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This show brıngs out the anımal in me!
Wolf Of Wall Street? Damian Lewis says he’s based his gloriously wicked Billions character on a far more dangerous creature...
You have to take your hat off to Damian Lewis for his uncanny ability to pick a winner. After his Golden Globe-winning performance as tortured marine Nicholas Brody in three series of brilliant spy thriller Homeland, he gave an acclaimed turn as a swaggering young Henry VIII in BBC2’s Wolf Hall, then decided to return to our screens last year in Sky Atlantic’s explosive Wall Street drama Billions.
Taking on the role of flashy, ruthless, morally bankrupt hedge fund king Bobby Axelrod was a huge departure, and a huge gamble, for Damian. But yes, once again, the show has been a big hit both here and in America. It earned the highest ratings ever for an opening episode on the Showtime channel when it aired in the States, and became the most downloaded series from Sky Box Sets here in Britain.
Today, when we meet in a hotel overlooking Manhattan’s Central Park, Damian admits that after Homeland he’d been wary of tempting fate by going into another series quite so soon. ‘It’s always satisfying to be in anything that’s at all successful,’ he says. ‘I was proud of Homeland, the storytelling was excellent and I enjoyed the people I worked with, so all in all it was one of the most satisfying work experiences I’ve ever had. But to follow that by going into another potentially long-running series was not a decision I took lightly.
‘There was no conscious decision to get away from Brody in this role, but Bobby Axelrod is a very different character,’ he adds. ‘I think it’s only when you finally step outside a character like Brody that you become aware that maybe the whole world sees you as that character, so you instinctively choose something different next time. People stop me in the street and call me by my characters’ names. I take it as a compliment, but it’s nice they don’t all call me by just the one name. They say, “Hey, Bobby!” now as well as, “Hey, Brody!”’
Billions, an intoxicating mix of greed and glamour shot through with waspish one-liners and liberal doses of sex, had viewers hooked from the start. Axelrod, outwardly a philanthropic billionaire, is secretly not averse to a little insider trading to increase his firm’s enormous wealth. He’s locked in a game of cat and mouse with Paul Giamatti’s shrewd US Attorney Chuck Rhoades, who goes after Axelrod when evidence of the billionaire’s financial shenanigans turns up.
Caught in the middle is Rhoades’ wife Wendy, played by Maggie Siff, a psychiatrist who works for Bobby as the in-house performance coach and helped him build up his company long before her husband became US Attorney. She’s torn between these two alpha males, supportive of her hus- band’s quest for justice yet unwilling to leave a job she loves. She’s no prude either – she and Rhoades have a penchant for S&M, while her closeness to Bobby saw them take a skinny- dip together. The first series ended with Wendy snapping under the pressure of being manipulated by both men, kicking her husband out for stealing private records off her laptop to get the dirt on Bobby, and quitting her job after Bobby threatened to destroy her for spilling his secrets. Series two picks up a few weeks later, with both men grieving the temporary departure of Wendy from their lives. But they’re at each other’s throats immediately when Bobby fi les a lawsuit against Rhoades citing unlawful harassment. ‘Bobby is coming to the realisation that Chuck isn’t going to go away,’ says Damian. ‘For the whole of season one he was on the defensive, but this season he
lays it out pretty clearly: “It’s me or Rhoades – and Rhoades has to go.”
‘Bobby’s brought in new personnel to make sure from now on everything he does is transparent. He files the lawsuit saying, “You harassed me, there weren’t legitimate grounds for your investigation into my company”, and as a result Chuck is investigated by his own team. And so the tables are turned.’
Trying to adopt a new squeakyclean image doesn’t come easy to Bobby though. ‘He’s trying to play by the rules and it doesn’t suit him,’ says Damian. ‘Let’s face it, playing by the rules can be dull and Bobby likes to play fast and loose – it’s much more exciting. He believes winning is the most important thing there is – that it doesn’t matter how you win, just that you win. I like that about him. I like his swagger, the fact he’s made something of himself despite his blue-collar roots. I suppose the little bit of badness in me likes the badness in Bobby! Having said that, it’s easy to exude animalistic power when you’re sitting in a swimming pool with the gorgeous Maggie Siff. But the relationship is not like the one between Brody and Carrie in Homeland, where you were thinking, “Are they going to kill each other or sleep with each other?” Bobby and Wendy have a complicated relationship although I don’t get the impression they’re going to end up between the sheets. But I could be wrong.’
Different as they’ve all been, Damian’s characters all share a distinct physical presence. ‘I was a keen sportsman as a child and I’ve always been aware that you need a certain athleticism to take to the stage,’ he says. ‘I was trained as a theatre actor and I find acting very much a physical endeavour. It’s different on TV but it still expresses itself. When I take on any role I always base the character on an animal. For Bobby I see him as athletic and prowling, so I use a leopard as my model there.’
He’s quite a sexy leopard too, as various steamy love scenes between Bobby and his wife Lara, played by Swedish-born actress Ma lin Akerman, can attest. But he says there’s more to Lara than her blonde bombshell looks. ‘ I don’t know if you’ve noticed,’ he says with a sly smile, ‘but Malin happens to be one of the most beautiful women you’ll ever see. But the one thing we always said about Bobby’s wife is that, in spite of all his wealth and the fast cars, the yachts, the helicopter and the $83 million houses, we didn’t want him to have a trophy wife, we wanted to root him in a real relationship. We wanted to make it clear that Lara had grown up with Bobby, that she was blue-collar too – she used to be a nurse and came from a family of policemen and firefighters. She’s like him. They’re both alley cats and know how to scrap.’
Waiting at home in London is reall ife wife Helen McCrory, the redoubtable matriarch Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders who was awarded an OBE to match her husband’s in the recent New Year’s Honours list. They’ve been together for 14 years and married for nearly ten, and their union is famously rock solid. Helen has always said she’s not worried about her husband’s sex-symbol status. ‘Every wife wants to be with someone everyone finds attractive,’ she remarked recently, adding that her recipe for a happy marriage is Damian as Brody in Homeland with Claire
Danes as Carrie ‘marry someone you love and someone you like’. Damian clearly feels he’s done both. ‘Helen is more sensible and has much better taste than most people,’ he has told me in the past. ‘ We miss each other when we’re apart, and we’re very happy when we’re together. I’ve worked with some beautiful actresses in my time, but none has been as beautiful as my wife.’
In truth it’s amazing they find any time to be together at all, with both their careers currently in overdrive. Helen’s just been making ITV’s new thriller Fearless, written by Patrick Harbinson, the executive producer of Homeland, which is due to air later this year. She plays a lawyer trying to free a man she thinks was wrongly convicted of a girl’s murder, but who senses dark forces within the police and the security services trying to thwart her. Damian, meanwhile, has a five-month filming schedule on Billions in New York, during which he makes regular weekend commutes back to London. ‘We work it out but it’s hard,’ he says. ‘We all miss each other when we’re apart but my wife and I are still vain and ambitious enough to want to carry on working at the same time, so trying to make it all add up is quite something.’
Certainly when he’s home he’s a celebrity around Tufnell Park in north London where he and Helen live with their two children, daughter Manon, ten, and son Gulliver, nine. But that can have its downsides. ‘Was I fully prepared for the negative aspects that come with success? No, I wasn’t. Do I choose to deal with those negative aspects? Yes, I do. Do I always deal with them well? No, I don’t. Sometimes you’re running late, you can be with your kids or you dropped your change, and someone wants a photograph. Sometimes you have to say, “Look, you just have to stop and look at the picture in front of you here. I’m carrying three bags, I’ve got a dog and two children under 11, and I’m clearly running for a train. So you don’t get the photo, I’m so sorry.” That’s just part of my life now. But it could be worse, I’m not a politician. If I was hoping to get someone’s vote I’d have to stop.’
He says he and Helen are trying to bring up their children not to be spoiled. ‘If they clean the chimney well they get 50p,’ he remarks, deadpan. ‘But seriously, Helen and I do teach them that you have to work to live, which is a helpful explanation
‘I wasn’t fully prepared for the negative side of fame’
when I’m walking out of the door full of guilt because I’m not going to see them for three weeks. I haven’t really introduced them to the concept of money, but I try to make the equation simpler by explaining that Daddy going to work equals a nice holiday and Christmas presents. But we don’t think money is very important. As long as there’s enough for a couple of holidays, to pay the school fees, go to the theatre and eat in nice restaurants, we’re happy.’
Damian had a rather privileged upbringing himself. His father, Watcyn Lewis, was a City insurance broker and his mother Charlotte, the daughter of Sir Ian Bowater, a former Lord Mayor of London, was a debutante who was presented to the Queen at The Dorchester. But tragedy struck when she was killed in a road accident while holidaying with her husband in India when Damian was 30. His father had to drag his mother from beneath the vehicle. Damian rarely speaks about this, although when he won the Golden Globe for his performance in Homeland in 2013 he dedicated it to his mother, and he once said in an interview that his mother’s death was ‘the single most important thing that’s happened to me in my life. Father was with her. It was a terrible, terrible thing to happen to him.’
As for whether his children will follow their father to boarding school – Damian attended Ashdown House prep school in Sussex and then Eton – he says that’s yet to be determined. ‘They
may eventually, but I wouldn’t have sent them as early as I was sent, which was at the age of eight. I think some very good things happen to young boys and girls when they go through boarding school. You learn team ethos quickly and you learn to adapt to any situation, which has given me confidence through life. But that was at 13. I think it’s a lot to ask of an eight-year-old to cope away from home, although for my parents’ generation it was second nature to send us.
‘My father was nine when he was evacuated during the Blitz. He was put on a boat to Canada and didn’t see his parents for three years. So for that generation the thought that their children were going to go away for three weeks and then come home for a weekend, it was no big deal. But for my little ones, eight was a bit too young.’
On the other hand, he says he thoroughly enjoyed his time at Ashdown. ‘It was in the countryside with woods and fields and lots of outdoor time. Muddy knees, tie under your ear, snot running down your nose – it was a bit more scruffy than today’s schools. I’m thankful for those five years there at that age because it was a bit wild and you could just tear around.’
Sounds like it’s stood him in good stead for playing Bobby Axelrod. Billions, Tuesday, 9pm, Sky Atlantic.