Damian Lewis, the London-born actor (yes, it’s important to mention where he was born) who played Nicholas Brody in Homeland and Richard Winters in Band of Brothers, looks back on the criticism he received for his participation in the critically panned Stephen King adaptation, Dreamcatcher. While the film failed in multiple ways, Lewis remembers many people didn’t exactly like his depiction of an Englishman because of his accent – yes, that would be his real accent.
Lewis spoke to Screen Rant recently to promote his new vampire horror comedy, The Radleys, and during the conversation he touched on Dreamcatcher, his first major Hollywood film. His big break was in 2001 with Band of Brothers, but the Stephen King film represented a huge leap onto the big screen. Unfortunately, the film wasn’t well received and struggled to make a coherent movie around one of King’s more disjointed novels. Lewis recalled people criticizing one unique aspect about Jonesy, his character in the film,which is laughable when you know where he comes from. He said:
“Well, I loved making that movie. I loved working with Larry. It was a wild ride of a film, that script was a lot. But we had a great group of guys, and actually, funnily enough, I’m remembering some people who jumped online afterwards and said, ‘Oh God, I really loved the film. But that Damian Lewis guy, what is that English accent? It’s totally unbelievable.’
Because they’d all just seen me in
Band of Brothers
. A lot of people thought I was American. And then I played American in
Dreamcatcher
. But you are right, the alter ego, the alien invasion, we decided we’d have this sort of Lawrence Olivier, quiet clip, 1930s British accent, which was kind of wild and surreal.”
It’s completely ironic that Lewis would get criticized for having the accent he actually grew up with. You can’t get more authentic than that. In the film, Lewis gives life to Jonesy, one of four friends who encounter a parasitic alien capable of taking over a person’s body while on an annual fishing retreat. Amid the chaos, the survivors are “captured” by the military, who are planning to nuke the entire area to destroy the alien threat. Meanwhile, Jonesy, trapped inside his own body by the invading alien presence, is the only person who can stop the creature carrying out its deadly plans.
Dreamcatcher Had Everything in Order to Be a Good Movie, So Why Did It Fail?
Dreamcatcher was a massive box office bomb, making just $75.7 million against a production budget of $68 million. Critics were not impressed by the film, calling it “incoherent” and “unnecessarily long.” However, many of the movie’s problems came directly from King’s novel – one written in the years following his near-fatal accident in 1999. The author himself has even recognized that the source material doesn’t make very good reading.
Nevertheless, the movie did have a good opportunity to defy the illogical aspects of the book and make a solid King adaptation. The cast was outstanding: Thomas Jane, Damian Lewis, Jason Lee, Morgan Freeman, Timothy Olyphant, and Tom Sizemore, among others. The director was Lawrence Kasdan, writer of blockbusters such as The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Bodyguard, as well as recipient of four Academy Award nominations. Not only that, but he co-wrote Dreamcatcher with William Goldman, a two-time Oscar winner whose work in Misery was impressive.
Related
Worst Stephen King Movies of All Time
From the recent Dark Tower to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Running Man, the works of Stephen King have not always transitioned well to the big screen.
Deamcatcher is one of those movies that, two decades later, is not as terrible as it was made out to be, but it does suffer greatly from an inconsistent tone and perhaps some less than perfect dialogue. Then there are Morgan Freeman’s eyebrows to consider – if you have seen the movie, then you know. Maybe the biggest issue is that people try to see a Stephen King film, and it doesn’t comply with the rules that the horror author usually applies to character development and the constant revision of American values. It’s just a slightly generic sci-fi horror film that goes by as smoothly as any other CGI fest from the 2010s.
- Release Date
- March 21, 2003
