Lewis takes on le Carre
British actor Damian Lewis tells Stephanie Bunbury why he takes sole responsibility for the characters he plays.
BY his own reckoning, Damian Lewis is playing John le Carre. In Our Kind of Traitor he plays a disgruntled MI6 officer called Hector who has made it his personal mission to expose the tangled dealings between the Russian mafia and certain British men of influence, including his boss.
Every le Carre thriller has a version of that character, says Lewis. It’s him. ‘‘David Cornwell [le Carre’s real name] – it’s difficult to know what to call him, isn’t it? – is someone who strikes me as someone who always wanted to speak the truth to authority. But like many good le Carre characters, Hector is compromised.’’
Our Kind of Traitor, directed by British television director Susanna White, is the latest in the cavalcade of le Carre adaptations catering to our anxious age.
It centres ostensibly on a troubled couple (Ewan McGregor and Naomie Harris) who are on holiday when they meet a Russian consigliore (Stellan Skarsgard) who wants to trade his comprehensive figures on who paid what to whom for asylum in Britain for himself and his family.
He gives them a USB stick which they think they will be able just to turn over at the airport when they get home, but soon find themselves tangled up with Hector at MI6, dealing with the Mafioso Dima and his wife and a range of ruthless characters, some of them very close to home, who want that information and its sources suppressed.
It’s a good yarn, infused with Le Carre’s increasingly apocalyptic fury at the state of things, although it has been rather overshadowed at the global box office so far by the popularity of The Night Manager on television.
Espionage, like the present crop of British actors, is apparently a posh enclave.
The Night Manager starred Tom Hiddleston. Both Hiddleston and Damian Lewis went to Eton, alma mater to fellow actors Eddie Redmayne and Dominic West, the royal princes William and Harry and to roughly half the Conservative government’s front bench. Saga: Wolf Hall The Forsyte interview that he dreaded being stuck in theatre until he was over 50 and ‘‘one of those slightly overthe-top, fruity actors … playing wizards’’.
Sir Ian McKellen bit right back and Lewis apologised, but there were plenty of nasty mutterings afterwards about how Lewis was, when it came to it, just a television actor.
This is roughly true. Lewis came to prominence at 30 in Steven Spielberg’s HBO World War II miniseries Band of Brothers – for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe – and is now most famous as Nicholas Brody, the al-Qaeda convert in the compelling CIA drama Homeland.
Homeland has been a hit in 40 countries across the world, won Lewis an Emmy, is a favourite with United States President Barack Obama and has certainly pushed American television into areas that were hitherto unimaginable, making a terrorist and traitor into a sympathetic character.
Lewis has been at the forefront, in other words, of television’s current golden age; being ‘‘just a television actor’’ is no longer much of a put-down.
Homeland was also a personal success; Lewis became an unlikely sex symbol, proving so popular that plans to kill Brody off during the second series were abandoned.
The New York Times has editorialised about his character; Jay-Z namechecks Brody in a track called FUTW. There are those – including Lewis – who see him as the next James Bond. ‘‘I think it would be wonderful,’’ he told Esquire magazine. ‘‘Daniel’s doing an amazing job and he’ll continue to do it for a bit. But if it ever comes to that, I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.’’ Timing, he added, is everything.
Of course, it is not everything. One director after another comments on how hard Lewis works to establish a backstory, master an accent and do research. ‘‘Not only did he read books but he would send me emails in the middle of the night asking about the moral code of the character,’’ Sorkin says.
Lewis doesn’t think it merits any sort of notice. ‘‘That is my work; that is what I’m hired to do, make flesh what is on the page. And yes, of course I could just stand there and spout the words but . . .’’
All right, he concedes, perhaps there are actors who come to a film cold, putting their trust in the director. ‘‘But my experience is that directors are often very busy and so you must take responsibility for your own characters and I consider myself to be solely responsible for my characters. That’s important to me.’’
For Our Kind of Traitor, he visited former officers with MI6, the British intelligence service. ‘‘Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t you? Fascinating. You don’t get a lot out of them. But even though you’re not going to get the nuts and bolt of security protocol you are going to get anecdotal stuff because I think they quite like an excuse to talk about it if they can."
One former MI6 officer he didn’t visit, however, was David Cornwell, aka John le Carre. ‘‘I didn’t talk to him once.’’ Even though he came on set at least once; he plays a little cameo in the film. ‘‘I didn’t talk to him. I had read an adaptation of his most recent novel on radio and got a nice note from him saying, ‘Well read, that was fantastic’. But no, I have spent more time with his sons, who were heavily involved in producing.’’
He actually thinks Hector embodies ‘‘some selfmythologising’’ on Cornwell’s part. ‘‘Hector the lone wolf, the mysterious romantic figure who can quote Polish philosophers and speak the truth to authority and sets himself aside.’’
This may be the first faintly disparaging thing anyone has ever said in public about the gentlemanly le Carre. I’m quite shocked. Perhaps only Brody could get away with it. — Fairfax ● Our Kind of Traitor (R13) is out now
‘ That is my work; that is what I’m hired to do, make flesh what is on the page.’ DAMIAN LEWIS