In his journey from Eton to Kilmainham Gaol, Damian Lewis has managed to live down his past to become one of the most exciting English actors of his day, writes Donald Clarke
DAMIAN LEWIS is discussing his early days in the acting lark. "I suppose it is a little unusual for somebody with my background to get into the business," he says. "Maybe perceptions are changing though. I don't think it does matter as much as it did."
If you heard a phrase like this coming out of an English actor's mouth 50 years ago you might assume he or she had been raised in some sooty working-class locale many miles north of Watford. To that point, the English stage had been dominated by such clubbable actors as John Gielgud (son of a stockbroker), Ralph Richardson (son of the art master at Cheltenham Ladies' College) and Laurence Olivier (son of a high Anglican priest).
In the years that followed, however, various Finneys, Stamps, Caines and Courtneys reclaimed the profession for the working class and the regions. So, oddly, we now find ourselves in a place where Damian Lewis, one of the most exciting English actors of his generation, almost has to apologise for the fact that he went to Eton.
"Well, yes, but I think the toffs have now been integrated into the middle class," he says. "They are everywhere in the professions and the media. People of my age are among the first of that lot to move into things like acting. I think maybe that's helped lessen the prejudice against Eton and places like that."
He has a point. The British Labour Party has tried hard to portray David Cameron, another old Etonian, as a chinless, upper-class buffoon, but the electorate appears to view the leader of the opposition as no more posh than their doctor or solicitor.
"Actually, I used to keep my school very quiet because I thought it might count against me in some way," Lewis says. "There was this view that you couldn't be posh and be a really good actor. Maybe that is changing."
You wouldn't confuse Damian Lewis with a character from EastEnders, but he doesn't come across like a denizen of the grouse moors either. Bounding excitedly into the room, the ginger actor, now 37, talks eloquently and enthusiastically in the sort of educated but essentially classless London accent you will hear in every Camden wine bar.
A glance at his CV reveals that directors, unaware of his background, have felt no need to cast him as Lord Bumpington-Dumpington. He was steadfast and American as Major Winters in the epic television series, Band of Brothers. He played the ultimate social mountaineer in the satire Jeffrey Archer: The Truth. He was quite brilliant as a troubled vagrant in Lodge Kerrigan's unfairly overlooked film, Keane. This week he turns up in the impressive prison drama, The Escapist.
Rupert Wyatt's debut feature, which was shot almost entirely in Dublin with support from the Irish Film Board, follows weary lifer Brian Cox as he and his chums plot an ingenious escape. Lewis puts in another unnerving, focused performance as the senior convict who rules the prison. Now, I don't want to go on about this school thing, but I am reminded of the comment of Jonathan Aitken, the disgraced Tory MP, before being detained at Her Majesty's Pleasure. "I'm sure I will cope," he drawled. "I lived through Eton."
"Well, I'd like to say there were similarities," Lewis says. "But my boarding-school experience was not much like being confined in a maximum-security prison. It doesn't work like that."
The main body of The Escapist was filmed in Kilmainham Gaol and, considering the brevity of the shoot and the concomitant long hours, the cast must have begun to feel incarcerated.
"I wouldn't quite say that," Lewis says. "But spending all that time in the one place with those guys did, I suppose, help us get into the mood for playing prisoners. We did still manage to have lives though."
Oh, yeah? So he was dragged out to the fleshpots of Dublin? "Not quite. But I was taken once or twice to that 'Bordello' place. What's it called again?"
That would be Lillie's Bordello, the nightclub off Grafton Street where the people who think themselves beautiful go to party.
"Yeah, that's the place. It is amazing how much Ireland has changed. It has become such a wealthy place. I remember what Bono - or maybe it was Geldof - said once when asked if international aid would work for Africa: 'Well, it worked for Ireland.' Har, har!"
Lewis was born and raised in London. His father worked in insurance and his mother was an organising force in theatre and the arts. He remembers the household being engulfed in a permanent cacophony of chatter and declares that he was first forced to declaim as a way of making himself heard above the din. At the age of eight, he was sent away to boarding school, but he refuses to indulge in any sob stories of evenings weeping on matron's shoulder. Indeed, he suggests that his school years were somewhat idyllic.
Inspired by his mother, who was on the board of the Royal Court Theatre, Lewis began acting at primary school and went on to set up a theatre company in his mid-teens. After Eton, he attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where his contemporaries included Ewan McGregor and Joseph Fiennes. Following graduation, he picked up a few decent roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Steven Spielberg spotted him playing Laertes opposite Ralph Fiennes in Sam Mendes's production of Hamlet and nabbed him for a TV series he was planning on the second World War. Lewis was so convincing in Band of Brothers that many casting directors still think he is American.
"That was hard work," he says. "We had to get up at five in the morning and didn't get to bed until after 10. In a way it was like being in a dormitory. It's strange, but there is something liberating about being told what to do all day. When they stopped our five-mile runs in the morning, many of us missed them."
Band of Brothers did not make him a star exactly, but his handsome, quizzical face did lodge in viewers' minds. He played Soames in ITV's mildly successful reworking of John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga and got another American lead in a weird movie version of Stephen King's Dreamcatcher. But, for many Lewis aficionados, his greatest performance was in that undeservedly obscure American independent film called Keane.
Lewis played a man who, following the disappearance of his daughter, suffers a mental breakdown and begins lurking around the spot where he last saw the little girl. How come the film never received proper distribution? "That's a long story and one I've thought a lot about," he says. "The film played at Cannes and got an amazing reception. But it was one of those films that suffer from having a lot of different investors involved. They had this strange strategy for the film's release, and it just never got the coverage it deserved."
Never mind. Although he didn't get the Oscar nomination many felt his performance merited, this charismatic, versatile performer has seen his reputation solidify in recent years.
In July 2007, he married Helen McCrory, best known for playing Cherie Blair in The Queen, and the couple now live with their two children - Gulliver and Manon, would you believe? - in a smart enclave of north London. He spends a great deal of time in Los Angeles filming the impressive NBC cop show, Life.
In earlier interviews he admitted to enjoying a party, so is he happy to have settled down?
"Oh God, I really don't know what that phrase 'settled down' means," he says, visibly aghast. "We do live with our children in London, yes. But life is so busy that it seems odd to say we have 'settled down'."
There is one thing I must ask him before he goes. Helen played Cherie Blair in The Queen, he played Tony in Confessions of a Diary Secretary, a TV movie focusing on the misadventures of John Prescott. Do they ever become the Blairs in the privacy of their own home? "Oh God, no. I can say with certainty we have never done that."
He looks genuinely appalled. Of course Blair, an alumni of the only modestly exclusive Fettes School, was just that teeny bit common.
Wasn't he?
The Escapist is on limited release