-
Producing is a world of compromise and actors are utterly spoiled all the time.
-
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.
-
If you believe - which I do - that acting is a bit like advocacy for your character, then of course I want to find the positive points.
-
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.
-
It's important to have a big-enough house in order to have space.
-
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 am Damian Lewis, not Daniel Day-Lewis.
-
I think people like to be scared. I think people like tension and suspense in a movie.
-
I'd feel guilty just doing gags.
-
I have a three-year-old and a four-year-old at home, and my mornings are about just dealing with the fact of that. I oddly enjoy it.
-
I grew up in London, one of four children. We were a very loud family, not a lot of listening, plenty of talking. My mum was a hearth mother: she loved to gather us all around her - Sunday lunches were a big thing. She was very good at thinking on her feet - people used to say she should go into politics.
-
The lesson I learned is that sometimes the task you have at hand needs all of your concentration and focus.
-
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.
-
It's sad that children don't spend enough time looking around and being amazed by what's in the real world.
-
I'm always forming bands.
-
I've always been a narcissist.
-
I guess I'm just good at playing repressed individuals. I'm lucky because those are often the roles that catch people's eyes.
-
All you should try to do is behave with honour. If you can. At all times.
-
There's this sort of cloud that hangs where people are like: 'How long can you keep the heat of 'Homeland' going?' People have short memories is the truth, and Hollywood loves the new and shiny.
-
My wife has a horror the children will start talking American if we spend too much time out there.
-
I remember, when I was doing 'Nicholas Nickleby', James Archer came to see me at the interval and said, 'My father would like to see you after the show.' It felt rather as if I had been summoned by the Queen, and I was cocky enough to think, 'Who the hell is he to summon me?'
-
There are jobs that come along in your life, if you're lucky enough, that elevate you in a considerable way. And 'Homeland' was definitely one of those jobs.
-
It's constantly fascinating for me that something that feels absolutely right one year, 12 months later feels like the wrong thing to do.
-
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.'