30 autumn 2012

HOME BOYDamian Lewis might have a hit show on both sides of the Atlantic and a fan in the White House, but it doesn’t stop him pining for the green green grass of Dartmouth Park. Craig McLean talks to the Homeland star about patriotism, family and his Olympic dash

damian lewis is pacing his rented apartment in Charlotte, North Carolina. There’s a lot going on. He was up late last night, hard at work filming one of the closing episodes on the second season of Homeland, the hit American drama in which the English actor plays an elite Marine sniper held captive for eight years in the Middle East.

He’s not long returned from a trip to New York, where he sated some of the feverish US media interest in the show by conducting a “press tour” in advance of the show’s keenly anticipated return in the autumn. Meanwhile, he and co-star Claire Danes – who plays Carrie Mathison, the brilliant but troubled CIA agent who is convinced Lewis’s character is a jihadist turncoat – have just been nominated for Emmy Awards, with Homeland gaining nine nominations altogether.

But today there’s a more important obligation still. This evening Lewis is taking an overnight flight back to Gatwick, to his family in Dartmouth Park, North London. His wife, the actress Helen McCrory, and their children, Gulliver, 5, and Manon, 4, are waiting for him. This weekend is the closing lap of the Olympics, and Lewis is determined to make the most of a rare

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Monday off with a flying 48 hours in the city of his birth as the greatest Games of the modern era races to a climax. Handily, McCrory – who has been appearing at the National Theatre, in The Last of the Haussmans – also has a couple of nights off. It’s a rare syncing of professional diaries for the powerhouse acting couple, whose relationship was kindled on the stage of Islington’s Almeida Theatre in 2003.

“I want to try to catch the last-gasp Olympic party,” the actor says of his under-the-radar return from Homeland to homeland. Now that Hugh Laurie’s eight-year run in House has come to an end, Lewis is probably the best-known Brit on American TV. But filming obligations aside, he knows where he needs to be in summer 2012.

“I knew I was coming out here to film all summer, so

I didn’t give the Olympics much thought,” he admits, as another balmily hot Charlotte day kicks in. “Then I’ve just been watching it, religiously, on the TV here. And I’ve loved this incredible spirit and togetherness. And just watching us win golds – alongside America and China is us! It’s incredible to think that of an island of 60 million people. So I’ve been sitting here getting quite patriotic and homesick and just thinking, ‘I want a slice of that!’ I want to soak it up a little bit. So I’m making a dash this last weekend.”

He’s been bunkered in the American South since spring, so I tell him he’ll notice an unusual national fervour in the “United Blingdom” (© the tabloids).

“If even the Scots are taking pleasure from the Union, then you’ve done something special,” says the 41-year-old, laughing. “And to say nothing of the sport itself – if anything’s gonna choke me up, it’s seeing some guy or girl who has dedicated their life to being a champion, and then watching them achieve it. It’s unbelievable. The boundaries that they push themselves to. And then the joy as they realise their dreams. You can’t write it better.”

Patriotism, nationalism, pride in the flag, what it means

to be a citizen. What it means to follow your heart. These are topics Lewis has had cause to analyse greatly over the past 18 months. They’re the backbone – and the brain and the heart – of Homeland.

The first 12-episode arc of the US production (based on an original Israeli series) was a classic edge-of-the-seat drama. Who is Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody? A PoW rescued from a battlefield hellhole, bloodily tortured but unbowed? Or a traitor, a soldier gone rogue and “turned” by his captors into a sleeper terrorist? And how to get to the truth as he is returned to his family, an adoring public, a grateful military top brass and – eventually – an eager Republican political machine?

Being front and centre of a show that has been a critical and ratings smash on both sides of the Atlantic – and in the

White House, where President Obama is a well-known fan – has been “very exciting” for the Londoner who shot to fame with Band of Brothers 11 years ago.

Lewis ascribes Homeland ’s touching a common nerve to the fact that “people do feel strongly about the war. And the show purposefully captures a mood of the electorate ten years on from 9/11. We no longer have this testosterone-fuelled, bullish attitude towards war. There’s a dissatisfaction. There’s a jaded feeling. There’s a real questioning of our own governments, our own leaders, about the way in which they perpetrated our war on the terrorists. Homeland examines those issues,” he says in his eloquent, thoughtful manner.

“And the centre of the show is a very anti-war message about what war can do to individuals. And that’s represented in Brody. But the brilliant thing about Homeland is that he also represents the threat and the menace. So you want to condemn him as well as feel sorry for him being the victim of circumstances – a victim of his war.

“And,” Lewis adds, “there’s a real exploration articulated by Brody himself of the notion that nation states and governments can commit acts of terror themselves.”

Of course, too much politics and too much polemical grandstanding would hardly light up the ratings. Homeland is, simply, a brilliant, knottily compelling thriller. And it is, of sorts, a romance. Brody and Mathison are both scarred by their experiences in the war on terror. Much as they distrust each other, they “get” each other where no one else can. They can’t help but be drawn together. The consequences of which can only be problematic.

“On a fundamental level, it turned out that people loved sitting in front of their TV and being made to feel anxious and excited on a Sunday night. It’s the same thing when you go and watch a horror film – the adrenalin rush of anxiety and not quite knowing what’s going to happen next. So it’s tapped into that on a more visceral level.”

The show’s fans at the very top of the American political tree saw Damian Lewis being invited to a state dinner at the White House in March. The actor was one of the special guests hosted to mark the visit of David Cameron.

Such events and widespread approval have sweetened the blow of being separated from his family for five months of the year. Nonetheless, heart and hearth remain in London, and whenever possible he tries to take son Gully to the Emirates Stadium to see Arsenal. Lewis became a Liverpool fan in his Seventies childhood. “It was totally random – they were the coolest team with the coolest players and were winning a lot. And,” he smiles, “I have been that shallow ever since.”

But he wants a different experience for his son.“Unless something changes, I imagine we’ll be in North

London for the best part of Gully’s growing up. So you think, it’d be great if he supports his local team, be part of the community. ’Cos that’s lovely and I never had that.”

Lewis spent his early childhood in northwest London. But his father, an insurance broker, and mother, an arts patron who died in a car crash in India in 2001, had firm ideas about his schooling.

“I went to boarding schools, and I went young,” he says of his ten years out of the city. “For my parents’ generation that was accepted. And I really felt I became a Londoner when I came back to drama school, the Guildhall, at the age of 18.

“So I identify incredibly strongly with London actually, because up until that point [my London experiences are] a bit disparate. I grew up in St John’s Wood and it was quite a transient neighbourhood – even more so now. Back then it was full of artists and novelists and psychotherapists and doctors. It was a bit more cuspy.

“I see London through my children a lot now,” admits the Old Etonian, whose not-that-posh tones also bring grit to the big-screen reboot of Seventies TV cop show The Sweeney. Lewis plays a suited officer in charge of

Ray Winstone’s old-fashioned Flying Squad copper.“I feel keen to establish them in a community actually in

London,” he continues. “One that they feel a part of. And where we live is like that. It’s very family-orientated, and a good mixture of interesting people. So London is now synonymous with my children growing up in it. When I’m away I very much think of where we are now more than where I grew up.”

In any case, Lewis’s spacious home within ambling distance of Hampstead Heath would seem predestined to be the perfect abode for the nation’s greatest gift to American television since we gratefully let them take Piers Morgan off our hands. It used to belong to Hugh Laurie.

As with Laurie, the US can have Damian Lewis for a few seasons of top-quality drama. But Washington should know that, as was the case with the one-time Dr Gregory House, Queen and country will be expecting the return of our crack thespian sometime in the near future. We never leave a good man behind. •Series 2 of Homeland starts on Channel 4 on October 7

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‘I’ve been sitting here getting quite patriotic and homesick and just thinking, “I want a slice of that!”’

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Damian Lewis as Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody in Homeland

‘I see London through my children a lot now. I feel keen to establish them in a community, one they feel a part of ’

Lewis with his wife, actress Helen McCrory, at a benefit night in London