”This fight was getting faster and faster, because we were getting kind of cocky. We were just a bunch of 20-year-old, horny Englishmen on Broadway having the time of our life in a smash-hit show, so we were staying out later and later and later. Finally, it just got to a point where the thing was going faster and faster, and Ralph was thrusting at me, and I was just sort of parrying. And then one night, he came at me particularly hard and I sort of went, in a tired way, ‘Oh, God’… and the pommel came back and hit me right above the eye.
“As soon as it hit me, I thought, That feels bad. I know what a cut feels like, and that feels bad. But it came at the point of the fight where Hamlet went that way, Laertes went that way, so Ralph didn’t see what he’d done. I fell on the floor and I came up like this, and I was like the Bride of Dracula, with blood pouring down the side of my face.
“And he didn’t stop acting! It’s amazing. But he just came closer and closer to me with those piercing blue eyes. And he kept going with Shakespeare, and he went [in a whisper], ‘Are you OK?’ And I said, ‘I dunno, you tell me!’… And then all I could hear in the audience were people going [in an American accent], ‘That’s amazing, honey, how did they do that?’”
-Damian Lewis
