musings about the actor and the characters he brings to life
Looks like May is Damian’s month in the UK! With the start of Billions on Sky Atlantic and now the premier of the long awaited thriller Our Kind of Traitor, our guy has been everywhere! There is certainly great talent on board with Ewan MacGregor, Stellan Skarsgard, Naomie Harris, and, of course, Damian Lewis in the role of curmudgeonly British intelligence fixer Hector Meredith.
Continue reading “Our Kind of Traitor: Premiers Today May 13 in UK”
From the opening scene of the birds eye view over lower Manhattan to the closing credits of every episode, you know that music is very important to the show runners behind Billions. The underlying score, a sort of industrial ambient techno riff and drone, is composed by Los Angeles based electronic musician Eskmo. The general mood set by the score is one of dramatic tension and urgency. Like, what the heck are these people going to do next, is the thought the music puts into your head.
Peppered throughout nearly every episode are carefully curated tracks. chosen for the way they match a scene or a mood or a character, or simply because the show creators really dig the music and wanted to make a place for it in their creation. We get to hear an eclectic mix of hip-hop, techno, pop, Italian pop, alt-pop, alt-country, punk and metal. From classic rock to classic punk to classic motown. I think that’s it, but I probably missed some! They cover it all!
This post is the result of my binging all 12 episodes again, this time with Shazam in hand to identify all the musical bits I didn’t already know. Just as each of the 12 episodes had a unique core strength to them, so do the selection of songs backing them up. Whether the music is straight up mood inducer or meant as an ironic statement, there’s nary a dud in the bunch.
As we reported in March, BBC series Wolf Hall was dealt the most nominations for BAFTA Craft and TV Awards. At the BAFTA TV Awards portion of the event in London on May 8, we saw this excellent series take home the well-deserved prize for Best Drama! And leaving with the honor of Best Actor was Mark Rylance for his flawless portrayal of Thomas Cromwell.
Continue reading “Wolf Hall WINS BAFTA for Best Drama, Mark Rylance WINS for Best Actor”
In the talk with Stacey Wilson Hunt at SAG-AFTRA Foundation last week, it is notable that Damian never had straight up formulaic answers for any of the excellent questions asked by the interviewer. He seemed to put some real thought into all his answers. Something struck out as requiring further exploration from that interview. When asked about the best advice he’d been given as an actor, Damian turned it around into a story of his biggest professional regret. Damian tells us that he was once offered a major role in a major Shakespeare production to be staged at the very major National Theatre by, as you can imagine, an appropriately superlative artistic director. In sharing this story, he provided a perfect instance of the notion that our biggest lessons come from our biggest mistakes.
Creativity is a strange beast. At its narrowest definition, it is the skill of creating something original and new using nothing but one’s imagination. But that would exclude a lot of us from the act of creativity, wouldn’t it? How many of us are capable of conjuring up some idea, art, or thing completely from scratch? An impossible task, even for the creative geniuses among us. Nothing is truly original. It’s all about processing what has come before and presenting it in new and “creative” ways. “Creative problem solver” is one of those phrases you see on resumes a lot. Try telling a mathematician or a software engineer that what they do doesn’t involve creativity and you’re bound to get an earful in exacting detail of just how wrong you are. Thus, not an easy thing to get a handle on, creativity.
So desirous are we to learn about the elusive nature of creativity that we’ll watch and listen with bated breath when someone who has been successful at living life as a creative person has something to say about the process and the choices he’s made to get to where he is today. Thus we have Damian Lewis chatting at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation with New York Magazine’s Hollywood editor, Stacey Wilson Hunt, about his career as an actor.
Continue reading “Damian Talks Career and Craft at SAG-AFTRA”