“The dialogue is written as though they’re mid-stroll, walking over—to me it seems that way,” he said, presenting his argument as modest while brooking no disagreement. “Which just presupposes a very short distance.”

They huddled for a few minutes.

“I mean, part of me feels like there’s something great in having this be the piece that transitions us from not wanting to talk about this tragedy to doing it,” the director said. “I think it works unless you guys are bumping up against something.”

The actors went back to the walk-through.

“Acting balm, ahhh!” Lewis intoned, between takes, slathering his lips with petroleum jelly.

He kept up the banter and thus—on a bone-cold night—his collaborators’ morale. He chatted with the wardrobe assistants (“You have on a peacoat, almost a pea tunic”); he broke into song (Madonna’s “Holiday”; the Welsh national anthem). Between antics, he kept pushing the director to refine the encounter.

“I asked for some more specific psychology,” he said, “and I didn’t really get an answer.”

It was soon time for the first take. Axelrod was beginning to question the ruthless behavior that has enabled his success. As the psychiatrist asked him when he had last cried, something seemed to flicker behind Lewis’s pupils. The script called for him to launch into a speech about heroism. Lewis nailed the physical manifestations of American male sentimentality—the watering eyes, the bulbous clench of the jaw when talking about fathers playing catch with their kids and soldiers coming home from war. Yet his performance contained a note of irony. He seemed, in the movement of his eyes, to be leaving it open as to whether Axelrod came by his tears earnestly or was manufacturing them in order to pull one over on the shrink.

“Yeah, and then?” Axelrod says, in the scene’s last line. Lewis stared at Siff, letting the ambiguity linger. Finally, someone yelled, “Cut.” Lewis’s jaw slackened.

“I’m looking forward to some tomato soup!” he said, rubbing his palms together like an urchin queuing for gruel.

Siff told me later that Lewis is the least neurotic actor she’s ever met. “There’s something kind of Johnny Appleseed about him, where he’ll do a take and let it go, do a take and let it go,” she said. “He keeps things light and moving, and I read that as real confidence.”

Confidence is Lewis’s hallmark as much as intensity is De Niro’s. In describing him to me, colleagues from all periods and facets of his career used the word again and again. His abundance of it is a result of his background (stable), class (upper), schooling (élite), and disposition (“Red hair confuses people,” he told me, making an asset, and a joke, of a feature that a less secure actor might have bemoaned). These advantages have perpetuated themselves in his marriage (loving), parenting style (involved), and level of satisfaction with himself, with others, and with life in general (high). The director Peter Kosminsky cast Lewis in “Warriors,” his first big television role, in 1999. Last year, Kosminsky directed the BBC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall.” He recalled, “When I came on board, the very first thing I said was ‘We should get Damian Lewis to play Henry.’ It’s Thomas Cromwell’s show, so when you’re playing a huge character like Henry VIII you have to bring a certain gravitas, a certain sense of self, a certain power. You can’t just tug at your forelock and say, ‘Yes, guvnor, where would you like me to stand?’ If you’re going to be the king, you’ve got to have a fuck-off quality about you.” Dominic Maxwell, writing in the London Times, called Lewis’s Henry “cordial but deadly.”

Lewis sees himself as a champion for his characters, be they rapacious monarchs or domestic terrorists or capitalist pigs. Acting, for him, is analogous to mounting a case. “If you pick up an eighteenth-century play, at the top it says ‘The Argument,’ and then you have a list of characters, and then you have the play,” he said. “I was just always struck by that—that, of course, good drama is about conflict. And if there’s conflict there’s an argument, and there’s two sides of the argument, and, therefore, one must advocate for one side of the argument, just as much as a lawyer does in court.” The sense that a performance is a contest, a debate that can be won, appeals to Lewis’s competitive nature. The harder the fight, the greater the spoils. Lewis said, “I will always find a defense for characters, and that’s why it’s fun playing characters that are morally ambiguous, or are at least perceived superficially as being problematic.”

On the set in Orangeburg, Lewis continued to lobby for more particularity. “It was an episode that I struggled with personally,” he said, later. “I found it hard to unravel. I felt it had a tonal shift from the rest of the show.” He was unconvinced, he said, that his character, “a billionaire intuitive street fighter,” would suddenly begin to ask himself, as Axelrod does later in the episode, whether he has sociopathic tendencies. “I didn’t want to appear generalized in any way,” he recalled. “And I felt the scene wasn’t necessarily there yet in terms of what it revealed about Bobby. If any thinking person’s assumption is that people who rule us—who run a multinational, a political party, a country, or a financial corporation that turns over billions of dollars a year—probably have a particular personality type, I thought the audience might have been ahead of us, like, ‘Oh, really?’ ”

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Werner Herzog cast Lewis, “on the basis of his natural authority and dignity,” as Lieutenant Colonel Charles Doughty-Wylie in his forthcoming colonial epic about Gertrude Bell, “Queen of the Desert.” “What I needed was a manly man,” Herzog told me. The film, which premièred last year at the Berlin International Film Festival, has received mixed reviews, but, on Indiewire, Jessica Kiang singled out Lewis as one of two actors—along with Robert Pattinson, who plays T. E. Lawrence—whose performances weren’t overwhelmed by the production’s elaborate period apparatus. Lewis’s style “may be more classical than Pattinson’s semi-method manner,” she wrote, but Lewis “handles the role of the married consul, whose amused admiration for Bell flares into love, with a deftness that had us palpably relaxing during his scenes.” Even with a director as famously combative as Herzog, Lewis was able to plead the best conditions for his work. At one point, the two men disagreed over a walking stick that Lewis wanted to use as a prop. Herzog recalled, “I said to him, ‘We do not have to imitate a person, we have to invent them,’ but he brought a lot of knowledge and details. At first, I didn’t like it, but he briefed me that, at Gallipoli, Doughty-Wylie walked into the machine-gun fire without a weapon, only with his walking cane.” The stick stayed.

Alex Gansa, the co-creator of “Homeland,” told me that the “biggest pushback” he ever got from Lewis involved “Marine One,” the final episode of the first season, in which Brody attempts to assassinate the Vice-President. “Damian said, ‘I don’t believe a marine would wear a suicide vest,’ ” Gansa recalled. “There was something about a soldier assuming the tactics of a terrorist that he was quite reluctant to do, and felt it was a mistake. When he read the script, he was on the phone with me that second, like, ‘I just don’t want to do this.’ ” Overruled, Lewis took the argument to the screen, making a suicide bomber relatable—possibly even admirable—and delivering the seminal performance of the series.