The Toby Young Interview:

Damian Lewis

The leading man and our celebrity scribe do lunch.

by Toby Young, John Lewis Edition, Issue 3 (Winter/Spring 2010)

Sitting across from Damian Lewis in a restaurant called Searcys in St. Pancras, he exudes an easy-going self-confidence and, given his recent experience of living in L.A. while filming TV series Life, an air of being happy to be back in rainy old London.

"I find the South Bank infinitely more glamorous than L.A.," he says, in between mouthfuls of ham hock. "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. It's just so, so ..." He trails off, lost for words. "In the end, Los Angeles is an utterly second-rate city compared to London."

The reason I'm interviewing Damian in King's Cross is because he's in rehearsals around the corner for a West End production of The Misanthrope, Molière's satire about 17th-century Paris, in which he plays the lead opposite Keira Knightley. As an actor, theatre is his first love and he regularly takes time out of his busy schedule to appear on the stage. To date, his most celebrated performance was as the male lead in Ibsen's Pillars Of The Community at the National.

"I love going to the theatre," he says. "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."

Damian Lewis was born in 1971 to an upper middle class family in London's St. John's Wood. He went to prep school in Sussex and then on to Eton where he formed part of a generation of boys determined to break free of the traditional, Old Etonian stereotype and do something more unconventional. Instead of going to Oxford or Cambridge, Lewis won a place at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London where his contemporaries included Ewan McGregor and Joseph Fiennes. After graduating in 1993, he joined the RSC. "Eton and schools like it are not set in aspic like people think they are, and kids like myself are coming out and going into this now enormous industry of the creative arts," he says. "It means that you don't have to be a High Court judge to have met an Etonian. you can be a runner in Soho and the guy next to you will be an Old Etonian."

His big break came in 2000 when Steven Spielberg saw him playing Laertes in a Broadway production of Hamlet. Spielberg asked him to read for the part of Major Richard D. Winters in a forthcoming mini-series he was producing for HBO.

That series, co-produced by Tom Hanks, was Band Of Brothers, and it was Lewis' performance as the heroic Second World War officer that led to predictions that he would shortly become a Hollywood star (not to mention, in the words of Hanks, "the first-ever red-headed film star!"). Not only did he radiate an understated manliness that seemed to chime with the new, post-feminist Zeitgeist, but he proved himself to be one of the few British actors able to do a faultless American accent. "I take great pride in the fact that, on the whole, people think I'm American," he says.

In 2003, he landed the leading role in Dreamcatcher, a horror film based on a Stephen King novel in which he plays an American character possessed by a British demon. It performed respectably at the box office, earning $75 million worldwide. Since then, he's appeared in a number of feature films, including Keane, which was tipped for an Oscar by People magazine and which garnered several awards, and The Baker, which he co-produced with his brother, Gareth. "It came and went," he say, ruefully.

On the small screen, his career has thrived. Since Band Of Brothers, he has appeared in The Forsyte Saga, Jeffrey Archer: The Truth, Stephen Poliakoff's Friends And Crocodiles, and a BBC TV production of Much Ado About Nothing. This work has made him a recognizable face in the UK and earned him a sizeable number of besotted female fans -- including, I regret to say, my wife. There is something about that hint of cockiness, the mischievous spark behind the mask of decorum, that she finds irresistible. He is rumoured to employ a woman whose sole job is to deal with his sack-load of weekly fan mail.

"TV has such a strange reach," he says. "It's a many-tentacled beast. You forget when you do it; you tend to think of it as more parochial than film, but it's even more omnipresent than film, even a big film, because all these TV things end up getting sold all over the world." His most successful TV venture to date has been Life, an American drama series that ran for two seasons in the US (and more recently here on ITV). He plays Charlie Crews, a police detective wrongly convicted for murder and released after 12 years. The twist is that instead of being eaten up with a desire for vengeance, Crews discovers Zen Buddhism in prison.

"He becomes this childlike lover of the new life that's been given to him," he explains. "It is, of course, also a way of suppressing a lot of anger. When those moments bubble up and you see anger in him, I think that roots it in credibility."

Lewis hadn't planned to move to Los Angeles for two years, but, as he says, one of the characteristics of the actor's life is that you never know what's around the corner. "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.," he tells me. "But when Life was offered to me, it was so good and it offered such a possibility for adventure that off I toddled."

As luck would have it, the offer dovetailed with a pivotal event in his personal life. He had embarked on a relationship with the actress Helen McCrory when they were both cast in Five Gold Rings at the Almeida in 2003. She gave birth to daughter Manon, their first child, in 2006. They subsequently married and had a second child -- a boy called Gulliver -- in 2007.

"There's no question that Helen followed me to L.A. because of the job," he says. "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." He pauses and takes a sip of white wine. "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."

This is the terrible cost of making it big in America. The production schedule on a typical network television series is brutal, requiring the cast and crew to churn out 16 episodes every season. This meant Lewis had to work 15-hour days, reducing the home he shared with his wife and children to little more than a crash pad. The rewards can be enormous, of course. Hugh Laurie, the British star of House, has just signed a deal with Fox that will net him $400,000 per episode -- or $9 million a year. But Laurie's personal life is reported to have suffered as a result of his hectic schedule, with his wife Jo remaining at the family home in Camden, while he spends most of the year in Los Angeles.

"As a family we really missed England and we were really looking forward to coming home," says Lewis. "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."

He's now back in north London, with his three-year-old daughter about to start nursery, and he's relishing the opportunity to tread the boards in the West End. "The experience of being on stage is just an entirely different sensation if you're used to being in front of the camera," he says, his eyes sparkling with excitement. "It's terrifying, it challenges you, and that challenge is partly what's appealing about doing theatre. Will I have stage fright, run into the wings and start screaming for a woman called Barbara?" "Who's Barbara?" I ask. "Exactly."

As we're leaving, I ask him if he overlapped with David Cameron at Eton. He gives me a funny look and I immediately correct myself: "Of course, he probably left before you got there."

"Actually, I'm considerably younger," he says.

I start laughing, assuming he's joking, then quickly realize he's not. Cameron is 43 while Lewis is 38. Oh God! What have I said? "Sorry about that," I say, slapping my forehead. "I'm an idiot."

"Don't worry," he says. "I just look old before my time. It's the effect of all the drugs."

This time he is joking -- to spare my embarrassment. I certainly wouldn't rule out Damian Lewis from becoming Hollywood's fist red-headed leading man, although in the end he just seems far too nice to be a movie star.

Martin Crimp's production of Molière's The Misanthrope runs until 13 March 2010 at London's Comedy Theatre and also stars Keira Knightley, Tara Fitzgerald and Dominic Rowan. For ticket availability, visit greenbee.com.

Callout: "I find London's South Bank infinitely more glamorous than Los Angeles."

Callout: "It's terrifying, it challenges you, and that challenge is partly what's appealing about doing theatre."