Month: October 2025

REVIEW: Damian Lewis is Orwell in ‘Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5’

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” – George Orwell, 1984

I was lucky to attend a screening of Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 at the IFC Center in New York, followed by a Q&A with the film’s director, Raoul Peck. After seeing Damian’s recent Instagram post, I knew he was proud to be part of this project—and now I completely understand why. The documentary is timely, smart, and deeply inspiring.

But I do have one minor disagreement with Damian’s post. He says he is the voice of Orwell, but I would argue that he is Orwell in the film. I’ll explain more about that later. Continue reading “REVIEW: Damian Lewis is Orwell in ‘Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5’”

11 Years Ago Today: Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory at Cheltenham Literature Festival

source: gloucestershireecho.co.uk

11 years?!?! Whaaaat? It feels like yesterday.

I was very lucky to be there in the room when Damian and Helen read love poems to each other from The Love Book, a brilliant collection of classic and contemporary love poems that vary from Shakespeare to E.E. Cummings to Maya Angelou coming together in a book as well as in an app. It was a moving and intimate hour with a powerhouse husband and wife team reading poems, teasing each other, and sharing their dynamic chemistry with the audience.

It turns out that when the festival inquired about a possible video recording of the reading in 2014, Helen and Damian said no. Damian tells The Sunday Times:

Continue reading “11 Years Ago Today: Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory at Cheltenham Literature Festival”

Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis in Noël Coward’s London Calling! – A Centenary Celebration

London Calling! was the first musical revue thanks to which Noël Coward broke through as a song and sketch writer as well as a performer. The revue premiered at Duke of York’s Theatre in London on September 4, 1922. And Robert Hazle, a cabaret actor and musical director as well as the Cultural Development Officer at the Noël Coward Foundation has put on stage a centenary celebration of London Calling! at the very theatre it premiered hundred years ago on October 5, 2023. I was very lucky to be in the room during this hour-long, free, and sold out lunchtime performance and I am ready to tell you all about it! Continue reading “Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis in Noël Coward’s London Calling! – A Centenary Celebration”

Happy Birthday, Homeland (Or How Brody Turned My Life Upside Down)

Prologue

At a recent dinner party, we played a game where everyone had to talk about three things they thought changed their lives. I had two moments from my early life: one being the Live Aid concert back in July 1985 (I was 13!) that got me thrilled that the whole world, all of us, were watching it together, and the other was a political assassination of a journalist in Turkey in January 1992 (I was 20!) that taught me that a state can get rid of its citizens who insist on looking for the truth. And the third moment I mentioned was Homeland. Because I was a regular academic attending to my own thing until a certain “pesky Brit” disguised as an American POW showed up and turned everything upside down! Homeland made me a Damian Lewis fan for life and I launched a blog in his name almost a decade ago. Go, figure!

Homeland, the show that started it all, premiered on Showtime on October 2, 2011, exactly fourteen years ago today. Continue reading “Happy Birthday, Homeland (Or How Brody Turned My Life Upside Down)”