The “corrupt” movie Damian Lewis hated making: “One of the biggest turkeys ever”
Damian Lewis might be the acclaimed actor of television shows like Homeland and Billions, but he’s not had as much luck adapting the work of Stephen King.
Although the two mediums are now interchangeable thanks to the advent of streaming services, there used to be a significant difference between actors who starred in films versus those in television shows, with the latter being viewed as a ‘lesser’ medium that wasn’t as artistically pure, and actors that originated on the small screen had to work hard to break into a new format.
Lewis is a great example of an actor whose success on the small screen didn’t exactly translate to the movies. It was immediately after his acclaimed performance in Band of Brothers, the HBO World War II series produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, that Lewis was floated as an actor who might have been able to make that transition. Unfortunately, one of his first projects was Dreamcatcher, a film that became legendary in its failure.
Based on a novel by Stephen King that had only been released two years prior, Dreamcatcher was a science fiction horror film that starred him alongside Timothy Olyphant, Thomas Jane, and Jason Lee as a group of friends who discover a mysterious alien race. Although it was directed by Lawrence Kasdan, the legendary writer/director behind The Big Chill and Body Heat, Lewis referred to the film as “one of the biggest turkeys ever”.
“Poor Larry Kasdan didn’t make a film after that,” he told The Guardian, “He went into a long depression. It had good ingredients. It was from a Stephen King novel, and with a thrusting young cast, but I found it a bloated and corrupt and lonely experience.”
Despite his vast experience on television, Lewis wasn’t prepared to be in a film with as significant a budget as Dreamcatcher, and grew cynical about the ways that studios handled their tentpole releases.
“There was just this acceptance that we would keep spending millions of dollars to slowly churn out 30 seconds of film every day,” he claimed, “It was my first experience of a slow-moving studio film, where I had to try to keep my marbles to do one line on Friday.”
It’s no coincidence that it was only shortly after filming wrapped on the project that Lewis retreated to England and worked on television’s The Forsyte Saga, which earned him unanimous praise. He wasn’t the only member of the cast who decided that they’d be better suited for the small screen, as Olyphant landed the first of his many great TV roles on HBO’s Deadwood, and Lee landed a lead role in the popular sitcom My Name Is Earl. Although Lewis noted that Kasdan never directed again, he eventually returned to writing when he was hired by Disney to pen Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Solo: A Star Wars Story.
King has a loyal fanbase who will often seek out anything adapted from his books or short stories, but the original source material for Dreamcatcher wasn’t exactly beloved to begin with. While there have been cult fandoms that have emerged for underrated King adaptations like Cujo and The Dark Half, public sentiment on this film hasn’t exactly changed since Lewis’ disastrous experience making it. It was certainly a learning curve for his career, but not a very pleasant one that saw him retreat to the confines of the TV set.
