Damian Lewis

Damian Lewis is an English actor who portrayed Nicholas Brody on Homeland.

About him[]

Like his co-star Claire, Damian earned himself an Emmy for his performance as U.S. Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody in the show, as well as a Golden Globe.

Damian had already gained experience playing a military man, having starred as US Army Major Richard Winters in the HBO series, Band of Brothers.

Away from the set of Homeland, Lewis has starred in a stack of hit film and television projects.

In 2016, he began starring as billionaire Bobby Axelrod in the series Billions.

Last year, he acted in Quentin Tarantino's Oscar-winning film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - where he worked alongside fellow A-Listers like Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt.

Tragedy hit earlier this year when Damien's wife, fellow actor and Peaky Blinders star Helen McCrory, died of cancer in April at the age of 52.

The couple had been married since July 2007 and shared a daughter, Manon, and a son, Gulliver.

McCrory passed away at her home in London on 16 April, and Damian revealed on Twitter that she had had died "peacefully at home, surrounded by a wave of love from friends and family".

Biography[]

Early Life[]

Lewis was born in St John's Wood, London, the son of Charlotte Mary (née Bowater) and J. Watcyn Lewis, a City broker.His paternal grandparents were Welsh. His maternal grandfather was Lord Mayor of London Ian Frank Bowater and his maternal grandmother's ancestors include Bertrand Dawson, 1st Viscount Dawson of Penn (a doctor to the royal family) and philanthropist Alfred Yarrow.

Lewis made several visits to the United States to visit relatives during his summers as a child. He first decided to become an actor at age 16. He was educated at the independent Ashdown House School in the village of Forest Row in East Sussex and at Eton College and graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1993, after which he served as a stage actor for the Royal Shakespeare Company. During his time with the RSC, he played Borgheim in Adrian Noble's production of Henrik Ibsen's Little Eyolf, as well as Posthumus in William Shakespeare's Cymbeline. He has also starred in another of Ibsen's plays, Pillars of the Community.

Career[]

Lewis appeared in the 1997 film Robinson Crusoe, playing Patrick Conner. Lewis also appeared in Jonathan Kent's production of Hamlet, playing Laertes opposite Ralph Fiennes' Hamlet. This production was seen by Steven Spielberg, who subsequently cast Lewis as Richard Winters in the HBO/BBC World War II miniseries Band of Brothers, his first role of several that required a credible American accent.

Subsequently, Lewis has played Soames Forsyte in the ITV series The Forsyte Saga (later shown as a Masterpiece Theatre miniseries), which earned him rave reviews and further exposed him to a US audience. He returned to the US to star in Dreamcatcher, a Stephen King film about a man who becomes possessed by an evil alien. The character is American but when possessed he takes on a British accent.

On the heels of this role, he starred in Keane as a Manhattanite with a fragile mental state who is searching for his missing daughter. Despite the film's poor box-office performance, the role won Lewis rave reviews.

He played Jeffrey Archer in the satirical TV special Jeffrey Archer: The Truth. Since 2004, he has appeared in a number of films, as well as the 2005 BBC TV adaptation of Shakespeare's comedy Much Ado About Nothing, as part of the ShakespeaRe-Told season. Lewis played the role of Yassen Gregorovich in the film Stormbreaker.

In 2006 he appeared in Stephen Poliakoff's BBC drama Friends and Crocodiles. On 10 November 2006, 1 May 2009, 18 November 2010, and 27 April 2012, he was the guest host on BBC's Have I Got News For You.

In 2008, Lewis starred as the main character Charlie Crews in the US television series Life on NBC. The show premiered in the US on 26 September 2007 and was affected by the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike. Only half of the first season's shows were produced. Regardless, the show won a 2008 AFI Award for best television series. Although the show received critical acclaim, when it returned the following television season, it was shuffled from night to night. With its high production costs, the show was cancelled by NBC to clear its time slot for the much less expensive daily program The Jay Leno Show. Lewis appeared, the following year, in the lead role in The Baker, a film directed by his brother, Gareth Lewis, and also took the supporting role of Rizza in The Escapist, which he also helped produce.

Lewis led the cast in Martin Crimp's version of Molière's comedy, The Misanthrope, which opened in December 2009 at the Comedy Theatre, London. Other cast members included Tara FitzGerald, Keira Knightley and Dominic Rowan.

As of 2012, Lewis has a starring role as Sergeant Nicholas Brody in the Showtime psychological thriller series Homeland.

In 2014, he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE).

Personal Life[]

On 4 July 2007, Lewis married actress Helen McCrory; together they have a daughter, Manon (born 8 September 2006), and a son, Gulliver (born 2 November 2007). They lived in Tufnell Park and Los Angeles. In April 2021, McCrory died following a long battle with cancer.

Official Account[]

Behind the Scenes[]

Damian Lewis has appeared as Nicholas Brody in 30 episodes of Homeland.

Comments[]

“Brody is not a hero.” –Damian Lewis

“I loved playing Brody. I’m extremely proud of who we all created together. I think he’s a tragic hero for our time. He himself embodies a cautionary tale, going right back to the beginning, about sending young men to war and the damage it can do. - Damian Lewis

Fascinating, interesting and exhausting. I feel added responsibility when portraying real-life conditions because they’re people out there living with these conditions and you owe it to them to represent it honestly. There’s the added burden of trying to get it right and not letting a community of people down… You want to represent them faithfully - Damian Lewis

Showrunner Alex Gansa has admitted that Brody’s season one story arc was supposed to end with the capitve-turned-Congressman wearing a suicide vest, and pushing the button. And then ker-boom.

''Brody suffers from PTSD. Carrie has a bipolar condition. These guys are both damaged people. They have clinical conditions, which manifest themselves in the same way, in many sorts of different behavioral ways. These two also have both been in a war zone. They’re like two broken-winged birds sort of hobbling and circling around each other. And they both are destructive for each other. Carrie should not be sleeping with the potential enemy, and Brody should not be sleeping with the one person who he knows could really humble him and who’s clearly more intuitive than everybody else. It’s sort of a madness. And actually, it’s testament to the writing that it is at all plausible because it is kind of ridiculous as a premise. But Claire is so enjoyable and so brilliant and nuanced at what she does that somehow we’ve made it credible.

And I think the reason it’s credible is you keep reminding yourself of how damaged they are. There is a recognition between these two that she struggles to find with any other man. And Brody, when he returns to his family, struggles to reconnect with Jessica because they’ve had two very different experiences. With Carrie, there is that recognition. And I think it’s a brilliant conceit — as much of a stretch as it might seem — it’s a brilliant conceit to have the romantic or emotional constantly subverting and getting in the way of what they are both trying to achieve professionally. So they are each other’s worst enemy. And they have this extraordinary magnetism they feel between each other at the same time, and so they can’t keep their hands of each other. To me, you find in season two that it’s not just about rock-and-roll sexual encounters, swinging from the chandeliers. It’s a real need; there is a real tenderness that develops, at times. Will they be happy together? Can they be together, these two? Or, you know, is Brody going to get shot?''

- Damian Lewis.

Lewis says that Brody, a prisoner of war who returns after eight years of captivity, comes home deeply affected by the man most responsible for his detention, who becomes both a captor and a father figure: "I think Nicholas Brody is made unstable by that relationship. And so he's a confused soul. While his impulses might be defendable, his – his action is not. So there's a lot going on with Brody, but I try to ground him in what's essentially an abusive relationship with this father figure."

Brody, upon his return, almost instantly raises the suspicions of Danes' character, Carrie Mathison, a CIA analyst who, as Lewis puts it, is "brilliant, maverick, dynamic, intuitive, but is also driven to a point of, I suppose you might say, selfishness and obsessiveness." Mathison finds that her suspicions aren't taken all that seriously, a problem that's compounded by the fact that she's been diagnosed bipolar. Carrie represents a sort of fundamental conflict, he says, in that she "sometimes is hard to like, but represents the hope for security."

While Lewis is hesitant to make too much of political themes in what he says "is, at the end of the day, a sit-on-the-edge-of-your-seat thriller," he does acknowledge that there's something about Brody's broken state that speaks to things that really happen in the world. "I think Brody does represent ... a picture of a young man who is victimized, who is damaged brutally by war, and therefore he is a comment on war and what we risk by sending young men to war." - Linda Holmes

Appearances[]

Season 1
Pilot	Grace	Clean Skin	Semper I	Blind Spot
The Good Soldier	The Weekend	Achilles Heel	Crossfire	Representative Brody
The Vest	Marine One

Season 2
The Smile	Beirut is Back	State of Independence	New Car Smell	Q&A
A Gettysburg Address	The Clearing	I'll Fly Away	Two Hats	Broken Hearts
In Memoriam	The Choice

Season 3
"Tin Man Is Down"	"Uh... Oh... Ah..."	Tower of David	"Game On"	"The Yoga Play"
"Still Positive"	"Gerontion"	A Red Wheelbarrow	One Last Thing	Good Night
Big Man in Tehran	The Star