Tea and a Mag part two

Tea and a Mag….continues

  I Can't Believe I'm Getting Paid For What I've Always Wanted To Do'

He's selling himself short, and he knows it. Refreshingly, he doesn't make a big deal of what he does. "I'm actually a bit of a nightmare to work with," he confesses cheerfully. "I try to make it harder work than it is, because I suffer from guilt about having this job. I can't quite believe I'm being paid to do something I've wanted to do forever and which is such fun -- fooling around, putting on costumes, using different accents. ... It's playtime, isn't it?

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He had a privileged upbringing in northwest London -- "although my parents didn't have loads of money," he's quick to point out. "It was my grandparents who made money selling newsprint to Rupert Murdoch's father. And on my mother's side was Bowater-Scott, who made loo roll and stuff like that." Reluctantly, he abandons the pretence that he isn't posh. "So, yes, I suppose you'd say I was privileged."

Now 42, Damian was just 16 when he decided to become an actor, graduating from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1993. He says he spent the next few years "jumping around in tights a lot on stage" doing Shakespeare. "It certainly has its romance, theatre," he says, wistfully. "I though that's what I'd always be doing, actually. I understood being on stage but, for a long time, I didn't really know what to do with a camera. 

And then came a range of roles, culminating with Homeland, the must-watch series with more twists than an alpine road, about a returned American prisoner of war. It's earned him a Golden Globe, an Emmy, worldwide fame, and made him such a familiar face on US telly that many Americans, on meeting him, are surprised to hear that he is in fact British.

"I almost feel that i have an American twin these days," he says. " I have family in America, and when I was a kid, I used to visit them often in Connecticut, so I've grown up around the accent. And between playing Major Winters in Band Of Brothers and Brody, the accent has become almost second nature to me. Homeland is filmed in North Carolina, and if I'm alone there over the weekend, I'll find myself going to the store and talking in an American accent anyway. It's not even something I think about."

The acting lifestyle means a certain level of compromise between Damian and his wife, actress Helen McCrory (who played Cherie Blair in The Queen and Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies). Working on different sides of the Atlantic, with Helen back in England taking care of their children, Manon, six, and Gulliver, five, must have presented challenges?

"Oh, my God! Did you bug my hotel room or something?" he says in mock alarm. "I've just had this conversation with Helen on the phone! No, it's true. My wife is a brilliant, talented actress, who had to shape her career around the family when our babies were very young. Having said that, she managed to appear in four major movies in that time, but only because she was playing smaller roles. I think she's quite keen to take more responsibility in a film now; not necessarily a Hollywood blockbuster, but just something in which she can play a lead role and really show her acting chops. She did some theatre work last year, and I actually took the kids on my own for a month -- well, not on my own, I don't want you to think I'm Superman, we had a nanny! And that worked out well, so we'll see.

"Meanwhile, there's Romeo & Juliet to look forward to, as well, of course, as the new season of Homeland [series three]. That is, so long as they don't kill me, which you never know about!"

Any ambitions left unfulfilled? "I'd like to do a romance," he says, unexpectedly. "I'd really like to do a film where, at the end, I kiss the girl and we both look into the sunset together. But it just doesn't happen for some reason." He laughs. "Maybe my hair's too red. Maybe no one thinks a redhead could ever get the girl."

Truth be told, he doesn't seem too worried about it.

Callout: "I'm a bit of a nightmare to work with -- I make it harder than it is."

 

source damian-lewis.com