea has been drunk and the children want their stories. ... Lewis heads off, leaving the kitchen-stage for the new theatre of the children's bedroom, where another rapturous audience awaits him. They won't be disappointed.

EVENING STANDARD, 06/10/11:

• "Helen and I partied very, very hard before we met and then we collided at the Almeida in 2004 [in Five Gold Rings] and together we partied even harder. We used to lose entire evenings listening to jazz at Ronnie Scott's. We love to dance, and when we weren't out we'd put on music really loudly and dance around the house, just the two of us."
• "I proposed to Helen in Paris. I tried to do it on the Pont Neuf -- I was sweating bullets and wrestling in my overcoat pocket for the ring, which had got stuck in a little cellophane bag, but when I finally got it out, a gaggle of Japanese tourists surrounded us like a flock of seagulls, taking pictures, and the moment was totally destroyed. I now take Helen back to Paris for three days without our two kids [Manon, four, and Gulliver, three] every February for our anniversary. We walk about the city, and sit in bars drinking rosé."
• "I only really started cooking when I became a dad. Helen was flat out breastfeeding and sleeping, exhausted all the time. I realized that if I didn't cook, we wouldn't eat. Now I love to cook Gary Rhodes' fishcakes with a lemon butter sauce and green beans. I'm no food connoisseur, though; foodies have palates that can speak hundreds of different languages -- mine can only manage about one."

METRO, 06/22/11:

• "Acting was something I instinctively did and liked. I was happier acting than doing anything else. I was disenchanted by the idea of university and decided to try for drama school. I came out of drama school, got work, kept working and I've been incredibly lucky since."
• "I put on a production of The Long And The Short And The Tall with some friends at school and played Wackford Squeers in a production of Nicholas Nickleby. My dad used to take us to see West End musicals as holiday treats -- things like Guys And Dolls. I loved the theatre as a kid and still do."
• "I cut my eye open on stage while duelling with Ralph Fiennes. It was at the end of the fight between Hamlet and Laertes and we had this extraordinary duel choreographed for us. The pommel of my own sword came back and whacked me on the eyebrow. I felt it split open. I had to fall to the floor as part of the fight and Ralph turned around to see blood pumping out of my face. Ralph continued with his lines, then whispered: 'Christ, are you alright?' We carried on to the end of the show, then I went to hospital to get stitches."
• "[The worst job I've ever had was] selling car alarm systems in the Elephant and Castle. I had to convince people they needed new car alarms and occasionally give a demonstration. I did it for two months."
• "I get letters from little boys who write to me saying they get teased at school about it [their red hair], which makes me angry. People still think it's OK to say: 'Alright, ginge?' or 'what are you looking at, ginge?' and I don't have any time for it. I'll definitely come to someone's help if they're upset by it."
• On what else he would like to achieve in his career: "Maybe a musical. Just continuing to do what I'm doing. You have to juggle things with a family and my wife's very successful so I have to fit in with her. I'm about to direct my first short film so maybe there are things on the other side of the camera that I'd like to do. Acting remains interesting as you can always get better at it."

GUARDIAN, 06/22/11:

• [Turning 40] has, he says, encouraged in him "a new-found seriousness about what I do," as well as a desire to "explore more than just the showing-off element of acting."
• On not having joined the school cadet force at Eton: "I rejected it because the last thing in the world I wanted to be was a soldier." On his attraction to flawed characters. "You get to play the hero, which satisfies you on a purely egotistical level -- but you get to play someone who is imperfect, which is real and so interesting. There are arenas in which that type of personality is elevated -- the theatre of war being an obvious example."
• On who his heroes were when he was younger: "It's awful to admit, but I was too caught up in my own journey to perhaps allow any influences. Even allowing the notion that you might be trying to emulate someone meant that someone else was placed centre stage, and I'm not sure I was humble enough for that. I'm much more likely to have heroes now, people I look up to enormously." He cites David Attenborough, Richard Branson, Roger Federer, Ranulph Fiennes: all, Lewis says, "people who seek perfection and who are able to attain a sort of perfection with a monastic pursuit of it to the exclusion of all else."
• How does a "monastic pursuit" of perfection square with being the father of two small children? "It's an impossibility. You just have to hope that your desire to engage at home in the things that men would never, ever have engaged in, or thought to engage in, to do that and do it well, has its own heroism. What I'm saying is absurd: of course it's not heroic. But for naturally selfish men who want to go off and do their own thing, being good at home -- taking care of your kids on your own, getting them to bed, alive, with three square meals in them and the house not looking like a tip -- that gives you a tremendous confidence. Being able to do that is a real competence."
• On his career. "I'm very lucky. It's going very nicely -- but how do you keep pushing yourself? How do you continue to apply your mind?" He has been worrying that acting is no longer "intellectually or creatively stimulating," that he is falling back on "old tricks and habits." "Acting can be a narrow and isolated experience, because you only examine your particular part."
• "I grew up going to the West End. At drama school, we spoke about setting up our own theatre companies. But something happened to me around the time I did Band of Brothers: I was given an opportunity to explore TV, something I knew nothing about. I don't regret making the choices I continue to make -- but they don't have the same romance for me."
• "I've discovered just how symbiotic the relationship is between writers, directors and actors. They ask the same questions and strip down texts in exactly the same way. It's satisfying to know how much work you have to do yourself in order to really explore a role, flesh it out and make it live."
• "As a friend said to me, 'Damian, you've always had a good turn of phrase, but you'll never sit down long enough.' He may be right. I don't know: I'm in the middle of it all. Writing and directing might be a red herring, and really I'm just re-examining what it is to act, to do it well and do it properly."

TIMES, 06/28/11:

• "Simply in terms of acting there is no escaping the fact you look at yourself on screen and think: 'Oh God, I look a bit craggier than I did five years ago.' You won't believe me but that's not really the prime focus of my attention. The next ten years I really want to focus on things -- focus on my family, which is a fabulous thing to have, a real gift. Not so much running around like a headless chicken wondering what the world is all about. It's more about exploring with a greater concentration all the other things in life that I've been too busy to do."

SCOTSMAN, 07/02/11

PRESS ASSOCIATION, 07/02/11:

• "It's got to a point where I go shopping at the weekends and stay as an American, and then I find myself talking to an English person and that's when I feel ridiculous. But in America more often than not I naturally wake up in an American accent."
• "[When Life was cancelled] I think my wife was secretly relieved ... actually very publicly relieved. She'd had enough. We were both taken by surprise by the amount of time we were kept apart because of the workload. I was having the life of Riley because I was working on something that I was committed to, but it was hard. Our son Gulliver was born there -- so he'll be president one day -- but I didn't see them enough."

TIME OUT CHICAGO, 09/28/11:

• "When I was in Los Angeles, and I was there frequently after Band Of Brothers, I was a little bit scared off [by] the corporate nature. Los Angeles still ranks as one of my guilty pleasures, along with butter-pecan ice cream and Coldplay albums. We always knew in my family we would go back to London."

FRESNO BEE, 09/30/11:

• "I don't know why I seem to play Americans convincingly. I'm going to assume you think I do play them convincingly. But it's a fluke, and it's a lucky, happy fluke that I'm going to run with until someone finds me out."

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, 10/02/11:

• "On the weekends, I'll wake up, go to the store, do some errands and realize, 'I've been talking like an American all day.'"
• "When it's cool at home, I'm Celsius. I go, 'Oh, my God, what is it, like 8 degrees outside?' When it's hot, I go Farenheit. Then it's, 'It must be 85 degrees out there!'"
• At home, Lewis uses his adopted American enunciation only to amuse his son. Dropping into a charming British accent for the first time in the interview, he mimes the boy: "Oh, Daddy, stop it! Stop talking silly!"

CHARLOTTE OBSERVER, 10/06/11:

• "I've played Americans a lot. The first time was in 'Band of Brothers,' and I was very conscious of Americanisms, and concentrated hard to have an authenticity. When I'm at work, I speak in an American accent all the time, not just when I'm on set. When I leave the house, I become an American and I stay that way all day. It's sort of become part of me."

INDEPENDENT, 10/19/11:

• "We live in North London, and our local team is Arsenal. And my wife, when I was filming in America -- and I take great pleasure in making this public -- went to the Emirates and bought my son an Arsenal strip. She doesn't even support Arsenal. I said, 'What are you playing at? You've crossed a line -- a boy and father's rite of passage, going on their first trip together." Can Lewis bear to let his son support the local team? "You know what, I'm in two minds about that. I did say, 'he's got a birthday coming up, so I'm going to buy him a Liverpool strip as well, so he's got both,' and she said, 'oh well, that's just confusing. You're going to play guilt-trips on your son; he's going to want to wear one to please one parent and the other one to please the other parent'."

HUFFINGTON POST (UK), 10/20/11:

• "When I was 20 or 21, I bought myself a motorbike and a guitar. I busked my way across Europe, and just pitched my tent wherever I happened to end up."

ABSOLUTE BRIGHTON, NOVEMBER 2011:

• "I was good enough to have a couple of trials for England schoolboys, but I was never focused enough to have made a career out of playing football. In truth, I was too lazy. I got tall very quickly too as a youngster, so seeing as I was 6 ft. and quick, I just used to hang around upfront as a bit of a gloryboy striker. These days I'm getting thicker round the waist so I have to sit in the middle of the park and just spray the ball around rather than do any actual running."
• "I was 5 or 6 years old, and Liverpool were the best side at that time and always on the TV, so I immediately latched onto them. I was quickly hypnotised by the beautiful way in which they played the game, and I've supported them ever since. Because I'm a Liverpool fan, my friends have always ribbed me about when exactly it was that I lost my 'Scouse accent.'"
• "[Boarding school] was where I first discovered theatre. Each summer we'd stage a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, and I used to love singing the solos. Then when I was at Eton, we put on a production of Nicholas Nickleby. I must have been 16, and that was the moment where I thought, 'I love this. This is what I want to do.' I knew then that I wanted to go to drama school."
• "I used to sell car alarms on the phone! That was pretty bad. I'd have to ring up people out of the blue and try to sell them something they didn't want. I was in a permanent bad mood because of that job."
• "looked quite odd when I was 16. My face seemed to expand in all manner of directions. And of course, I had the red hair! So I always had to rely on making girls laugh and appearing much more confident than I actually was."
• "I seem to be able to play Americans convincingly, but I've no idea why. It's all a bit of a fluke."
• "I don't think about taking certain roles to launch my career in a specific direction. All you can ever do as an actor is attach yourself to good work. you have to go where the good writing is. That's the only way you can ever be stimulated and fulfilled."
• "Without a doubt if I could have been a professional footballer, I would have taken that over acting. Having played in those charity Soccer Aid games, you get a real insight into a footballer's life. You spend the week training but only for a couple of hours a day because they don't want you to risk getting injured. Then it's back to the hotel for some lunch and then hanging around and enjoying some banter with the boys. Oh it's a great life!"

NEW YORK MAGAZINE, 11/11/11:

• "Oddly I don't find it difficult to be still, or, if you like, to seem inscrutable onscreen. Probably a long, long time ago when I was starting out, someone probably said to me, 'Just be still on camera.' Don't move around too much -- that's about as scientific as my approach is. I am pretty wedded to the idea that the camera can capture thought. If you're clear and absolutely quicksilver in your thinking, then the camera will pick it up."
• "Why did the tall, pale, redheaded English bloke get asked to play all these American dudes? I don't really know, except to say that it's obviously to do with Band of Brothers, because that's the first time I played an American, and it was an American hero that I think people felt great ownership of. I felt an overwhelming responsibility to get that right. I was so focused on it, you know, 'Failure is not an option!' There's definitely been a shift, because during Band Of Brothers I was consciously keeping my American accent, I was mindful of it as I was playing the role. And now I find that I have created an American persona for myself -- I'm exaggerating a little for effect, possibly [laughs] -- but I feel I can be an American for a weekend. This sounds absurdly pretentious, but the American Damian, I'm sort of oddly comfortable with him. When I was living in L.A. for two years, and because in L.A. no one's heard of a British accent -- although God knows why, there are Brits all over the place there -- I just got tired of repeating everything in an English accent when I went into a store. So I would wake up sometimes and just be an American with my American accent, and it felt like the most natural thing."

TELEVISION WITHOUT PITY, 12/09/11:

• "When I first started acting on camera, I wasn't very good at it. I found the camera an imposition. I didn't know how to relax in front of it. I got my first meaningful on-camera job after doing two years at the Royal Shakespeare Company, so I was used to standing on stage and shouting verse to 1200 people. It was something I had to learn, and I just started reading about it and [learned] you have to be so specific with your thoughts and the camera will pick up what you are thinking. Anything presentational will be too much and will seem false. Whereas in theater you have to have the thought and make it real, whilst presenting it because it has to travel. On camera it doesn't have to travel, the camera comes to you and you just have to be real and genuine. With a laser like specificity, when actors are good, it is because they've managed that and when they are less good it is because they haven't managed that. It's just what I try and concentrate on, transformation can only happen with immersion in a world and a belief system that your character has. Otherwise you attitudinize. You are an actor with a series of attitudes and you can trot out those attitudes on every film that you do. The guys who are magnetic and the girls who are magnetic and compelling to watch, they are called film stars. We love their attitudes and we love watching them trot it out each time. I just don't really have the confidence to think that I have a set of attitudes that are compelling enough to trot out each time, and I just enjoy the process of immersion and transformation a bit more. I'm aware that I'm at the risk of sounding self-righteous, and make it sound like one is better than the other. I don't think that one is better than the other, I just think they are two different things."

CHANNEL 4 (UK), 02/02/12:

• "[In my childhood,] when I couldn't sleep, I would get out of bed in my pyjamas and turn on the light in the bathroom upstairs and just talk in different accents and pull faces in the mirror, pretending I was being interviewed by Wogan. He's part of our cultural history. He's commentated on something I've done before -- a celebrity golf thing or a celebrity football thing I did. And now I've been on Wogan. Finally! I did his radio show."
• "[My parents] were brilliant, and oddly supportive [of my decision to pursue an acting career]. They had seen me on stage at that point. A group of us put on a play at school, and my parents saw me, and I think they decided that it wasn't going to be a complete waste of time. And so in the last two years [at Eton], when I should have been working for my A levels, I decided that I wanted to go to drama school. I'd stopped working, and my shocking A level results reflected that. So I was only going to go off to a not very exciting university anyway, and so I went to drama school. My mum said 'Go, with our blessing.' And what she really meant was 'And that means you can stay at home with me for another three years.' I grew up in London, so I lived at home throughout drama school. It was a very un-studenty three years. I went back to a nice family house every night where, if I was lucky, mum had left out a fishcake."
• "[The Royal Shakespeare Company] gave me a campus life that I hadn't had. It was a bit like going through another training -- you'd have voice lessons and verse lessons, and you'd rehearse all day and perform all night. And you just happened to be living in a small wendy house of a 17th Century workman's cottage right next to the River Avon, with Shakespeare's graveyard 300 yards one way and where he lived a couple of miles the other way. It was a rather extraordinary, rarified existence for a year. I loved it. And I would imagine, having visited Oxford and Cambridge many times to go and see my friends who were studying there, and I played cricket there quite a lot (coughs) -- where I scored a century -- (the only one I've ever scored, and it was against a team called The Grannies!) I imagine our existence [at the RSC] was quite similar, just living in these beautiful, bucolic surroundings."
• "[In terms of the work that I'm most proud of, Band Of Brothers] sits right up there; it's certainly the thing that I think I've done that's had the biggest profile. One of the things that's had the smallest profile is arguably what I'm most proud of, which is a small independent film called Keane, which I made about four years ago. I'm very proud of The Forsyte Saga, I enjoyed that enormously, and an Ibsen I did at The National Theatre, Much Ado About Nothing for the BBC, I loved doing that. And I'm extremely proud of Homeland."
• "Ambiguity is a complex thing to play. It can leave you being a little unspecific, if you're not careful -- if you're consciously vague, and you then allow the audience to project onto you. But if you're doing it well, the reverse is true -- you commit yourself to decisions totally, and it's just about how adroit you are with your changes, that is in the end what creates the ambiguity. You have to be lightning quick and nimble, there's a mental and imaginative agility in the performance which is really fun. It's a challenge -- there are so many things to play, and if you try and play everything at once, then it's a bit of a pudding, so you have to make specific choices and then just change on a sixpence."
• "I don't take work home. Stay an American all day long [when playing an American role], that's one thing I do do. It's too confusing to switch in and out of accents. So I go to work as an American, and until my make-up's taken off at the end of the day, I remain that way. And then I actually switch off from work alarmingly quickly. I have to rev myself up quite a lot to go back into work, because I'm quite good at down time."
• Regarding the Soccer Aid celebrity football match in which Damian lobbed Arsenal and Germany keeper Jens Lehmann from 25 yards, and hit the bar, how much of his success would he give up to have that shot go six inches lower? "All of it! It was unbelievable. 70,000 people at Old Trafford. It was about the 15th minute. I was playing alongside Jamie Redknapp in the centre of the park. I just looked up and saw him inching out of his six yard box, and I just went for it. And I saw him, he had that look in his eyes as he backpedalled, saying 'F*** me, I've been done.' And it just rattled the crossbar. The last thing Bryan Robson said to me -- he was our coach -- he said 'Damo, you're on Zidane. Keep yer legs closed.' And I clattered into him -- I've always been a shocking tackler, I'm like Paul Scholes. I'm always late, and just bad at it. I clattered him. Jamie Redknapp came over and said 'Damo, Damo, calm down. You can't clatter into Zizou like that. You could've broken his ankle.' I thought 'Alright, it's just that the twice-world footballer of the year was a bit quicker than me!' And in about the 30th minute, we were right by the touchline, and I thought 'He's going nowhere!' And he just looked at me, and nutmegged me -- straight through my legs! And the whole stand erupted in spontaneous laughter. Still, I suppose he's nutmegged much better players than me!"

GQ, 02/03/12:

• "A lot of us [in the Homeland cast] lived in the same apartment block [while filming Homeland], so we were quite good at giving dinner parties. My proudest moment was cooking eggs and bacon for brunch before going off to watch the Carolina Panthers play -- we lined our stomachs for drinking a lot of cheap beer."
• "I've gone back to my favourite [cook]book which I used when I was a bachelor, which is Gary Rhodes' Great Fast Food. It's absolutely brilliant. It does take forever if you have to buy all the ingredients just for that recipe though -- you go around the aisles and it takes about three hours."
• "[As for favorite restaurants,] I do love J. Sheekey. Pop in quickly late night for the fish pie and buttered green beans. The Arboath Smokies they do are great and they do a fantastic kedgeree, with a lovely poached egg just sitting on top. Potted shrimps are also a favourite."
• "My TVR was brilliant and very fast ... when I could get it started! If I went away for two or three weeks and it just sat in the road in damp London, it always ran into a bit of trouble getting it going again. Now I drive an Audi A6 Allroad. It's a fantastic car. I'm sponsored by Audi, so I have this rather lovely rather arrangement where they just insist that I'm always in the latest model. I just drove the new Audi TT RS in LA for the last five days and it was a lot of fun. Big enough boot for golf clubs as well -- that's a crucial element."
• "I'm always forming bands. We had a band in Life called the Breezeways, because we'd sit there and jam on the tail lift of the camera truck parked in the breezeway at Universal. We did it again on Homeland and we actually played four or five songs at the rap party. I can now say I've played and sung Billy Idol's 'White Wedding' in front of a crowd of 200 people. That band was called Yummy! Yummy! Yummy! and if you watch Homeland -- a bit of inside trivia here - there's a clue to why we're called that on the show."
• "Armani are very generous and they have dressed me on a number of occasions. For the [2012] Golden Globes I went British and wore a midnight blue Burberry tux, which was, if I may say so myself, outstanding. I enjoyed it enormously. What else do I like? I've got a nice Dolce & Gabbana suit and wear basics like John Smedley V-necks over £9.99 H&M T-shirts. My watch is actually my father's gift to my son, but I'm wearing it because my son is four and he can't yet."

TELEGRAPH, 02/04/12:

• "Unless something changes, I imagine we'll be in north London for the best part of Gully's growing up. So you think, it'd be great if he supports his local team, be part of the community. Because that's lovely and I never had that. I went to boarding schools, and I went young -- for my parents' generation that was accepted. I really felt I only became a Londoner when I went to drama school at the age of 18."
• "I have a pipe dream of maybe running one of the smaller theatres in town. ... You know what I'll end up doing probably? Just bringing up my kids! Which will get in the way of all that. I'm being glib but I'm not really -- it takes a lot to get you out of the house I find now, once you have children. You've got to be committed to a project. ... It's hard being away. Anything over three weeks is hard when your kids are that small."

TIME OUT, 02/17/12:

• "I don't believe Jesus was the son of God, although I'm inclined to think he might have been a great prophet. You know, I think I am faintly spiritual. I've had loss in my life, and I like to think my mother's energy lives on in some faintly Buddhist way. I do find some comfort there."
• "I'd been acting for a certain amount of time and started to feel like I understood it. So I started reading all these books on writing and directing, and realised they were preoccupied by the same things as actors. I thought that was interesting, so I decided to re-explore acting again and, well, try to be better. I carry a notepad around with me to jot down script ideas, but it just gets filled up with 'wallpaper for kitchen' or 'do taxes'."

GUARDIAN, 02/17/12:

• "All my heroes and aspirations were in the theatre; I didn't watch much TV growing up because I wasn't allowed to. So I went to the RSC and thought I was going to miss that moment. I thought I'll always be too big and fruity, too red for the camera. But one of the things I learned from watching De Niro [films] was: if you think it, the camera will see it."
• "I went to boarding school. And what that teaches you is to cope emotionally at a young age, and to suppress emotions like homesickness; it creates in you a whole new set of social skills. You learn about how to deal with the group that you're in, and to suppress a lot of emotion so you don't let anyone in too much. Being in the army is, in a way, similar. Yes, you might be looking for improvised explosive devices on the roadside in Afghanistan and be on the verge of tears, but you don't let anyone know that."
• "In the end, there's something of the puritan work ethic about me that roles really must sustain me on an intellectual level. I'd feel guilty just doing gags. Part of the joy for me is in learning from a role." But would he go to the extremes of, say, Robert De Niro, who spent a year as a New York cabbie before he made Taxi Driver? "Oh no no, I don't want to work that hard, that's just bonkers! 'Why don't you just try fucking acting, darling?', as Laurence Olivier said. I want to keep pretending, otherwise where's the therapy?"

Read more of The Damian Digest:
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | Page 6 | Page 7 | Page 8

RETURN TO DAMIAN'S DOMINION

This site copyright Ann (damiandreamer) 2004 - present. All rights reserved.