Damian Lewis on the innocent clowning of spoof movie Fackham Hall

Damian Lewis has done a lot of stuff on screen.

He’s been in a cat-and-mouse psychological game with Claire Danes on Homeland, he’s faced off against Paul Giamatti in Billions, and strode the corridors of power as Henry VIII in two Wolf Hall miniseries.

What he hasn’t done a lot of is comedy, such as a scene where his character is trying to revive himself while choking, using a medieval suit of armour as leverage, while his fictional wife and daughter chat in the foreground, completely unaware of the life and death situation behind them.

The film is Fackham Hall, a spoof comedy that plays up the likes of Downton Abbey, Agatha Christie and Knives Out. Written by a team including Jimmy Carr and directed by Jim O’Hanlon, it takes the well-established tropes of a country house drama and mystery and morphs them into a parody.

A duck-hunting party ends up shooting a moose out of the sky, the motto of the aristocratic Davenports is “incestus ad infinitum”, and the fastest tailor for a new suit is a shop called Tailor Swift. It’s gags aplenty, and you’d be hard-pressed to keep up.

While better known for his dramatic roles, Lewis is no stranger to comedy. When he was a young actor, he took clowning classes at Circus Space, which was renamed in 2014 as the National Centre for Circus Arts. Lewis was trained by a prominent clown named Bob.

“I like the attitude, I like the clown’s reality, which is that everything is right at all times, even when it’s undeniably wrong,” Lewis told The Nightly.

“They don’t mind because the clown is innocent, and I enjoy that.

“They have great melancholy of course, when they realise that everything is not as it seems, but mostly their innocence, and all the comedy that comes from that.”

When Lewis speaks of the sincerity of a clown and their existence, Fackham Hall takes on another meaning.

In the film, he plays Humphrey, Lord Davenport, who is the head of Fackham Hall. The family has overseen the stately manor for generations, but Humphrey has no male heirs. His daughter Poppy is due to marry a foppish cousin, Archibald (Tom Felton), so as to keep it all in the family.

There’s the arrival of a new hall boy, a vicar whose sermons are wildly inappropriate thanks to his propensity to pause at the wrong moments, and then Poppy pulls a runaway bride at the wedding to shack up with the local manure salesman. Which then falls on the second daughter, Rose (Thomasin McKenzie), to fulfil the marital obligation. She doesn’t want to, obviously.

So far, so Downton. Even Lewis admitted that his character is very much based on Hugh Bonneville’s Lord Grantham. “If you turn the volume down, perhaps it could be Downton Abbey,” he said.

But then, after many close brushes with death, Humphrey is found dead in his study, and a detective deduces that he must have been killed by a culprit from inside the house – one of the guests, the family or the staff. Here’s where the Hercule Poirot/Miss Marple/Benoit Blanc of it all kicks in.

Lewis once worked on a film penned by Julian Fellowes, who wrote Downton Abbey and Gosford Park, another reference point for Fackham Hall, an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in which he played Lord Capulet.

He said that spoofs have to come from a place of love for the genre you’re parodying, and that this film is very loving and not at all malicious. That’s part of its creative success.

“I get sent a lot of comedies, just a lot of them aren’t very funny, so that’s why you don’t end up doing a lot of comedies,” he added. “Unless you’re someone like Will Ferrell, who’s a comic genius and is just doing his own stuff.

“Fackham Hall comes from a sort of clowning tradition of innocence and joy. If you have a cynical heart, you’re going to check out of a movie like Fackham Hall after 20 minutes. You might want your humour a bit more cutting, a bit more acerbic. That’s not what this offers.

“This offers joyful silliness, clown-like, and as did The Naked Gun, as did Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley in those films.

“I think you need to celebrate the genre that you’re sending up, and at the same time, cram it with jokes.”

Fackham Hall is in cinemas on February 19