Look, I'm not saying Damian's a stalker.
This is Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory.
Celebrated pasttimes include:
Being bougie douchebags,
Talking about how much they don't like to talk about their relationship,
Talking about their relationship,
Showing up for everything ever looking like they just banged in the car on the way over,
Smiling beatifically in front of photographers as Damian fondles Helen's breast,
Public cosplay...
...
...
And generally being adorable and wretched.
"Damian and I have separate interests. I don't care if Liverpool win or lose. Nor could I explain any of the cricket scoring. Damian is very sporty. I watched him play football for England at Old Trafford in a celebrity game against the Rest of the World; I turned the air blue."
"People talk about settling down; there's nothing settling down about it, love. We've moved country three times, we've sold two houses, bought a house, done about seven films, a series, four plays, had two kids. I'd just like the dust to settle."
She and Damian got to know another when they starred together in a terrible play at the Almeida called Five Gold Rings. The tempo of an otherwise sluggish evening, when I saw it, was raised mightily by a passionate scene between the two. In fact, she says, it wasn't for another year that they got together, although she refuses to be drawn on the details.
Off-stage, the pair have been leading a life of peaceful domesticity. "We've had such a lovely time. Damian's taken time off and we've been to Wales, Cornwall, Dorset, Paris and Spain, and gone to galleries and the ballet, and sat in the garden and read, and cooked, and just had an amazing few months. ..." Which explains the caramel tan and the general blissed-out air. "We've completely and utterly, as my grandmother says, stepped out together."
"I very much respect the institution of marriage," he goes on in his mildly pontificating way, "and the only way to maintain a long-term relationship with someone, in my view, is simply to continue to find them delightful."
"It's not that painful, soul-searching love you might have had at 21 in some crappy six-month relationship, it's about there being the potential for that moment when you steal a glance at that person and suddenly find it, well, delightful -- the way they look out of the window ... or indeed, wash themselves in the shower. I think the reason people have affairs is because they're trying to recreate that six-month honeymoon period."
"Well, how about creating that with just the one person?"
McCrory and Lewis seem as well grounded as it is possible to be when you're one half of a famous couple who divide their time between north London and Los Angeles. There are flourishes of luvviness -- "darlings" and enthusiastic swearing with a cut-glass accent -- yet they are clearly devoted to each other.
"Doesn't Mummy look lovely?"
Helen McCrory reveals what Damian Lewis said to their five-month-old daughter, Manon, of her Robert Cavalli dress.
"I don't date a certain type of woman. I'm attracted to humour, beauty -- although, that's in the eyes of the beholder -- and grace. Movement in a woman is very important to me. A woman must be elegant. But wit and intelligence are must-haves."
"Nobody wants to marry someone nobody else wants! It's part of his job, and it's part of my job as well. Damian doesn't mind; he just puts the flowers in the back of the car and drives home. We understand where it comes in life. It's because people project on to you; some people are like that."
"A natural part of aging is discovering your limitations, and it's painful. It's taken me quite a long time to realise I have any. They've never become apparent." -- Damian Lewis
The couple met in 2004, playing lovers in Joanna Laurens’s Five Gold Rings at the Almeida, but she has never seen his best-known performances in Band of Brothers or The Forsyte Saga. “And he’s never seen any of my stuff.” She shrugs. “Neither of us minds.”
She was persuaded, however, to make six guest appearances in Life, playing a sophisticated security expert - “very Veronica Lake, all cigarettes and stockings” - and being amused by the horror of the set as she routinely cheeked and abused its star. “I'm sure they kept thinking, ‘Who is this bloody rude woman?’ But Damian and I take the piss out of each other all the time."
"I used to be really ignorant about film. I didn't know anything about film culture or film actors and I still haven't seen many of the great movies. Damian's a great film buff and he really introduced me to them. I suppose a part of me thought my ignorance was slightly charming, but actually it's my job and I should bloody know them. We watch a lot of stuff now. The more I see, the more I appreciate it, and the more I'm excited about being involved in it."
"I still feel overdressed whenever I go on set. I keep going to work wearing jeans and a T-shirt and my co-star Sarah [Shahi] will go" 'Wow! You dressed up today,' to which I can only reply: 'No, it just seems that way because you're wearing pajamas, so stop being so weird and L.A. about it.'" -- Damian Lewis
The ideal night out is ...
"Dancing somewhere with my husband. African live dance, of course, because I grew up in Africa and I love its music."
Most romantic destination
"I would love to go to Cuba with Damian, because apart from the beauty I love the music. We'd dance in the streets of Havana and go to the Hotel Nacional for mojitos. Our children would be very happy staying with my family in Wales."
There's something uniquely sexy about watching a man dance well. Ballroom in particular requires all the same skills that will make him good in bed, namely physical strength and flexibility, combined with a strong sense of rhythm, plus an ability to focus attention on his partner and take control without being overwhelming. Damian Lewis is currently the thinking woman's heartthrob, and therefore this combination of toothsome thesp and nifty two-step should set the pulses racing. Actress Helen McCrory is clearly impressed with her boyfriend of nine months, pressing her pelvis confidently against Damian's to display physical trust, and looking up to meet his smouldering gaze. Damian has made one basic schoolboy error in his otherwise impeccable-looking Latino routine, though: being good at dancing is fine, but being too good can equal disaster as it starts to smell of vanity and plain showing-off. Damian's pursed lips and swiveling hips are just too much, especially combined with those flashy, pointy white boots. And the hand raised to the side is the final nail in the coffin. Extended to display maximum "me, me, me" attention-seeking, it has poor Helen leaning at full stretch to reach the thumb alone. There was potential for romance in this pose, but Damian took it one rumba too far for most women's tastes. Pity. -- You Magazine, August 2005
Like most Etonians, Lewis has exquisite manners. "It might sound smarmy but I enjoy nothing more than allowing a woman of an older generation through the door first, or getting up and offering her a seat. And I always cross the street late at night if I sense my presence is making a woman nervous. I don't care if anyone finds it quaint. In fact if I heard anyone suggest that it was patronising, I would find it hard not to laugh in their face."
Damian earns top husband marks by asking the waitress to deliver a glass of calming champagne to his wife, only to promptly lose them again for forgetting what she is wearing. "This is for the lady in... oh, I can't remember what top she's in, but pink bottoms, I think. Anyway, she's sitting right round the corner. Tell her it's from a man who saw her across the restaurant."
He asks the waitress if his wife liked receiving the champagne. "She looked like she was expecting it," comes the reply.
"I did have a honeymoon. It lasted an evening. It was very short, but very lovely. We got married in the Kensington and Chelsea registry office, then walked down the King's Road and had lunch in a nice restaurant around the corner with 11 people. A very romantic day."
"When we told people we were getting married in a registry some said, 'Why not a church?' and we thought, 'Hello? When have you ever seen us in a church?' I would have felt hypocritical saying I meant the bit about staying together but not the bit about the Holy Spirit."
"Mum is my best friend, but I don't tell her everything. I don't tell her about my sex life, oh God, no -- but I don't tell my friends about that either. My parents still laugh together. Having grown up around their marriage makes me feel so lucky. It gave me the strength to wait until I'd found the person I was most happy with. I might have settled for someone else, thinking that was fine, but, when I met Damian, I knew the difference because I'd lived with the real thing. Not that they go around throwing roses at each other, but it's unconditional love: and that's what they gave me."
"The terrible jealousies and pangs of desire you feel when you first fall in love. But then as you learn to trust the person, and as you learn to love them, you become far more accepting. Rather than screaming, 'How could you have slept with her?' you're like, 'Well, I had a past.'"
"I always resented Tom [Hardy] for turning up on Band Of Brothers and getting the girl -- in fact, the only girl in a cast of hundreds of smelly men! I, on the other hand, spent eight months with my face squashed up against someone else's backside in one sodden trench after another. And it looks as if Tom might have got the girl again [in Colditz], damn his eyes." -- Damian Lewis
"[Band of Brothers] was a huge part of my life and continues to be. If [Helen] catches me watching [my box set DVD of it], she says I'm the saddest person she's ever met. I respond with something along the lines of 'watch it with me, your husband's a hero and is winning the Second World War'."
“Being with another actor means that you have a short hand and an empathy for each other’s world. It also means that you’re with someone who doesn’t find your work and your world nearly as interesting as everybody else does. So Damian and I don’t even talk much about each other’s work. I’ve seen hardly any of his and he’s seen hardly any of mine. So we are able to talk about completely different things, which is a relief, actually.”
It sounds brutal but you're 35 and single, are children on your mind?
"People talk about children as if they're some separate issue from being with someone you want to marry. I can't imagine saying I want a child, I can only imagine looking at a man and thinking I want his child." -- Helen McCrory, 2003 interview
Shut up, I'm fine.
I just have something in my eye.
I have something in my other eye...
I HAVE SOMETHING IN MY HEART.
"Decolletage, I think, is the word, dear," she hoots. "That was caused by breast-feeding Manon. I always vowed that if I ever had a large chest then I would definitely display my decolletage from time to time, and I was true to my word."
The most surprising thing to happen to me was ...
"Finding out that I was pregnant when my first child was six months old. That was genuinely surprising."
He saunters off to scoop up Gulliver, a distinctly bouncing baby. "Oh, he's a chubber," Damian laughs. "Two stone and not even a year old. I was a big fatty like him when I was a baby -- I looked like a giant baked bean! You know, I found myself the other day pushing the double buggy along the cycle path in Santa Monica with my kids inside, jogging along behind them in the sunshine, and I thought to myself: 'Damian, you big tit!'"
"Parenthood is only a seven-day-a-week job and apparently in 18 years you can stop worrying so much. I'll have a nice nap and a shandy then."
Damian Lewis has just ordered a drink and is attacking a bowl of nuts as if he hasn't eaten for days. In fact, given that his fiancée, actress Helen McCrory, has just been in hospital giving birth to their first child -- a daughter called Manon -- that may be the case. "They're coming home from the hospital tonight," he says, "so I'm scrubbing floors. ... I'm in a daze of love and happiness. I imagine it's like being on drugs."
"We don't have lie-ins now [on Sunday morning] - we'll probably be up at 6 o'clock. Damian is a very good cook so he does breakfast in the garden and I get the papers with Manon."
"She's very easy and very beautiful. So far she's also very calm, so Damian should definitely be getting a DNA test for that one.".
How does he manage work with two very young children? And how will he and Helen juggle their two very successful careers that sometimes will have them working long distances from one another? "We've been asking ourselves that exact same question, and we have no answers yet. But, it's blissful. The kids are fantastic. You don't sleep and you clear up a lot of vomit. Who could want anything more?"
Are she and Lewis well staffed? Wide-eyed, she laughs that much harder and in a Jean Brodie voice replies, "I am the staff! And Manon enjoys pottering around doing things with me. I think it's important for kids to see and understand that when you want a meal you have to cook it and you wash up and not everything is just presented to you in life."
"I've been acting in the evenings, then I'm home for the night feeds with Gulliver (her eight-month son), then up with Manon at six (her 22-month daughter), and having snoozes in the afternoon. It's like being a nightshift worker, a cab driver in London," laughs the 39-year-old. ... While McCrory did the nightshifts recently, Lewis spent his days doing up their Tufnell Park home, climbing ladders and knocking down walls, so much so that Manon thought it was his day job.
OH NO I'M OUT OF PICTURES BUT I HAVE MORE QUOTES.
REGARDING HELEN'S CHILDHOOD IN AFRICA:
"What's so idyllic about growing up somewhere like Africa is you don't have constant pressures or images of what you should buy and what you should look like. It's a media-free environment where people don't have very much. People talk instead about who's going to have a bicycle in the village that day; it's great, because it teaches you very early in life what the real priorities are."
...
"Growing up in Africa made me feel part of life and nature. In Europe it’s as if humans are the only things alive on earth. When I was a child, I saw elephants in the Serengeti, knew the names of the snakes and lizards and what to do if I saw a jellyfish or a sea urchin. Africa is a remarkable place and once you’ve lived there you never forget it."
...
"It was an amazing childhood. There was a wildness about it. I was shocked when we came to Britain when my mum was pregnant with my sister. I was confused that children wanted to be adults, to wear make-up and smoke. My idea of naughtiness was to go up onto cliffs and practise our swallow dives. I had no interest in smoking, boys and hair. I'm a bit like that now! I don't sit and think, 'Do I want a straighter nose?' I'm sure that's because of Africa."
...
OH MY GOD, DAMIAN. YOU CAN'T JUST ASK SOMEONE WHY THEY'RE WHITE.
Oh, God, there's too much, everything about them is so fabulous and terrible, but allow me to leave you with this.
"I'm half Scottish, half Welsh and I regard red hair as perfectly ordinary. And to set the record straight, contrary to reports, he has never referred to himself as the 'Ginger Ninja'." -- Helen McCrory, Telegraph, 2006
The new Steve McQueen? "I'm the Ginger ninja," he declares. Pause. "Actually, I'm slightly embarrassed I've just said that." -- Damian Lewis, Sunday Times, 2001