musings about the actor and the characters he brings to life
This lovely picture tweeted by Michelle Blair a few years ago shows a group of young actors that were together in the 1998 London revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods at Donmar Warehouse.
Oh, yeah! Way earlier than being the big, bad wolf Henry in Wolf Hall, Damian Lewis was the Wolf in Into the Woods. Continue reading “Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis in Into The Woods”
Damian took a long break from stage – 6 years – after he did The Misanthrope with Keira Knightley and Tara Fitzgerald at Comedy Theatre in 2009. And three seasons of Homeland, a season of Wolf Hall, three movies, an Emmy and a Golden Globe later, in 2015, he made a wonderful comeback to West End as Walter “Teach Cole” in David Mamet’s American Buffalo which went into history as the first (and second) time I saw my favorite actor on stage. Continue reading “Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis in American Buffalo”
Wow, this pandemic, amirite? Depending on where you live you may be still hunkered down, resisting social gatherings, wearing masks whenever you go out. Maybe you’re somewhere where things are fully open and things are back to normal. For most of us, though, it’s certainly a new way of life. And, it may be with us much longer than anyone hoped it’d be.
Some of us are fortunate enough to have jobs that weren’t too affected, or actually took off, due to the nationwide lock down. (once folks can no longer mill around the water cooler in the office, they seem very keen to get stuff done. I sense in some industries, like tech, for example, productivity is at a record high) Too many of us haven’t been so lucky. And what about our artists, the stories that we need to watch, the performances that entertain and sustain us? Obviously they have been affected in a major way. Those in Damian’s profession are still learning how to get their work running again.
Continue reading “Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis as Oedipus Rex: Archetype of a King”
To be filed in the category of “This is a guy who makes you want to go back to school”, we learned and reported (on our lovely sister site damian-lewis.com) that Damian’s version of Antony’s funeral speech from Julius Caesar, for The Guardian’s video series Shakespeare Solos, was featured in a seminar on rhetoric. This wasn’t an avenue for literary criticism or drama theory, but a newsletter on effective public speaking.
How is speaking any different from writing and reading, you may wonder? Well, there are components to classical rhetoric, when dissected, can show you what makes one speech different from another. Such an analysis would reach your brain (or at least attempt to). Alternatively, we can talk about how a speech makes you feel. Granted we’re not seeing much great oratory from our current elder statesmen, so examples are few and far between. But, there was a time, wasn’t there? In our not too distant history, when a leader spoke, it did a heart good to hear, didn’t it?
Continue reading “A Lesson in Rhetoric: Damian Lewis as Antony”
Spot a certain ginger among a bunch of young actors playing in a celebrity football tournament around 1995/96!
It was Damian’s pal Jonsel Gourkan who tweeted the picture. Both he and Damian were playing football for Royal Shakespeare Company and it is clear from the tweet that the competition on the football field was real! Well, we all know Damian knows his footie, don’t we?
So how about traveling back to mid 1990s today and talk about young Damian being as serious about theatre as he was about football? Continue reading “Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis at the Royal Shakespeare Company”