Quotes By Damian Lewis

You know what it's like to feel anxious - it's horrible feeling anxious. It's stressful having that feeling, having butterflies in your stomach, even for a day, and you don't sleep at night.

Acting can be a narrow and isolated experience, because you only examine your particular part.

Writing and directing might be a red herring, and really I'm just re-examining what it is to act, to do it well and do it properly.

Of course the lower classes have always felt downtrodden and aspired to a better life. But there is this theory that people respond to a class structure in England - there was a time when people knew who they were and knew whom they served and as long as management wasn't abusive, it was a good life for people.

There are lots of different reasons to choose roles.

What I do believe in is the moral code of Christianity.

It's good to be busy on a film set because there is a lot of sitting around, so if you've got two roles to play at one time, then that's great to do.

The lesson I learned is that sometimes the task you have at hand needs all of your concentration and focus.

I was, if you like, a successful schoolboy in that I had a degree of talent in all the required things that make you a success at school.

Why do you think so many actors are only half-developed people? It's very easy when you're a young actor to have these intense, explosive friendships for short periods of time, because you can control what's shown of you. Then you go on to your next job and reinvent yourself again. I think it's important to find something constant.

I'm a slow starter.

I don't mean this grandly, but it was never my intention to live in L.A. and do a big network show.

When I'm working in America, I wake up with an American accent and stay with it all day till makeup comes off. I just want everyone to be at ease, and not have the show's creators think, 'Oh my god, he's so English, why did we hire him?'

A lot of these American actors have this - in my view - misplaced view that they have to look like Action Man. The trouble is, they all run the risk of being interchangeable.

I love playing sport.

I'm always forming bands.

I've done classical theaters. I played Hamlet myself and Romeo.

I love going for a swim. Growing up in England, anywhere with a pool seems like the height of glamour to me.

You know, this idea of going around the world imposing democracy by growing a middle-class, a trading merchant class that is independent of your faith, is a good notion, but we're all partially different - it's no good imposing systems on people that it doesn't suit.

You have to go where the good writing is.

It's certainly true that I was brought up in that British amateur tradition, the one which always held that if you were reasonably good at cricket, knew one or two Latin texts and a few zingy Oscar Wilde quotes for dinner parties, you were pretty much ready to go and run some outpost in Hindustan.

I guess I'm just good at playing repressed individuals. I'm lucky because those are often the roles that catch people's eyes.

I've had loss in my life, and I like to think my mother's energy lives on in some faintly Buddhist way. I do find some comfort there.

It's an unfair comparison because when things are developed in the UK, they're developed at script stage only.

Temperamentally I'm not a natural producer, because I don't have the patience.

L.A. still ranks as one of my guilty pleasures, along with butter-pecan ice cream and Coldplay albums.

Quiet people, people who aren't given to emotional outbursts, people who are economic with words - they're also fun to play, but you find yourself needing a laser precision in those roles. Otherwise you just sort of stand around, looking slightly brain-dead. You worry about being uninteresting.

I don't believe Jesus was the son of God, although I'm inclined to think he might have been a great prophet.

You can't do something that is morally vacuous or dysfunctional and then write it off saying, 'It wasn't my film, I was just doing a job in it.'

There are ways of avoiding becoming tabloid fodder and therefore giving people license to pry into your private life. And there's a distinction between being an actor and being a celebrity. You may become a celebrity through acting, but you don't need to do so.