Eddie Marsan Quotes

I wasn’t that hard. I wasn’t that tough. I wasn’t that funny – I looked like me.

With a face like mine, I’m never going to play a character who conquers the universe, I’m going to play characters who are subject to forces bearing down on them. My career’s based on how we are rather than how we wish we were – they get the good-looking boys in for that kind of role.

I always define egotistical thoughts as the thoughts I think other people have of me.

I went swimming the other day and my wife was watching and she said, ‘You know, it’s funny, it’s when you’ve got no clothes on, no one recognizes you.’ I said, ‘What are you saying? That I should do more love scenes?’

I had a good job as a printer in the East End. Before the unions destroyed it, that job was very lucrative.

I knew very early on that I wasn’t Brad Pitt.

The trick to acting is not to show off, it’s to think the thoughts of the character.

I listen to a lot of jazz. I’m a big Sinatra geek. I love Chet Baker.

When I was doing fringe theatre, my ambition was to do repertory. When I got to rep it was to do national theatre; then it was t,o get a couple of parts in television. I never had this great desire to overreach myself. I was too busy enjoying acting. I was just obsessed with it.

I want to be respected as an actor. There’s my ego. But I don’t have a great need to be liked by an audience.

You’re not going to have something set on a council estate that explores all elements of human existence, the variety of experience inherent in any community.

I’m not a great fiction reader. I love history. I love history and philosophy.

If your character doesn’t express himself or doesn’t feel confident expressing himself, then you don’t express yourself.

I always think of Gilbert Norrell as being Salieri to Jonathan Strange being Mozart.

I was approached to do something for seven years, and it was a quality project. I did seriously think about it, but I didn’t want to be away for six months of the year. I’ve never done the L.A. thing where you go and have loads of meetings; I can’t say to my wife, ‘I’m going to wait by a pool for six months.’

I love Bethnal Green and where I’m from. Nothing there, especially the people, ever held me back, but I never felt that I was successful there.

The trick to acting is not to show off; it’s to think the thoughts of the character. I was lucky because when I started acting, it was doing jobs above pubs. I learned to act in anonymity, so by the time people saw me, I knew what I was doing. I was crap for years, but no one saw me being crap. It’s a trade you learn.

My idea is just to do something different each time; the next thing I do has to be completely different to the thing I’ve done before – that’s what I try and do, because you know, I’m an actor, not a film star.

If you leave me waiting ’round for hours and then call on me to do something, I need to be able to do it straight away. That’s my job, like your job is to do what you do.

When I was a struggling actor, I worked for a party company. One of my friends from school was working for an advertising agency, and I turned up to one of his company’s parties dressed as an alien to collect tickets on the door.

The hardest thing to do and most miserable films are comedies.

I consciously decided not to be a ‘London’ actor. Those gangster movies made a lot of East End actors think they were movie stars. And I was very aware that they were going to go out of fashion.

I thought ‘Lock Stock’ was a good film. I thought ‘Lock Stock’ was a good film because I think it was a one-off before it was imitated a hundred times.

I come from a place where there’s violence and inarticulacy. I worked in a pub from the age of 12 or 13. I used to see people smashing glasses over each other. I was never tough. I was scared of them.

Acting was a way of me finding myself, which I think is the case of a lot of actors, regardless of where they come from.

Major film stars tend to do a film and then have a couple of months off. I’m not a major film star; I’m a jobbing actor.

It’s a very fascinating thing for an actor to play somebody who is suffering, and you have to express the suffering, but in an inarticulate way and sometimes a dysfunctional way, through violence.

I’ve got four kids – I unblock a toilet every day.

I could not be one of those actors who stays in character all day long. I’d go mad.

You can’t write a screenplay if you’ve been doing a zero-hours contract. Which means that the people who write drama, the people who commission dramas, and the people who direct dramas all come from a small circle of society.

I sometimes think if I had gone to Oxford or Cambridge and looked like a handsome young guy who could be in an Evelyn Waugh novel or something, I’d be a massive movie star. But there’s a longevity to what I do. It’s more reliable. Someone isn’t deciding that I’m the next big thing.

When you’re the youngest and the only boy, you get spoilt but you get told you’re spoilt so you don’t get to enjoy it very much. I was the only man in the house because my parents divorced and my dad moved away when I was 13.

As children, we all hold on to the myth of omnipotence. Comics are successful because kids identify with superheroes. They’ll read a book or watch a TV programme and say, ‘I’m that guy.’ And that guy is always the one in control.

Different races never fazed me because coming from Bethnal Green, I’d been around people of different races forever. Different class? That was much harder.

Mr. Norrell is like a librarian trying to do magic… That’s the story of my career, really. I stand next to good looking men and make them look better!

My friends I grew up with were so supportive to me. And I’m not the only one who’s done well.

When you watch ‘Ray Donovan,’ you think that it’s about Hollywood, about scandal, about stars, and about trying to keep secrets. That’s true, but that’s also just the means by which you reveal secrets of the people suffering every day life.

I don’t look like Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise. When you put me on the screen, the women don’t want to make love to me, and the men don’t want to be me.

I love the fact that everyone’s trying to be good-looking in L.A. – then I turn up and I get work.

I come from a council estate in Tower Hamlets, and by no means am I the only person who has done well – one of my friends is head of year in a great school in Twickenham. Another is a writer; another is an artist, a musician.

I wanted to work with Bryan Singer because I like his films.

I’m not one of these actors who can make a bad script good. Some actors, a script can be terrible, and they can bring something to it and make it really special. I can’t.

My career is playing the guys who go, ‘Boo.’ That’s what I do.

I’m a great believer that actors are very similar to session musicians. You wouldn’t ask a session musician, ‘How do you play jazz,’ and then, ‘How do you play classical?’ They just do it, because if they don’t do it, they don’t eat.