He’s just so changeable

Mention you saw him in “Keane” and Damian Lewis’ pale orange eyebrows will shoot up in grateful surprise. The versatile British actor carried last year’s small and highly praised film as a grief-stricken, mentally ill father wandering New York in search of his daughter. Very few people have heard of it. Even fewer have seen it.

The reason, Lewis acknowledged, is that despite a decade of critically acclaimed roles (“Band of Brothers,” “The Forsyte Saga”), he has yet to achieve commercial value. “It’s not Robert Redford leading it,” he said of the film. “As a result, it’s a much, much smaller movie.”

One of London’s top stage actors, Lewis has been frustrated with his lot in Hollywood: big roles in small films and television, small roles in bigger films (“An Unfinished Life,” “Dreamcatcher”). And as yet no “mythical breakthrough,” he said. “I guess in some ways, I’m still breaking.”

“Keane” is a sore spot, particularly on the eve of the Oscars. “It has fallen into that annual list of films that critics say will be overlooked that perhaps shouldn’t be, because they’re too small or the subject matter is too difficult.

“The whole system is flawed,” he said. “No surprises in that. I’m not the first person to say that. Christ.”

Lanky and freckled with startlingly blue eyes, Lewis vented politely in upper-crust British cadences at a sunny patio restaurant recently in Pasadena. He had come from London to help promote the TV movie “Friends and Crocodiles” to the Television Critics Assn. Already seen in Britain, BBC America will air the show, which stars Lewis as an eccentric inventor, on Saturday.

Clearly, Lewis recognizes the importance of promoting his work but admitted he has made mistakes in the past of overvaluing promotion at the expense of pursuing other creative works. He said he now participates in such junkets only when his work schedule allows.

Lewis has been busy for the last five years playing a full range of characters, from the arrogant and villainous husband Soames Forsyte to “Band’s” upstanding, heroic commander Maj. Richard Winters, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe. He has chosen both comedic and dramatic roles in the two years since “Friends and Crocodiles” was filmed -- as a journalist in a modernized “Much Ado About Nothing” with Sarah Parish, an attorney in Martha Fiennes’ “Chromophobia” with Ralph Fiennes, a CIA operative in the upcoming “The Situation” and a Russian assassin in “Stormbreaker” (late summer).

Both “Keane” and “The Situation” had strong arguments that attracted him, he said. “Keane,” he said, asks: “How blurred is that line between sanity and madness?”

A love triangle between a CIA operative, an American journalist and an Iraqi photographer, “The Situation” illuminates the illusions of well-meaning and educated liberals who run into more complications than they expect in Iraq. The film, he said, asks audiences to consider certain aspects of the war in Iraq. “Is it futile, us trying to rebuild, democratize Iraq, when [‘The Situation’] shows you how difficult that process is? The arguments are, yes, it’s worth it, we should persevere, versus it isn’t worth it, we should get out. That’s apart from ‘Is it right or wrong.’ That’s a different argument entirely.”

Then again, he’s just as happy being in a piece of family entertainment like “Stormbreaker,” about a 14-year-old operative in the British MI6 intelligence service. “I think you’d sort of shrivel up if everything you did was worthy,” he said.

To increase his opportunities, Lewis said he lied early in his acting career about having attended Eton College. “That was a fear of typecasting. For example, when someone wanted to know what school I went to, I’d just make one up. Like, ‘Oh, a place you’ve never heard of, in Oxfordshire, it’s called, you know, Oysterton Minarette High, whatever. I didn’t think it would help, coming out of drama school and being ‘the Etonian actor.’

“I think my decision to keep it quiet has been vindicated.”

In fact, he is so convincing at portraying Americans that even American fans have assumed he is one. His small, off-center smile is often compared to Steve McQueen’s. America was a part of his childhood, he said. “I have an American godfather. I have cousins in Connecticut. My father lived in Chicago for five years. We spent holidays here when I was younger.

“I couldn’t say I have a good American accent because of that. I always considered dialects to be part of acting and actors should be able to do accents. I now know that’s not true. I realize it’s just a fluke. I’m just lucky.”

For “Friends and Crocodiles,” he said he wanted his character to speak “estuary English” -- a pejorative name for a suburban language represented by an area around Essex, where the river Thames runs into the estuary.

Despite frustrations with the Hollywood system, his career has been successful enough for him to gain celebrity status in Britain, where he has homes in London and Wales. Life is good on other fronts as well. On Wednesday he and actress Helen McCrory, with whom he was cast in the 2003 play “Five Gold Rings,” announced their engagement.

He has also branched out from acting to sign on as a director of a production company, Picture Farm Ltd., that includes his brother Gareth, Rupert Wyatt and Adrian Sturges.

“A family joke was that my brother might give me a job in his first movie. I might really need it. Maybe I would help him make his first film by acting in it. As it happened, the last five years for me have been really good, and so it’s worked out.”

Their first feature film will be “The Baker,” written by Gareth and starring Damian as a sensitive hit man who tries to build a new life as a village baker. “I sat at every coffee table in Cannes for 10 days pitching it with Adrian, trying to get people interested. Now it’s greenlit [by European backers], and we’re going to shoot it in March,” Lewis said.

Though he’s only a part-time producer at this point, he said he aspires to have a company similar to George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh’s Section Eight with people who are “really committed to making films, in a place where I can really develop material and commission scripts.”

He has the most fun in discovering for himself what works and what doesn’t. “That’s the point about everything. Whether it finally succeeds or fails, there’s no satisfaction in listening to other people say, ‘Oh, you’ll never make it work,’ and go, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re probably right.’ If it’s not going to work, I want to discover for myself that it can’t work.”