Tea and Mag....an extract

When Damian Lewis was in his second year of drama-school, he and two fellow-students took the boat to Amsterdam. Lewis (laughing): "Guess what we did there ...

 I still remember on the way over there we were sitting all three on deck in the middle of the night gazing at the stars and we shouted in a romantic way that we were the new generation of actors and we were going to change everything, stuff like that. I would like to say that that really happened, but I think it didn't quite go that way. ..."

He is self-confident, sexy and certainly not afraid of Hollywood but doesn't want to be "sold as the newest sportscar!" He refused a nice role in Black Hawk Down in efavour of The Forsyte Saga.

For an actor it is always fun to play the bad guy. Was this also the case? "Soames has something petty and ugly, something I could only shake of with some alcohol at the end of the day. But I didn't hate him, if I did I couldn't have played him. In the book he is a complex personality; in the BBC-series from 1967 he was evil and Irene was only the victim. We wanted to show some more sides to him.

 Even if no one likes Soames -- he is a bastard, a racist, a sexist, a snob -- then still you should be able to understand his obsession for that woman and how it destroys his life."