Charlie Crews, the character Damian Lewis plays in Life -- ITV's new drama import from America -- is perpetually defeated by modern technology. Lewis isn't too hot on it himself.
The London-born 37-year-old can't stand Facebook, worries that video games are a threat to the film business and struggles with text messages. When we meet he is wrestling with his mobile phone: "Sorry, I've just got to text my sister-in-law, who's a tyrant -- if I don't text back within half an hour she shouts at me," he says. "My text response time is usually about two days." His mobile, grey and chunky, is a model so antiquated that most teenagers would probably mistake it for a TV remote control.
At least Crews has an excuse. At the beginning of the series, he's just been released from a Californian prison, where he spent 12 years for a crime he didn't commit (which explains his bafflement about gadgets invented in the meantime). Having received compensation for wrongful imprisonment, he returns to his old job: detective. But now he's not only tackling run-of-the-mill murders -- he's trying to find out who framed him all those years ago.
He's not some "hard-bitten" cop show stereotype, though. What marks Life out from the usual police procedural is its "lightness of touch", says Lewis, whose previous successes include Steven Spielberg's Emmy-winning Second World War series Band Of Brothers; Lewis was nominated for a Golden Globe as best actor.
"Charlie is given his life back," he says. "And far from being this avenging vigilante, he's a sort of chrysalis, if you like. He becomes this childlike lover of the new life that's been given to him. 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 didn't visit a prison when preparing for the part, but he did plenty of research, particularly when it came to the philosophical side of Crews's character: "I read a bit of Zen, listened to a lot of Allen Carr -- that's wrong, he's the cigarette guy. Alan Watts, the 1960s philosopher -- he's been discredited by so many people but he was such a magnetic figure, bringing the idea of Zen and Eastern cultures into the West. I've been listening to his tapes, which is a soothing way to go to work, hearing about how godless the universe is. ..."
He also did a lot of reading about American prison life. "The homosexuals, interestingly, all deflect attention from themselves in a way that you think would be attention-grabbing," he says. "They actually make themselves more effeminate: wear lipstick, develop a bit of a walk. That way they make themselves non-threatening, and they get left alone more." He pauses, demonstrating the kind of deadpan comic timing he uses in Life. "Reminds me of school."
School was Eton -- he was there in the Eighties, when going to public school (and in particular that public school) was about the least cool thing you could do, because of Thatcher and "aspirational Conservatism", he says (with no air of resentment). He studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His big break came when Spielberg saw him in a production of Hamlet directed by Sam Mendes, and cast him in Band Of Brothers in 2001. He's since appeared in ITV's adaptation of The Forsyte Saga, Steven Soderbergh's Keane and the teenage spy film Stormbreaker.
Perhaps the most striking thing about Lewis's career is how often he plays characters with American accents: "I take great pride in the fact that, on the whole, people think I'm American," he says. Intriguingly, there have been quite a few other British actors doing American accents on US television in recent years: Hugh Laurie (House), Anna Friel (Pushing Daisies), Dominic West (The Wire), Michelle Ryan (Bionic Woman). ...
Surely Hollywood isn't so short of homegrown actors that it needs to hire British stars to play American roles. "Hollywood is hungry for new blood all the time -- if the studio fail to get that, they're in trouble financially," Lewis explains. "And there are few thirtysomething American actors that the American public don't already know." He suspects that some American actors resent the British, in a "they come over here, take our jobs" type of way, but he thinks this is daft: "The industry is global, people go backwards and forwards constantly."
Lewis won't be going backwards and forwards for much longer, though. He has two children (daughter Manon, two, and son Gulliver, born last November) with his wife, the actress Helen McCrory (who played Cherie Blair in The Queen with Helen Mirren). When he's shooting Life he brings the family to stay in Santa Monica with him, but he can't see them much: "A regular day on set is 13 hours," he says. Because of the hours, Life will be the last TV series he makes, he says.
If he can be tempted back to TV, let's hope it's to guest present Have I Got News for You again. He did it superbly in 2006 (making an impressive off-the-cuff pun about Friesian cows); team captain Ian Hislop says Lewis was one of the panel show's best hosts.
"Actually, this is a good opportunity for me to say this," he says. "In the lead-up to the filming [of HIGNFY], I accepted a horrible put-down [from the writers] in which I basically rubbished bicyclists. I get gyp about it every time I go in my local bicycle shop in Kentish Town. So I've always vowed that if I go on again I'll make a public statement about how I love bicyclists and that I was weak and in desperate need of a gag. ... That's never going to go in your article, is it?"
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