But hold on. Lewis is still talking, and what's this he's saying now? "I'm not sure -- and this is only conjecture on my part -- I'm not sure Brody will last the distance. It feels like he might not." Oh dear. Brody, for the uninitiated, is Lewis's character, US Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody, rescued after eight years' captivity in Iraq, seemingly gone to the bad. It's a role Lewis inhabits so well, I half expect him to turn up to the interview in full dress uniform and looking highly stressed.
How stupid is that? Rather, on this sunny September lunchtime in a pub garden near his home in North London, Lewis is casual in jeans and open-necked shirt. he has fretted a little over the choice of pub. Such and such a place is "not suitable, there'll be a brawl," and settled on the Lord Palmerston. His sonorous, actorly tones boom around the enclosed space, a mark of his self-confidence. I suspect he's one of those people who doesn't lower his voice on the Tube. Good for him.
He is "a bit the worse for wear" after attending the GQ awards the night before. He won TV Personality of the Year. "The evening got slightly out of hand," he reports, ordering Cumberland sausage and mash by way of a cure. He also has a half a bitter -- "I can't let you drink on your own" -- but then moves on to coffee. The barmaid asks if we want to open a tab. "Oh no, don't encourage that," he replies, disappointingly for my purposes. He asks me to make him a roll-up -- "It's like being with my wife, she likes these" -- but only half smokes it. I think he might be that rare thing, an English actor who isn't pretending to be a bloke. Although he does play football. Eight-a-side at Coram's fields in Bloomsbury. "Quite a high standard."
"The awards were actually very humbling," he says, a little thespily, confirming my initial impression of an old-school luvvie. "Most of Team GB were there. I find myself eye-to-eye with Bradley Wiggins, and he's telling me how much he loves my work, when I've just managed to rattle of some lines in a half-interesting way and he's won seven gold medals."
Self-deprecation is a feature of his conversation, such as when I mistakenly say he's 42 and he says, "Don't hurry me along just yet. I'm 41. Every year is important to a shallow, vain actor." And yet, as he later admits, it's a bit of an act in its own right. "At boarding school you affect this laid-back, laissez-faire approach when actually you're like a hamster on a f***ing wheel underneath. you affect this, 'Oh, I don't really care too much," and you're pedalling away furiously. I think I probably suffer from that a bit." Which is not to say he's secretly a monstrous egotist, just that he takes himself and his work more seriously than he might otherwise imply.
The boarding school he mentions is Eton, a part of his life he hasn't always been keen to discuss. To be honest, I don't think he's that wild about talking about it now. His body language -- half-turned away, hand passing over face frequently, a certain hunted, indeed Brodyesque, cast to his features -- suggests a reluctance to dwell on the years 13 to 18 that I have witnessed in other products of Britain's most famous secondary school. A strange situation ha arisen in which some of the most privileged people in the country feel persecuted. Of course, this seems absurd, but there's no denying the phenomenon is widespread.
"I was aware," says Lewis, "as I was entering into essentially a left-wing profession, of a potential prejudice, so I never mentioned that I'd been to Eton. Once I felt comfortable I hadn't been typecast, I did mention it, then every article started, 'Eton-educated Damian Lewis ...'" So he'd made the right decision to keep quiet? "Yeah. I'm not sure it was the brave thing to do, but it was prudent."
We discuss Benedict Cumberbatch's recent complaint that there was too much "posh-bashing" in Britain. (Cumberbatch went to Harrow.) "Well, Benedict is a bright lad, so he presumably had reason to say it." For himself, Lewis hasn't "ever felt got at" because of his privileged education. "I don't think it's been brought to bear on my career in any way. Anyway, I'm not the floppy-fringed cherubic posh-looking guy. I was always the redhead trying to be funny."
Does he get fed up being asked about Eton? "I don't blame people for being interested. I have a degree of interest myself. At the same time, I've always been aware, and while I was there, I was aware that it was not fashionable. My bad Mockney accent predates Guy Ritchie's." His voice now -- resonant, commanding, befitting the RSC stalwart he once was before television came calling -- bears little trace of that pretence. At the time, however, "I toned it down. Being at Eton in the middle to late Eighties, you felt a bit out of time."
These days, of course, old Etonians are all the rage, nowhere more so than on American television, whose most highly paid star, Hugh Laurie, went to the school. Then there's Dominic West, Lewis's friend and near-contemporary. Other acting alumni include "a couple of lads a few years younger, Tom Hiddleston and Eddie Redmayne. It is no longer odd that people come from that sort of education and end up doing something creative." If nothing else, as he points out, the creative industries have grown hugely in the course of a couple of generations.
Lewis's father was a stockbroker, "but the family story is that dad is an actor who never became an actor." His mother, who died in 2001 in a car accident in India, was descended from a former Lord Mayor of London, and before that, a 19th-century baronet. Not full-on blue-blooded aristocracy, but not far off.
Although Conservative politically, Lewis's parents "were very liberal, if anything maverick in their outlook. They were completely supportive of me saying I didn't want to go to university, I wanted to go to drama school." Part of the reason, he says, for sending him away to a Sussex prep school was because, "My parents believed -- with much justification I think now that I'm into school-run hell -- that we should get out in the fields and get our knees dirty and get away from the precious competitiveness of North London day schools."
That very morning, Lewis had taken Gulliver, his four-year-old son, "for his first day of school. It was glorious and heartbreaking at the same time. I picked him up before I came to see you." Lewis is married to the actress Helen McCrory. They have another child, a daughter, Manon, aged 5. Filming Homeland takes him to North Carolina for five months of the year. "I make these mad dashes back and forth for 48 hours. If it looks like I'm not going to see Helen and the kids for a four-week stretch, which is too much for me, I'll bomb back after a fortnight."
to be continued....
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