Press Pack Q&A - DAMIAN LEWIS: SPY WARS

Roundtable Q&A transcript with Damian Lewis

How involved were you in choosing the stories?

There were some stories we (Rookery Productions, Alaska TV and HISTORY) started but couldn’t finish, so we had to find new stories. That's because it became clear that we weren't going to get the interviewees that we needed to get the story to the right place. Some had agreed to do it and then fell out, there was an Official Secrets Act situation.

After that my involvement was really to do with the pieces to camera, where I'm there talking to the audience, helping to script those a little bit, make sure we have the right sorts of locations for those, and really with my brother Gareth and the guys at Alaska TV just making sure that...sometimes with these kind of factual series you come out to a presenter and the presenter's entirely removed from the world. And I wanted to be integrated into the narrative of the piece, so it felt a little less jarring coming to me as the presenter. And so, each of our stories has a different set, and you'll find me on a different set (in London) and we've done it quite successfully actually. You create your set, you create your illusion and we've done that as well as we can. So, it just means that when you come to me there's a sense that I'm part of the world. That is something I insisted on actually, because I don't think I've seen that before in quite the same way. For me, the presenting bit is something that I wasn't versed in, so it was a way of integrating me into the main thrust of the narrative.

Did you enjoy the presenting side of it?

It was interesting. I enjoyed telling the story. From a performative or creative point of view it's not the same as playing Hamlet or Nicholas Brody or Bobby Axelrod, they're very different things, but it was very much part of the package of telling the story and enjoying sharing the story with the world. There are people who are brilliant at it like Michael Palin. 

Part of the process was you learned - was that from a craft point of view as how you present or a producer's side?

As soon as you put yourself in front of a camera, or in front of an audience, as a performer, there's a whole intricate web of thoughts that run through your head. How you want to be presented and how can you successfully be a credible part of your show - your story - whatever it is, and we had to work quite quickly. I was flying in and out of New York from Billions and doing these days, we had a budget, obviously, we had to be aware of. From a craft point of view presenting it was trying to take the curse off 'The News at 10' aspect of it, you know, a journalist walking towards camera with his thumb and forefinger together talking about what's going on in the building behind me.....