After The Forsyte Saga, he shot Dreamcatcher, an adaptation of the Stephen King bestseller, playing a man whose body is invaded by an alien. When I arrive for the interview he and his publicist are wading through a heap of party invitations; Lewis himself ironically brandishes the VIP discount card Versace have just sent him. “Not quite my type of clothes,” he laughs, dressed down today in chinos and a leather jacket He takes his work seriously. “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’.” But he’s no snob. It shows a certain humility.” The same could be said of Lewis, although he unapologetically “enjoys frivolity”.
It’s a fantastically unvain performance from an actor we’re more used to seeing modelling clothes in glossy, society magazines. Or impersonating Elvis on stage at the Berkeley Square Summer Ball But then Lewis is a chameleon performer. His screen icons are Steve McQueen and Gary Cooper, stars who had a natural economy with words. “If you set up an intensity and a stillness to someone, you only have to show a flicker of a smile and it will show volumes ” He also loves the way De Niro actively listens “He does it brilliantly It’s his listening that gives him his mercurial quality.
He spends his days, feverish and unshaven, staked out at New York’s Bus Terminal, from where he believes she was abducted. But all that should change with the release of his new film Keane: his performance is already sparking Oscar rumours in the States. Lewis plays a man battling mental collapse after the disappearance of his eight-year-old daughter. And in the remake of The Forsyte Saga, he did the unthinkable – making the brutal Soames sympathetic.
For several years now, 35-year-old Lewis has been a successful actor on the verge of becoming a major star. Unlike Ewan McGregor or Joseph Fiennes, his contemporaries at London’s Guildhall drama school, you might still walk past him in the street. He was the bewildered newlywed who doesn’t understand why his marriage is falling apart in Hearts and Bones. But, among his generation of actors, no one does grief and repressed emotion so well.