Homeland actor Damian Lewis to return to the London stage in American Buffalo

The actor said he has been planning his return to the West End stage for a few years
Come back: Damian will return to the stage in American Buffalo (Picture: Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for BFI)
Louise Jury12 December 2014
The Weekender

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Award-winning Homeland star Damian Lewis is returning to the London stage - but admits he has battled for two years to make it happen.

The actor, whose last play was The Misanthrope in 2009 with Keira Knightley, will star in David Mamet’s dark drama American Buffalo in the spring.

He said it was “one of the great plays of the 20th century by one of the great living playwrights” and “a play I really wanted to do”.

But it was “a minor miracle” that they had pulled it off because theatre was booming. “It is more difficult to find a theatre, book a director, line all the ducks up in a row to get something on,” he said.

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“I’ve tried about three or four times in the last couple of years and things have fallen apart. With theatre, you have to plan almost a year in advance. But we got lucky - a theatre was available.”

Lewis, 43, will play Teach - the role taken by Dustin Hoffman in the 1996 film - in the story of three working-class small-time crooks.

It will be directed by Daniel Evans, whom he has known since training at the Guildhall in London. Lewis conceded that he, an old Etonian, and Evans, a gay Welshman, were not “on the face of it natural fits” for the story of blue-collar desperation: “It’s a big challenge, of course, but that is what is attractive about it. My experience in life is not that of these guys in the play.”

Yet, he said: ”When I play Americans, I tend to play lower American types for whatever reason.”

Having won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his role as Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody in Homeland, his new TV series is Billions in which he plays a self-made man - though he does work his way up to be a hedge fund manager. He will be filming alongside Paul Giamatti, as a district attorney, before and after his West End run.

Going on stage was “always terrifying, but terrifying in a good way,” Lewis added.

He grew up in theatre and met his wife, Helen McCrory, at the AlmeidaL “Television and film have been a lovely big sort of accident. But I quickly learned what wonderful projects there were to work on if you were lucky enough to be invited. So theatre has taken a bit of a back seat.”

But he said this seemed a good project for “the tough times we’ve been in for the last few years. This is a play that has a real working-class voice”.

American Buffalo will run at Wyndham’s Theatre from April 16 to June 27. Tickets on sale today at americanbuffalo.co.uk

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