Quotes By Damian Lewis

I'm always forming bands.

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

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.

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

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.

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?'

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Dramatically it's always more interesting to conceal rather than reveal things.

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.

I'd feel guilty just doing gags.

I want to make a clear distinction between people who take acting seriously and people who call themselves actors because they've been on reality TV or something.

You just have to take control of your own performance.

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.

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.'

I think you can't be really posh and be an interesting actor. I'm a bit of a posh rough.

My heroes were all in the theatre.

A cricket ball broke my nose when I was a kid so I couldn't breath through it. Before I had it operated on I used to stand on stage with my mouth slightly open.

I've always been a narcissist.

I'm one of those pesky Brits.

I think people like to be scared. I think people like tension and suspense in a movie.

No Western government has ever played the long-term in terms of foreign policy.

For me the rehearsal period is the part I most enjoy. It's the creating of the story.