After seven years working in film and television, Damian Lewis has returned to his stage roots to make his National Theatre debut in a rarely performed Ibsen thriller. Mark Shenton welcomes him back.

by Mark Shenton, Theatregoer, November 2005

Like Kenneth Branagh, Daniel Day Lewis, Ralph Fiennes, Jude Law and others, Damian Lewis is one of a large breed of British actors who first came to prominence on stage but who has found fame on film and television. His latest film, Keane, an independent New York-made feature in which he plays a father desperately searching for his lost daughter, has just been screened at the London Film Festival, after opening to rave reviews in America and France in September.

While there's a certain pride amongst theatre followers from having caught members of this breed on their way up, it can be galling when they disappear from live view. So it has been with Damian Lewis, the distinctively flame-haired, six-foot and now 34-year-old London-born actor. He spent five years after graduating from drama school rapidly climbing the theatrical ladder -- only to fall off it again and vanish for five years thereafter.

Thankfully, he's now back with a vengeance, leading a new production of Ibsen's Pillars Of The Community that allows him to finally make his National Theatre debut. "I feel giddy with excitement being here now," he admits over lunch at a nearby restaurant. He's enthusiastically devouring a salad as he tells me: "It reminds me of being back at drama school. I would sit around with friends, and theatre was very much our reference, not film or television. Acting was going to be about going to the RSC or the National and playing leading roles there. One always imagines oneself in the leading role, of course, when you're a student -- and that you're going to transform the theatre!"

In fact, it was the theatre that transformed Lewis into the actor he has become. A rapid apprenticeship in the regions (with two plays at Birmingham Rep) was followed by a breakthrough appearance in Molierè's The School For Wives at the Almeida, where director Jonathan Kent cast Lewis after remembering him from a student production. That led him, the next year, to playing Hamlet in Regent's Park. From there, he stepped down to step up, playing Laertes to Ralph Fiennes' Hamlet in a more high-profile Almeida production that subsequently transferred to New York. "When Jonathan asked me, I looked down my nose at him very grandly and said, 'I couldn't possibly play Laertes, I've just played the Dane!' I was then out of work for four months, and rang up and asked if Laertes was still available. He said he'd been waiting for my call."

It proved to be a fruitful, if occasionally fraught, experience. "I have to say that I didn't much enjoy the rehearsals to begin with," Lewis recalls. "Actors tend to be possessive of the roles they've played and I didn't much like Ralph reciting Hamlet's lines. One day, we were rehearsing the graveyard scene where Hamlet and Laertes square up against each other, and Jonathan said 'from the top go!' and I totally involuntarily launched into Hamlet's lines! I'm not quick to blush, but I melted." Going with the play to Broadway "was a very interesting lesson in success through association rather than for yourself," but Lewis was noticed and acquired an American agent as a result.

Not realising the implications of that, he came back to the UK and signed up for two years with the Royal Shakespeare Company. That might not have made the Americans happy, but it was another breakthrough for him as an actor. "There are points in a career which are turning points, and I remember very clearly that this was one. I felt I'd tangibly developed as an actor, something had dropped in me and I'd become more still. The crap to some extent had evaporated -- I don't say for a moment that it has all disappeared -- but I'd become better."

When, finally, the movies came calling, there was a hitch. "I was not good at camera interviews -- I found it intrusive and alien and I became very distracted around it, and gave very flappy and unfocused auditions. It wasn't at all natural for me. I thought that maybe I'll just be one of those theatre actors who aren't suited to camera." All that changed when the right film found him. That was Warriors, a TV film made in 1998. Then came a string of high-profile television projects including Hearts And Bones, The Forsyte Saga and Steven Spielberg's epic Second World War series Band Of Brothers, which in turn led to Hollywood and films like Dreamcatcher.

"I was very taken with this new world I was introduced to. It was new and fun and exciting, but then I started to think, am I never going to go back on stage?" Lewis was lured back, again to the Almeida, to do Joanna Laurens' quirky, experimental play Five Gold Rings nearly two years ago, an experience that helped him rediscover his stage feet.

In Pillars Of The Community, a largely neglected Ibsen that's being presented to mark the centenary of the Norwegian dramatist's death, Lewis is Bernick, a businessman trying to suppress a long-buried secret that could ruin him. It's a role reminiscent of his recent television satire Jeffrey Archer -- The Truth, in which he portrayed the former MP.

Lewis met Archer once, when he was a student at Eton with Archer's son James. "He came and saw a show I was in. He summoned me afterwards and said what a wonderful performance I gave." More recently, when Lewis approached Archer one night after the film was broadcast, "he blanked me -- he either had no idea who I was or he knew exactly who I was."

For the actor, men such as Archer and Bernick fascinate. "I do seem to enjoy playing roles that often tread a thin ethical line. The conflict that must be presented to one if one lives one's life like that is eternally interesting in drama. [Bernick] is sometimes a good man, but also motivated hugely by self-interest. This play deals with sleaze at the highest level, American imperialism, the power of newspapers, the idea of capitalism in the name of progress versus provincialism in the name of protecting things that are honest and simple." It's also, Lewis stresses, "and you'll just have to trust me, a suspense thriller, with a surprising amount of comedy."

Pillars Of The Community opens on 1 November at the National Theatre, Lyttleton (020 7452 3000).

Caption: Damian Lewis in rehearsals for Pillars Of The Community.