ain't nobody going home

Ron Livingston in a 1986 Yale student-made movie the Bells of Funicello. He was a freshman of Yale.

“When we started casting Dick Winters, I did not want a British actor. I really did not. To me, Winters was Mr. America. He was from the Midwest. I was looking for an American actor.

And Tony To kept saying, ‘There’s this guy, there’s this guy.’

Tony had seen Damian Lewis in Hamlet. He was playing Laertes, not Hamlet, with Ralph Fiennes. And Tony remembered him.

So we brought Damian over from London to audition.

Tony said to him, ‘You have to keep your American accent. Don’t tell anybody you’re British. Just come in as an American actor.’

So Damian came in on a Friday. He auditioned for Tom Hanks and the casting team. I think he was the tenth or eleventh person who came in.

He read.

And everybody just looked at each other.

And we all knew.

He’s Dick Winters.

The next day, Steven Spielberg came in. He didn’t need to have Damian audition because he had seen him on stage.

He looked at Damian and said, ‘Were you the guy who played Laertes with Ralph Fiennes in Hamlet?’

And Damian said, ‘Yes.’

“... but there was a really special relationship between Damian Lewis and Ron Livingston.

And neither of them are here, and of course they would be if they could, but there was something very special — and dare I use the word magical — about that relationship that they created in the middle of all the kind of craziness that was going on with the rest of us.

And that was something personally that I really admired: the kind of easy, really important friendship that those two created in their cocoon of leadership.

Because that’s a very lonely place to be.