Quotes By Damian Lewis

I'm no more or less antisocial than the next person.

You have to go where the good writing is.

Producing is a world of compromise and actors are utterly spoiled all the time.

Seeing a man praying to Allah is enough for some people to assume he is a terrorist.

If you only do issue-based drama, you can become a boring wanker.

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.

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.

There are lots of different reasons to choose roles.

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.

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

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.'

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.

My heroes were all in the theatre.

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

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.

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

I love playing sport.

In England we burnt redheads at the stake, because we thought they were witches. There are still young redheads in Britain getting ripped for having red hair. 'Oy, Ginger!'

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'm always forming bands.

In the end, there's something of the puritan work ethic about me that roles really must sustain me on an intellectual level.

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.

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'm not an American, but I have this weird connection to America in different ways through my dad living here for five years, my godfather being an American who I'm very close to.

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.

I've discovered just how symbiotic the relationship is between writers, directors and actors. They ask the same questions and strip down texts in exactly the same way.

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

My parents were incredibly inclusive.