Damian lewis

Born on February 11, 1971 in St. John’s Wood, London, Damian Watcyn Lewis had relatives in the United States, so he often spent summers with them. When he finished his studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, in 1993 he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, with which he performed in productions of classic works.

He made his film debut with Robinson Crusoe (1997) , where Pierce Brosnan killed him in a duel , because they had both fallen in love with the same woman. Steven Spielberg discovered him on stage, when he played Laerles under the orders of Sam Mendes in “Hamlet”, with Ralph Fiennes in the lead role. King Midas of Hollywood proposed him for the role of American officer Richard Winters, in the luxurious World War II miniseries Blood Brothers . He also found great success on television as one of the leads in the British production The Forsyte Saga , which chronicled the lives of three generations of a middle-class British family.

Despite these triumphs, in cinema he seems to be jinxed. He did a great acting job in Dreamcatcher , where he was an American who after being possessed by an alien spoke like a Brit, so he had to mix both accents. But this adaptation of a Stephen King novel was the biggest fiasco for director Lawrence Kasdan . He stepped into the shoes of a lawyer fighting to save his marriage to Kristin Scott Thomas in Martha Fiennes ‘s low-profile chorus High Society . And he also brought to life the right hand of the prince ( James Franco ), who had a metal claw instead of a hand, inKnights, Princesses and Other Beasts , which garnered a –quite deserved– failure at the box office.

He played a CIA agent in the little-known The Situation , about the violence unleashed in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. He rocked the role of Jennifer Lopez’s abusive boyfriend in A Life Ahead , by Lasse Halström, a tremendous failure in the United States (it worked better in other countries, such as Spain, undoubtedly due to the pull of the two main actors, no less than Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman ). Lastly, he was the criminal who killed Ewan McGregor in Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker , the start of a potential franchise, which was left without sequels after suffering a huge commercial disaster. He didn’t rock the prison thriller The Scapist either, where Damian Lewis demonstrated his good work as a wren of the prison.

Even if anyone else would have thrown in the towel, Damian Lewis remained undaunted until Showtime signed him for Homeland , inspired by Israel’s Hatufim , which became the series of the moment. He plays Nick Brody, a Marine who returns home after eight years as a prisoner of war in Baghdad, leading a CIA agent (Claire Danes) to suspect that he has gone over to the enemy side. Without a doubt, Lewis does a great job on a cryptic character, who seems to hide a lot of things at all times. “I started with plays by William Shakespeare , which are full of suggestions. Without drawing comparisons, the authors of Homelandthey’ve also made their texts have a lot of subtext,” explains Lewis.

With a script that works like clockwork, the production became the television sensation of the moment. He came to prevent Mad Men from making history by reaping five consecutive Emmy awards for best dramatic series, snatching the victory in this category, at a gala in which he won a total of six awards, including an indisputable one for Damian Lewis , for which nobody gave one euro, since he was gambling with Jon Hamm and Bryan Cranston (a favorite after having taken it three times). Lewis has also received two back-to-back Golden Globe nominations.

After garnering an average of 4.4 million viewers in the United States, the second season of Homeland brings back Brody, who initially should have died in the first. “The recognition has brought with it enormous pressure,” Lewis said. “I miss the quiet, anonymous filming of the first season.” In addition, Damian Lewis is headlong because the filming lasts for months, in which he is away from his ‘homeland’, far from his wife, the also actress Helen McCrory –whom he married in 2007–, and from the two sons of him “It’s a little hard for me to spend a lot of time apart from my family for so long. But I think the results are very worth it, because each episode is like a movie.”