Damian Lewis has always been fiercely protective of his family life, but in a rare and candid moment, he recently opened up about his ultra-private world with his two children.
Speaking on the foodie podcast, Dish from Waitrose, with hosts Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett, the Homeland and Billions actor touched on cooking for his daughter Manon as he discussed having a noisy and loud family.
© Aaron Chown/PA Images via Getty ImagesThe 53-year-old is a doting father to his two children, Manon, 18, and Gulliver, 16, whom he shared with his late wife, actress Helen McCrory.
"I do cook, I like it… my daughter won't let me cook for her anymore," he admitted. "She's vegetarian and she's become very particular about how she cooks…I bought her an air fryer."
On cooking vegetarian food, he added: "I can't do tofu unless it's fried…So there's been a bit of fried tofu…But my vegetarian cooking is poor. If Manon lets me make something for her, it's probably half a big pepper filled with something…We might do a vegetarian chilli to go in it…So it's quite basic."
© GettyDespite his daughter now being vegetarian, when his children were growing up both he and his late wife Helen made sure they experimented with all kinds of food.
"We made the mistake early on with our kids, or not the mistake, because it's really nice, of just not always feeding them baked beans when they were hungry," he added. "Yeah, so they're always trying to eat adult food. But then my two, very young, North London, privileged children developed a taste for Carluccio's…And only Carluccio's.
"We couldn't go past the Carluccio's with some snotty five-year-old going, 'Po po. Daddy, let's go in and eat octopus.' So, uh, so then I decided, I'm going to cook an octopus myself. And it was terrible… It was terrible. I just sort of just dehydrated this, and it was a whole octopus…
"I boiled it with salt and shallots, and a bit of white wine or white wine vinegar… And sort of part boiled, part steamed it…And it was just so boiled."
© Loredana SangiulianoCooking aside, Damian has encouraged his children to have strong opinions and to let them air things out at the dinner table.
"Yeah, there'd be just a lot of people not listening to anyone else, yeah…We were always really encouraged to make our point," he noted. "So, we just got a family of people who are always making their point… With no one to listen to the point. Because everyone's busy making their point. So, we're a bit like that. "But I mean, so a lot of our friends are good listeners…And we bring them in for dinner parties… Don't talk too much. Just come, come and listen."
The Forsyte Saga actor was left distraught after his longtime love died from cancer in April 2021. He has since found love with The Kills frontwoman, Alison Mosshart.
Speaking about life following the death of his wife of 14 years, Damian previously told The Guardian: "When you've been married to someone and they die prematurely, you're left careering in a different direction. And that throws up… It's a very fertile, very creative, raw, open time, as well as being flattening and difficult and sad.
© Eamonn M. McCormack"It's all those things at once. Anybody who hasn't been through it won’t fully understand, but I think anybody who has been through it will. For four or five months, you're physically drained.
"Helen was ill for four and a half years. They say that the first day of diagnosis of an illness that could be terminal is your first day of grief. You are in a state of semi-grief while the person is still alive because there is always the sense that something might go wrong at any point."
He added: "Until the moment of death you're fully engaged in living the best possible life that can be lived for the person dying, and for you as a family and for the children. And it takes an enormous amount of energy. So the collapse in death, the exhaustion, comes with that."
Dish from Waitrose is available on all podcast providers
