Henry VIII Makes the Front Page of Sunday Times today!

source: twitter

We share with you below excerpts from the Sunday Times interview, and you can see the entire article here. 

Lewis, whose great-grandfather Lord Dawson of Penn was a physician to the royal family, will play Henry VIII in a six-part BBC television adaptation of Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker prizewinning historical novel.

“It feels like a canny piece of casting because I do feel and find similarities to myself,” said Lewis.

“I think there is no question that it helps having had the kind of schooling I’ve had to play a king. It’s not such a leap oddly — even though the thought of being a monarch of any nation is mind-boggling and not something I could imagine easily at all.

“But, yes, there’s just the sort of court structure, hierarchies and the way they are set up which is something I understand.”

Eton does seem to make natural rulers, having produced no fewer than 19 British prime ministers, including David Cameron.

Lewis’s comments, however, mark something of a turnaround for the actor who two years ago admitted in a radio interview that he used to keep his Eton background secret for fear of being typecast “as a floppy-fringed public school boy”.

He has become better known for playing Americans such as Sergeant Nicholas Brody in the Homeland series and Major Richard Winters in Band of Brothers.

Wolf Hall marks the actor’s meatiest role yet in a British television production. The series, which is due to be screened in January, combines two of Mantel’s books, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, which chart the rise to power of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII.

source: Sunday Times

The books have sold in their millions, particularly in Britain and America, and have also been adapted separately for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), first at Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, and then in London’s West End.

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The BBC series is a co- production between Company Pictures and the American-owned Playground and has more of a political slant than the stage adaptation.

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Lewis expands on his Eton education on today’s Desert Island Discs. “It had a high octane and privileged environment.” he tells the host Kirsty Young.

“It was also massively competitive and fed the idea that you had better not be the one who is caught out. You had to be quick, nimble and agile all the time.”

source: Damian-Lewis.com

The actor also talks about his role in Wolf Hall, explaining that Henry had an average- sized 34in waist until his mid-thirties. Lewis has to be padded up to play the king in his forties, however, after the monarch put on weight following a jousting accident that prevented him from being able to exercise so much.

Lewis says rather modestly that he is now not as well known as his actress wife, Helen McCrory, who has recently been in the BBC2 drama series Peaky Blinders and on stage as Medea.

“We signed autographs [in October] at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. I could have been her assistant. I don’t think most knew who I was,” he tells the Radio 4 programme.

McCrory, 46, gets to dress up as a monarch herself in the new year when she plays Elizabeth I — Henry’s daughter — in Bill, a comedy film about the young Shakespeare that was made by members of the team behind the Horrible Histories series.

Lewis tells Desert Island Discs: “I fully expect one day to end up acting as a butler to her dame."