Wolf Hall’s Damian Lewis: the man who would be king

WOLF HALL

Premieres Sunday, April 5, PBS

Where would British acting be without all those cruelly maligned posh boys to brighten it up? Benedict Cumberbatch is in absolutely everything, Eddie Redmayne, has a Golden Globe and an Oscar fresh under his arm, and upcoming is Damian Lewis in the most anticipated TV drama for years.

The 43- year- old Old Etonian plays Henry VIII in Wolf Hall, the BBC’s $ 20- million adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s two bestselling novels about the machinations of the Tudor court. Lewis’s portrayal of the king is a striking contrast to the blubbery, mutton bone- tossing caricature of Henry, just as Mantel’s central character, Thomas Cromwell, is eloquently reclaimed from the image of the low- born, duty- burdened thug.

Slender he may be, but Lewis recognizes his broader qualifications for the role. “I think there’s no question,” he told the Radio Times in a recent interview, “that it helps having had the kind of schooling that I’ve had, to play a king. Just the way, the sort of court structures, the hierarchies, the way they ’re set up. It’s something I feel I implicitly understand.”

Privilege is horribly out of fashion these days, and it takes a certain bravado to admit to cashing in on it. At the same time, there are obvious perils in trying to be something you’re not. Born into a wealthy family of illustrious lineage, Lewis, as one interviewer wrote, “has the kind of class credentials that make Hugh Grant look like a reform school oik.” To pretend otherwise would be, well — acting.

Yet beyond his early TV breakthrough as Soames Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga, Lewis has been noticeably sparing in his embrace of upper- class roles. He has dulled his diction and widened his range, but not entirely avoided the perils. Last year he annoyed Ian McKellen by saying that he didn’t want to end up as “one of those slightly over- the- top, fruity actors” who finish their careers “playing wizards.” McKellen curtly replied: “No one needs to feel sorry for me, or anyone else who has fallen victim to success.”

The challenge in playing Wolf Hall’s Henry is to make the character both familiar and different. The king, at least before the psycho- drama of Anne Boleyn’s destruction, comes across as a far smarter, more optimistic and resolute figure than the semicomic monarch of popular culture. Cromwell, too — his deadly, mostly mysterious consigliere — emerges as a complex if biddable brain around which the whole Tudor enterprise revolves.

“Now is the time for you to become king,” Cromwell informs his master.

“I keep you because you are a serpent,” is Henry ’s reply. “Everything that you are, everything that you have, will come from me.”

This was never going to be an ordinary role. Lewis claims to have read his history, and if he hadn’t, the hands- on Mantel would have filled him in.

“I think we all have this understanding that he was this womanizing, syphilitic, bloated, genocidal Elvis character,” says Lewis. “I see in Henry nothing psychotic. I don’t see a psychopath. But I think I do see a sociopath, someone who is capable of great love, great affection and I think he craved that.”

There seems to have been no doubt that Lewis would become an actor, since the days of performing in his bedroom mirror at the age of 10. He was born in London, the son of Watcyn Lewis, a successful insurance broker, and his wife Charlotte. His maternal grandfather had been Lord Mayor of London, and further down the ancestral line was Viscount Dawson of Penn, an eminent physician who euthanized King George V with an injection of morphine and cocaine.

Home was an echo of a bygone age. He was obliged to knock on the sitting room door and await permission to enter if his father was inside. “Ha! My kids don’t do that,” he says. “But I believe in good manners and structure, and sometimes a bit of formality. I believe in honour.”

After prep school and Eton, Damian enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and for years worked as a stage actor. One night he was playing in a production of Hamlet, when Steven Spielberg joined the audience. The upshot was a part in the director’s acclaimed Second World War miniseries Band of Brothers.

American audiences quickly took to him, as he quickly took to film work, and some of his best work has been in Homeland, the award-laden political/ spy thriller.

He has been married for eight years to the actress Helen McCrory, with whom he has a son and a daughter.

He hints that at heart he is happiest back in Britain, doing British stuff. It doesn’t get any more homegrown than Henry.