Tea and a Mag part three

Lewis' deal was signed on 25 December 2010. The pilot started shooting on January 3. The casting directors didn't even get to seem him read with Danes.

Earlier this year, Jay Z released a new album, Magna Carta ... Holy Grail. On the track "FUTW" [Fuck Up The World] he wraps, "Feeling like a stranger in my own land/Got me feeling like Brody in Homeland".

"I was aware of that, yeah," Lewis says.

That's quite a cool thing, isn't it?

"It's one of the coolest things that's ever happened to me."

Are you serious? It's pretty good, right?

"My natural habitat is quite a long way from, you know, a gangster rapper. So the fact that I've somehow straddled popular culture to find myself name checked ... From the RSC ..."

To the Jay Z?

"To the Jay Z. I actually did walk around playing it on-set to anyone who'd listen: 'Just in case you might be interested ... have you heard this?'"

Not the least of Homeland's many pleasures is the ability to plunge its characters into unbelievable jeopardy that really is unbelievable, yet still having us root for them.

"Within the context of the show, everything's plausible," Claire Danes tells Esquire. "The show creates its rules and then stays within them. It's realy in the land of make believe. Never underestimate these writers. They're monsters."

"I particularly asked for them not to send me the scripts until right before the shoot because I don't want to know what's happening," says Mandy Patinkin, who plays Saul Berenson, Carrie's enigmatic CIA mentor. "I'll happily say I'm never disappointed in any turn they take. There's no question of them keeping that intensity up. I'm witnessing it every day."

One could point to any number of deliciously ludicrous moments Homeland has given us over its first two seasons: Brody breaking the neck of an undercover al-Qaeda operative in a forest while having an argument on the phone with his wife, for instance. Or the administering of a fatal heart attack to the vice president after breaking into his office and giving terrorists the serial number to wirelessly hack his pacemaker.

"The pacemaker, that's actually true," says Lewis. "When Cheney and Rumsfeld were running Bush's administration, there was always concern that [someone] might be able to access a code for Cheney's pacemaker."

In fact, the only issue Lewis has had with Homeland's authenticity turns out to be a bit more pedestrian. when arch-baddie Abu Nazir kidnaps Carrie and is issuing orders down the phone to Brody, he does so via a video call.

"You can't Skype on that BlackBerry," Lewis says.

And anyway, if you really want to pick holes then the whole show is based on a fundamental untruth anyway.

"The CIA don't work on American soil," he says. "The FBI do."

Homeland season three begins 200 days after the car bomb that destroyed the CIA's Langley, Virginia, HQ and prompted a global hunt for Brody -- now the world's most wanted terrorist.

"Brody is on the run and, you know, there's no guarantee that we'll see him again," Lewis says. 

"What's fun now is season three has returned to something much more in the traditional hardboiled, paranoid, psychological thriller mould. It's a lot more hard-hitting. It feels more Seventies-ish. There's a lot of double and triple-agenting going on. Who's working for who? Who's turning who? A lot of stuff in rooms with people trying to pinpoint people.

With Brody absent from the first two episodes, the new series will focus on goings-on at Langley. The Saul Berenson character, someone the writers conceived as a combination of George Smiley and Günther Bachmann from John le Carré's A Most Wanted Man, an old-school spy, will move centre stage. There will be more significant roles for Quinn, black ops leader Dar Adal and Saul's estranged wife, Mirea. Brody's wife will fall pregnant -- by Brody? By creepy Mike? -- though this time it was the cast who surprised the writers.

"It was intimated to Morena [Baccarin, who plays Jessica Brody] in January that she wouldn't be in this season and now she's ended up being in it a lot," Lewis says. "She thought, 'It's a good time for me to go and get pregnant.' Wrong!"

With the worldwide manhunt underway, Lewis promises "an international flavour". He has been filming in Puerto Rico, "but it may not be Puerto Rico when we see it" (Venezuela is the likely candidate). Given that Brody and Carrie are now estranged, you might reasonably wonder how much further the show can go with their already crazy relationship. Indeed, there has been speculation about how much further it can go with Brody, full stop. Not least from the man playing him.

"Season three would be a good way for Brody to leave," Lewis says. "That could be a great way to write someone out of a show. The series could carry on, couldn't it? I think the one person it can't work without is Carrie because I do think it's a CIA show. It's about homeland security, isn't it? I think the writers reserve the right to do whatever they want each year. They could do surprising things, like not see Brody for an entire season. Then maybe he appears again. As long as the stories are strong enough, they can do that with the characters."

Indeed, David Nevins, Showtime's president of entertainment, recently compared Homeland to Friday Night Lights, which he also produced. That show "flipped over the entire cast between seasons". "You can't keep the same dynamic," he said.

So will Lewis be back for season four?

I actually ... I don't know," Lewis says.

It's something Lewis' co-star, the woman he calls "Danesy", also struggles to clarify.

"I have to -- or rather, I have the privilege of doing -- seven series," she says. "I'm contractually obliged to continue doing this show for a long, long time. And I think it would be a very different show indeed without Brody."

So you're both locked in for four more series?

"Potentially ... theoretically," she says. "Yes."

Hmm. For the moment, at least, those eager for more Brody-on-Carrie action can rest easy. Lewis promises they'll somehow find a way to get it on.

"Yes," he says. "There'll be something satisfying for everyone."

More than the magazine covers and the chats on The Jonathan Ross Show and the endorsement deals with fast car companies and the shout-outs from Jay Z, there is one more barometer to show your work has truly arrived in the top tier of the showbiz firmament. And that's getting your own parody porn movie. It is in this spirit that Esquire shows Lewis This Ain't Homeland ... XXX from Hustler Video.

"Who's that?" Lewis says, inspecting his likeness on the cover: dyed red hair neatly parted, tight army uniform pressed just so. "Richie Calhoun. He's a big porn star, isn't he?"

To be fair, the similarity isn't terrible. Better than Claire Danes', at any rate.

"Tara Lynn Foxx -- outstanding!" he chuckles.

It gets him thinking. "See, in the US, they parody these things on Saturday Night Live. They did a sketch of Homeland which basically amounted to Carrie crying a lot and me not moving my mouth. I was like a frog."

But that's a Brody thing, right? You're playing him buttoned up, conflicted.

"No, I actually ahve a really small mouth. My kids tease me about it. They say, 'Dad, go on, open your mouth as wide as you can. No, go on. Open it further ..."

A really small mouth? Is that even a thing?

"I don't know. My singing teacher said, 'We're not accessing some of the notes, do you know why this is? It's what I call a small mouth/big tongue'. It just sounds wrong," Lewis says. "It makes me feel like a lizard."

When Damian Lewis arrives at his local pub in North London for our second meeting, I get quite a surprise. He's completely bald. It is now June and he has been back to North Carolina to film the fourth of the 12 episodes in Homeland's new season (they will still be filming episodes and editing others when the show returns in September).

"It's a bit like Velcro," he says, rubbing his head. "I can't even get a hat on straight. It just sort of ... sits."

What does his wife make of it?

"She really likes it," he says. "She says it's like going out with a ballet dancer. Which is her nice way of saying, 'You don't look like a member of the National Front'." Given that he flew from the Homeland set this morning, one assumes it's part of some Brody-related disguise.

"It's to do with several things. It is to do with work, but I'm not going to tell you more than that."

In 48 hours, Lewis and his new haircut will fly up to the Isle of Mull for four-and-a-half weeks to shoot The Silent Storm, an independent film co-starring Andrea Riseborough and financed by Barbara Broccoli, guardian of the James Bond film franchise, whose production company is making a rare outing into non-Bond territory. Lewis plays Balor, a puritanical pastor convinced he's God's one true messenger.

"He's a man of faith and religious conviction and there is an event in his life which derails him that he is unable to cope with, in spite of his faith," he says. "I suppose it's a piece about the yawning gap between ideology and personal experience."

Today, Lewis has arrived home to something even more draining than his jet lag.

"I'm behind with my taxes," he groans.

He spend the morning going through his receipts and says the only break the taxman ever gives him is in the form of "residuals cheques for 79p for the selling of Poirot to Paraguay".

We order lunch. Lewis goes for something with quinoa.

"Oh, that looks so grown up," he says, quite disappointed, when it arrives.

I ask if he's OK with this chat being recorded and get out my Dictaphone.

"Yes,' he says. "Unless you've got a fucking good memory."

When Damian Lewis was little, his mum took him to the GP and gave the family doctor an ultimatum: "It's either him or me. One of us has to go."

"As a boy, I was quite shy to start with, until I hit about eight," Lewis recalls. "Then I wasw really not very shy at all."

The Lewis family was encouraged to be strong, loud and opinionated. The Sunday lunch table became a forum for debate, with everyone expected to throw in ideas and fight for them. Their ancestors had some history in this regard. Lewis' maternal grandfather was Sir Ian Bowater, the Lord Mayor of London from 1969-70, a Knight of the British Empire, and a decorated Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War. Other relations included a physician to the royal family and Sir Alfred Yarrow, the shipping magnate once noted among the world's leading builders of frigates.

At his prep school in Sussex, Lewis was made head boy. "My duties included turning all the lights off," he recalls. "I was a responsible young chap." Later, he recalls some less responsible things: "Midnight raids on the school pantry, sneaking into girls' dormitories, having midnight feasts, tying sheets together and shinning out of the fourth floor window to pick up slippers we'd bunged down." It was, he says, "all very Tom Brown's School Days".

Then came Eton. "And suddenly all these little kingpins arrived from their own schools. You're surrounded by the best of the best." Lewis developed a bit of a look, going on missions to Kensington Market for paisley shirts and spending hours trying to perfect his quiff with shaving foam. He also formed a theatre group, The Chameleons. "I realised I wanted to be acting and playing guitar and playing football and cricket. Academically, I slowed to an almost grinding standstill."

Private education has its pros and cons but one wonders whether Eton isn't a special case in itself. If there's a drive it instils in its pupils that's quite unlike anywhere else?

"Well, people have commented on that," Lewis says.

"I don't necessarily see it myself because I am of it. But Eton is an extraordinary place. Unless you're going to Oxford or Cambridge, you feel a bit like you've been to the best university already. Because the facilities are second to none. The history, the sense of belonging to a tradition -- you can't beat it."

So Lewis sacked off university and went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama instead. Graduating in 1993, he quickly enjoyed notable successes on stage, with the RSC in Hamlet on Broadway in 1995, and in the National Theatre production of Ibsen's Pillars Of The Community. But following Band Of Brothers, TV's been the platform for his greatest work.

"He was obviously always going to go far," says Christopher Menaul, who directed Lewis as the emotionally cruel patriarch in 2003's remake of The Forsyte Saga.

 "He was playing a very dark, sombre, humourless man, but he's very funny between takes. He's a fantastic mimic. I remember him being a northern comic: he had all the patter and the dance steps. I'm not surprised he fooled most Americans [that he's one of them] for Homeland."

"He's a movie star," says Corinna McFarlane, The Silent Storm's director. "He's got the ability to combine the majestic scale of his presence with something delicate and intimate. We've got a lot more to see from Damian Lewis."

"He's a consummate actor," says Mandy Patinkin. "There's a tremendous amount of intensity on our set, but he's incredibly disciplined and a wonderful leader. He's someone who makes people feel good about themselves, feel good about the day. I'd go down to the bottom of the sea in a submarine any day of the week with Damian."

"I had no ambition to go to the US and be in a TV show," Lewis says. "It's not like I've rejected something or decided that I've found something better. Your life just takes you off in strange and different directions. I would certainly hope that I haven't been in my last Shakespeare play."

One benefit of TV fame: the chance to cherry-pick other shows to moonlight on. He has hosted his favourite, Have I Got News For You, several times, and felt obliged to apologise to David Cameron for being rude about him when he ran into him on Hampstead Heath. This year, he's been popping up on CBeebies, reading bedtime stories like I Got A Crocodile.

"I did that for my children, and they couldn't give a toss," he sighs. "I keep being called up by friends saying, 'Little Fifi saw you on that thing'. I say: 'If I can get any kind of reaction out of my kids that would be brilliant'. My son's more into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."

Actually, what he'd really like to do is a musical.

"He took tap dancing lessons all last season," Claire Danes says. "He's a song and dance man, which I don't think anybody realises. He and Mandy [noted for his musical tehatre, notably Sondheim] are a dangerous pair on-set: they just don't stop singing. He'd love to do some big, splashy musical."

or his part, Lewis recalls his first words to Patinkin: "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die" -- Patinkin's immortal line from The Princess Bride (1987).

"He looked at me like: "I have to spend five months with this guy?"

Several years before Damian Lewis moved into his house in Tufnell Park in north London, it belonged to another British actor who subsequently succeeded on American TV: Hugh Laurie. "Occasionally, I still get post for him," Lewis says.

He found out Laurie had lived there around the time he'd been offered Life. Laurie's first season of House had just aired "and he had become a global superstar ... just like that." Lewis had never met Laurie, but he called him up anyway. "I just said, 'Hello, it's Damian Lewis. I'm sitting in your bedroom.' Then I said: 'So, what's it like making one of these TV things? Because I'm just about to make a decision'. And he gave me advice. He was very sweet."

The advice worked out: Lewis moved to L.A. for two years, found a beautiful house by the ocean. His son Gulliver was born during that time and Helen became pregnant with their daughter, Manon. But it was also tough. "Hugh was the most honest but nobody was particularly honest about what it means to go and work in American TV," he says. "You do 70-hour weeks and you don't see your family. It's sweatshop hours. There were a couple of times when I was driving down the [California Interstate] 405 at 4 am and the whole freeway started to swim in front of me."

Ultimately, he sees the problem as this: "I just don't consider myself to be, you know, an American actor," he says. "I don't want that life. People jump from series to series to series and they make a great living doing that. That's not what I want to do. I want to do theatre and film and direct my own things and develop. But essentially, I want to be in England."

Damian Lewis sits in the 13th-century Duart Castle on the Isle of Mull and helps cut out paper spiders to stick to his son Gulliver's top. "My spiders are all too narrow, or too long," he says. "Not wide enough. Not cool enough ..."

He's staying here while he films The Silent Storm. Yesterday, he was up on a cherry picker, stripped to the waist, and abseiling across pastor Balor's church, pulling tiles off the roof. "He has a Fitzcarraldo fit of obsession and starts to deconstruct his own church," Lewis explains. "He rips all his clothes off in a fit of madness. It was a bit more James Bond than Presbyterian pastor."

Next week, he's back to North Carolina to film episode five of Homeland. After this season he's got his eye on another British film. "An independent sci-fi project that I really want to do called Alone," he says. "About a man out in space."

As in: it would just be you in it?

"Yes," he grins. "You can see the attraction now for me."

Given he's the latest Briot to make it in the US, surely he's joined the others and been offered a superhero movie by now?

"I haven't, actually," he says. "But you just have to do what seems interesting at the time. It's fascinating for me that something that feels absolutely right one year, 12 months later it feels like the wrong thing. If someone said, 'We want you to play Amazing-Man in the next Amazing-Man franchise', I suspect one year it would feel right, the next year it wouldn't."

Still, there are some roles that are undeniable. Bond, for instance. Wife Helen was in Skyfall, he's working with Barbara Broccoli ... would he like to throw his hat in the ring? "Yes, I think it would be wonderful," he says. "Daniel [Craig] is doing an amazing job and he'll continue to do it for a bit. But if it ever comes to that, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. Like I said, timing turns out to be everything."

Perhaps. Though you figure Damian Lewis is also pretty accomplished at making his own luck.